Hey guys, first post of this forum and I hope you can help me out with this question/idea…
I’ve been using a mid 2011 iMac 27" for everything I do, and recently, after making the leap to cycles I’ve noticed really slow render speeds, and I’m talking a month for a simple audio visualizer 7000 frames long.
If anyone else has had experience with slow iMacs, please drop a comment below, but for now, I’ve got two obvious options:
1: a 4gb Nvidia 670 in an external gpu chassis with thunderbolt…
Or:
2: build a simple little computer, with i3 etc and a top of the line high end gpu…
Please help out if you’ve got any ideas, but for now, I’m waiting a month…
Ps: yes, I’m rending into individual png frames… I’ve cried, lots after rendering to AVI… Crash…
Look at the blender benchmarks results.
You can find them here, if you search, in several threads either by posts or collected in spreadsheets.
Or check this out : Blencmark GPU
When I did my research about a year and a half ago, the graphics card I chose price/performance was the GTX 760
I think that sells for about 200 nowdays and the GTX 780 (also a good price/perf card) sells for 300+
Top of the line is the 980.
The cheapest setup is a tower, but isn’t i3 a bit low spec?
Do not buy compact desktops or mini towers, the cards take up full space, full height.
Make sure the motherboard has slots! these cards take up 2 slots each and some 3 slots, with their fans and heat sinks.
Must have a good Power Supply !! these cards require power. Look it up, I don’t remember numbers. I do remember there are online app tools that calculate you power needs, then add some.
Did I say slots? here’s the magic : if you can fit two cards in, NVidia GTX can be connected SLI and they perform that much faster, eg two cards means half the render time (almost)! (X2) 760 will likely be faster than the latest GTX 980… again lookup the numbers.
Or, buy no hardware at all… radical idea… use Renderfarms! 1000$ will buy you a LOT of render time, if that is all the rendering you will be doing in a couple years you will save the render hardware upgrades.