Hey there I work for a university as a 3d modeler/animator and have to go through their computer providers when purchasing a new machine. I mainly use Blender and Cycles and have been quoted this for a new machine and was wondering what your thoughts were…
dell precision t5610
Intel E5-2609 2.5Ghz
16GB RAM
500GB 10K RPM SATA HDD
std support, keyboard and mouse
no graphics card if possible if not entry level card
and from dell spare parts and another supplier one of these cards…
Hi, the Dell seams suitable for Blender, good workstation.
For the card´s, performance is really linear to price except Titan.
It is slower than GTX 780Ti but has 6 GB of VRAM, if you work on very big /high poly scenes it is the only way (except Titan Black edition).
Here is a chart with all cards and Cycles:
But it seems getting a mac pro will be cheaper by about $1000, and am I reading this post correctly that a Titan Black can be used in a Mac Pro?
If so here’s the specs I got for a Mac Pro too (where we would be replacing the AMD card with a Titan Black)…
3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache
32GB (4x8GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
256GB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
That’s the new (late 2013) MacPro. Sorry, but there is currently no way of swapping the graphics cards in that machine. The new MacPro is a completely custom design that almost no standard components will fit into. That two D300s are purpose-built by AMD to fit into the new MacPro’s slim cylindrical frame.
So one last thing I need to nut out is the difference the processor is going to make for me, because if i have to choose between a single processor with 8 cores and a dual processor with 8 cores what difference in processing time would I be looking at (ie 10% or 80% more since the difference in price is over a $1000)?
I guess I would be most interested in how it affects Blender’s Cycles BVH building (which apparently builds the scene before rendering).
Sometimes when a CPU says it has 8 cores, it actually means it can handle 8 simultaneous software threads but in fact is one Physical circuit. Having a processor with more than 1 Physical circuit has obvious advantages beyond the logical ‘lies’. Logical cores basically share all the resources of the 1 physical processor so the actual processing benefits are not as grand as may be suggested. You can have a number of logical cores per Physical processor. The more actual circuits are in it, the less resources are shared.
So a dual would outperform a single. If you hit google at Parallel processing, plucking it from memory, I believe the benefits of 2 core to a 1 core cannot exceed 49% boost( ? dont quote me on this ) and each subsequent core adds a lesser and lesser benefit, eventually losing performance due to the overheads of splitting the tasks.
You may doubt your own technical ability, but regardless, look at the Architecture Schematics for each processor. They will clearly show you how many real to fake cores you are dealing with for each processor. All this info is available on AMD/Intel sites!
A good analogue to draw is Windows Dynamic Disks :- Splitting 1 HDD in to multiple logical drives where they all share the read/write capability of the physical drive. Obviously more physical drives is better then more faked ones
) and each subsequent core adds a lesser and lesser benefit, eventually losing performance due to the overheads of splitting the tasks.