Considering this computer purchase... thoughts on its DAZ potential?
Steven-V
Posts: 727
Right now, I have a 4 year old PC with a core i7-2600 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1.5 GB nVidia GTX 580. The computer has performed like a champ for me over the years, but it is definitely starting to show its age at this point. As always happens, it's gone from being way over the recommended specs of most games, to at the recommended, to below recommended but above minimum, to now being at or near minimum spec of many games. It handles DAZ pretty well in terms of renders and stuff, although it also can freeze or lock up, especially when I change from one scene to another (the whole PC just freezes, probably due to not having enough RAM).
My plan has been to upgrade, and at first I was going to get another desktop. But after speccing it out, I noticed I could get some pretty damn nice-looking hardware in a high-end gaming laptop for not much more money, and have the added benefits of mobility both around my house, and also, especially, when I travel (it has always frustrated me that the majority of my vacation time is spent visiting relatives and not able to do anything on my computer).
So here is what I am looking at in terms of a gaming laptop that I hope to also use for DAZ - an MSI dominator GT72.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152661
This is one of the top-reviewed gaming laptops for the price range. We are looking at an i7-4710 HQ processor, 16 GB of RAM, and an nVidia GTC 980m vid card with 8 GB of vRAM. Now, I know laptop processors and v-cards are not as good as their equivalent desktop ones, but the ratings on both the chip and the 980m seem pretty good (980m is supposedly 75% as good as the non-mobile version). So I suspect that this system will smoke my current desktop system, and that is saying something.
But, although I fully understand the nuances of what kinds of electronic necessities I need for high-end gaming, and this laptop has them, I'm not really up on what the main specs are for better DAZ performance. Has anyone tried something like this laptop with DAZ, and what kinds of performance are you seeing? I guess my main nightmare scenario would be spending $2K+ on this thing, and finding out that it kicks ass for games but renders no faster than my current desktop because of some esoteric feature of the vid card or the CPU that I didn't know to look for.
Any thoughts?
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Comments
Some of the main things that will affect your rendering speeds are the amount of cores in the CPU, the clock speeds and you will need Ram for rendering and for holding large scenes in memory.
In my opinion this looks like a good laptop for both gaming and 3D type work, it is at the top end with both components and its price though.
Of course a laptop will never hold as much grunt as a desktop system but this one is getting close.
The processor and the graphics card both look good. http://gpuboss.com/graphics-card/GeForce-GTX-980M
http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Core-i7-4710HQ
Imho from the specs I have seen you wouldn't have any regrets buying a system like this one if its in your price range,
Thanks.
I realize of course that a laptop is never going to have the oomph of a desktop bought at the same time -- i.e., a top end gaming desktop will always crush a top-end gaming laptop produced in the same quarter.
But I am not looking to get the ultimate gaming machine possible... just a good, solid one that will be a significant boost over my current desktop system. And this one looks like it is.
I did this once before... in 2008 I bought a Dell XPS to replace a PC. I skimped a little on that one and ended up regretting it. That's why I will try not to skimp on this one.
Of course I could buy an MSI titan but... that is insane price-wise ($3,200+). They do make me drool though. ;)
As for having enough RAM to do the renders and hold scenes in memory... yeah that is probably what is killing me right now is the 8 GB. So the bump to 16 GB will certainly help, and I can install more RAM later on.
I have an 8GB box, and it is definitely an inadequate amount of memory for serious 3D work. A single dressed genesis figure can easily eat up 1GB, so 3-4 of these in a scene, plus everything else I have running at the same time (firefox etc), and the main memory is just about gone. I think 16GB is a minimum, and should be enough for all but particularly heavy weight scenes. Can you upgrade the memory of that laptop in the future should you think you need it?
You may want to look at the Dell-Alien or M 3800. 4 years ago I had the 17 inch Alien, it came with 8 gig of ram that I quickly changed to 16 gig, and added two additional 500 gig drives. It was pretty much unstoppable. I am not a gamer, but I figured that this much power in a laptop had to be good with graphics, DAZ, Poser or Photoshop. The ONLY down side...it was heavy. Considering what it could do I didn't mind all that much.
Dell finally brought the M 3800 laptop workstation to the US. It is a workhorse, It came with a 4 core i7, 16 gig expandable to 32 (if you can afford those 16g SODIMs), I believe it supports two drives and has 10 point touch. Since I am not a gamer this has been a great unit for me. I will be replacing the 500g HD when I finish setting it up and then cloning to a 1 TB SSD (from Newegg).
The laptop is good but you will certainly loose a bit in rendering performance if you use DAZ standard render engine (3delight). If you use GPU based render engine like Octane or Luxrender that is an other story as the GTX 980 is a good beast especially with 8Gb VRam.
In term of spec for gaming and rendering, you'd certainly be better and cheaper with just buying 32 Gb Ram and a GTX 980. For around 1K you'll get more bang for the bucks albeit for the 8Gb Vram that only comes with 4Gb for the desktop version of the 980 GTX but if you don't use GPU rendering I don't think that is necessary
Now if you really want mobility and power you could have a look at Eurocom's notebook. They build notebooks with desktop or server processors. Take a look at the P5 Pro SE3. If you customize it to put a 17" monitor, a GTX 980, a SSD and an i7, you're pretty much around the same price and features as the MSI but with a desktop processor
The Eurocom seems to have better heat dissipation and weight lighter
The problem you'll encounter with such monster notebook will probably be battery life, the noise and the weight
...the latest version of Octane offers what is called Out of Core rendering which is a hybrid GPU/CPU process that uses the GPU primarily for handling the the geometry and the CPU for assisting with textures. As I understand this process is still pretty fast (especially compared to LuxRender's hybrid render mode which Lux decided to scrap in the next build).
This way one would not need an a GPU with an extreme amount of VRAM (The only desktop Nvidia GPUs that exceed 6GB VRAM are the Quadro series which are prohibitively expensive for most of us, the 12GB Titan Z is actually a dual card so only 6GB of the advertised 12 is applied to rendering).
A 4GB 980 with good memory (32GB) would be more than sufficient if you were to go the desktop route. Another advantage of desktops is the availability of DDR4 memory which is faster than DDR3 by a factor of almost 2:1.One needs an X99 board to support it (as well as the new Haswell i7s).
BTW my current system is about three years old and has12 GB of tri channel DDR3. I have received multiple "High Memory Usage" warnings when rendering even moderately "busy" scenes in 3DL. I've seen memory usage top out at over10 GB when rendering in 3DL. Looking to upgrade the memory to 24GB (the maximum the board will support). The bottom line for rendering (especially with 3DL): the more memory can get, the better.
Another thing to consider when purchasing a prebuilt system (notebook or desktop) is pre-installed "bloateware" which can impact system performance and is often difficult to get rid of without wiping the drives and installing a clean version of the OS.
The bloatware is a very real thing, and it hurts all customers of Dell, Toshiba, HP, Asus, and other major manufacturers. Of most concern to me are those "fake trialware" products that start nagging the user about 30 days into their ownership, bugging them to buy this or that product or (worst of all) subscription.
If you can lighten the load with "Programs" (aka, "Add/Remove Programs"), then by all means, do so, then take a backup. I have done this with laptops for friends and it has worked very well, eliminating a major source of irritation and confusion for those who are less-sophisticated Windows users. No computer system should ever be allowed to confuse the primary user. This is one major reason I like the iPhone; it NEVER comes with bloatware on it!
If you cannot complete a cleanup of the chaff and cruft, then it may be worthwhile to consider a completely fresh install of Windows 8.1 with only your own stuff on it. Yes, even if it costs you $200 for a completely standalone license.
I wonder (and maybe somebody can fill me in), will a Dell/Alienware laptop perform a Windows "reset" and remove the bloatware, or does Windows reset from a box-maker automatically reinstall all the trialware? Would be curious to know...
Hello:
A lot of users are able to make good use of laptops. The specs you're looking at seem fine to me. I'd be most concerned if you were talking about buying an i3 or i5 processor with 4 GB, but you're not; instead, you are doing the right thing by going the "gaming laptop route" for a rendering machine.
My only recommendations would be to...
1. consider a huge hard drive too, because before you know it, your 3D library will be over 100 GB... And they now make 1TB SSD drives and 2TB hard drives, all in laptop form factors. Whoohoo!
2. get model with a good IPS screen. I suggest 15" or larger if your laptop is going to be your main graphic art system. You can't beat better screen quality, and your art deserves the best anyway (within reason), right?
3. get one with a good cooling design. Rendering will produce heat, and you want your laptop to get rid of that heat without struggling. I like the Asus ROG laptops because they have two air pathways and separate heatsinks and fans, one set for the CPU and a separate one for the GPU. But surely there are other laptops that will be just as good or maybe even better, so definitely do your research.
...indeed the ASUS gaming notebooks, as well as the MSI model you linked to have superior cooling over a conventional notebook that has the single side vent.
If you can afford it, I'd look into a custom build house for you can then get a notebook more suited to your needs. often with no additional bloatware. If they offer a Win7 Pro "downgrade" I would suggest opting for instead of having to deal with an OS for which notebooks and desktops were an "afterthought".
Wow lots of things to respond to...
I am not really in favor of upgrading the desktop with just a new Vcard and some RAM, mainly because I would probably also need to upgrade the PSU (given how much less beefy my current vid card is). When you start adding it all you, you are into quite a lot of money to have a few new components on an old system that still would have an old MB, old HDs, and an old CPU. A GTX 980 alone costs ~$600 at newegg, ~$130 for RAM, and ~$200 for a PSU, we're talking nearly half the price of a new rig. IMO, at that point it is not worth it. I may as well just buy a new one. In fact that is what started me planning to buy a new system -- realizing how expensive it would be to upgrade the current one.
I have specced out desktops. Getting what I want in a desktop, e.g. a 980 GTX and 16-24 GB of fast RAM and a good processor and so forth... even on a discount site like Cyberpower (which is where I normally buy desktops), pretty much runs me into almost exactly the same price range (around $2k) as with a laptop -- and that is only if I don't buy a new monitor (laptops come with their own!), new speakers, and other such components that I have and are working fine. The whole reason I started looking into laptops is because I saw that the desktop would not save me much price-wise, was not gaining me that much muscularity (some, yes, but not that much), and has none of the convenience of a laptop. There is the additional issue of the monster desk I have right now to accommodate he monster desktop I have, and eats up a large section of the loft that serves as my home office. Down-sizing to a laptop will let me down-size to a nicer, less obtrusive desk.
So these are some of the things that weighed into my decision to start thinking laptop instead of desktop. And then there is the added bonus that I can take it on vacations with me (my "vacations" are visits to my mom and sister, with tons of time when I could be doing stuff on my computer, except I can't bring my desktop with me).
As for bloatware... I don't know what MSI will do, but normally I have gotten all the install disks with a new machine, and I typically wipe everything and reinstall *just* windows clean, and then put what I want on it. For instance, most systems come with Norton or McAfee pre-installed and I despise both, so I install my own anti-virus software (I am partial to Webroot).
It's interesting that I have an 8 GB system and have never gotten a memory warning when rendering busy scenes. It certainly takes a while, and my machine won't let me do anything else but I usually just leave it alone to render. Lately what has been pissing me off to no end, and I am sure this is a RAM issue, is that when I clear a busy scene with the "new scene" command, or else shut down DAZ after working in a busy scene, the computer basically hangs for 4-6 minutes, and I can do nothing with it (all clicks are basically ignored, although I can move the mouse). I'm guessing with more RAM this would not happen.
As for noise and weight issues in a monster laptop, yes, I am aware of those. Noise may annoy me, and it has been mentioned in some MSI reviews, although I saw a video demo of it and the decibel level reading wasn't too bad. (How fair it was, I can't be sure.) Weight is less of a problem. I can see myself carrying it around my house from place to place, or from the house to the car and the car to a hotel or my mother's apartment. I can't see myself trudging around town with it in a bag or something. So I don't think weight will be a major problem.
I had not considered Eurocom, however, so I will take a look at it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Thanks for everyone who has weighed in. Now I have to ponder some more and decide exactly what to do about upgrading my system.
Actually my FIRST thought was a Fangbook III, built by Cyberpower, but I have read about a series of issues with those, including poor luminosity to the display, very high noise, and poor cooling. Several reviewers talked about the keyboard getting so hot to the touch they couldn't use it. Whether this is just some isolated cases or not is hard to tell. Most Fangbook reviews are for older models. But there was enough ambivalence about them that it scared me off of the Fangbook.
MSI's Dominator and as you say the Asus ROG have overwhelmingly positive reviews. This is not to say no one has issues -- that would be impossible. But almost all the professional reviews and most of the customer reviews about both the ROG and the Dominator are favorable. That is why I started leaning toward one of those.
...is the Dominator upgradable to 32GB?Again it you will primarily be rendering in 3DLthe more memory the better.
If your SOP is to wipe and reinstall, then true, bloatware isn't an issue. I bypass it by building my own system, of course that doesn't work with notebooks.
Also the impact rendering has on other functions is CPU based. You can allocate so many "cores"to rendering ans so many to "other operations" if you need to do other things on the system while rendering is underway. It would be nice if you could render in background (like Poser Pro 2010 and up as well as LuxRender allow) so you could close the scene and even the Daz application to do other tasks which would also save some system resources.
This can be done with the Standalone 3DL but it's a bit tricky to work with and the free version only uses 4 CPU threads whereas the one built into Daz is unlimited.
Windows 7 is not offered by PC makers anymore. If you're buying a new PC now, you'll have to go with Windows 8.1, and really it's the right choice anyway, purely on a technical basis.
Your next laptop could last you 4-5 years. Don't do everything else right by buying a good gaming machine, then be stubborn and immediately use an old OS. 8.1 has more internal improvements, and is going to be a better choice for any hardware you are going to buy in 2015.
There is always Classic Shell if you miss your start button. Just do it and don't look back.
Yes, it's upgradeable. They also sell a 24 GB RAM version... although it's more expensive than just getting 8 GB extra and installing it myself, so I'll probably do that..
Yeah, these come with 8.1 and I was not planning on installing 7. Just probably doing a clean install of 8.1. It will depend on what the laptop is like when I get it. Cyberpower's actually pretty good about not installing bloatware, so the last 2 desktops I've gotten from them I was able to leave as-is.
The main reason I often reinstall OS is because I like to partition large HDs -- it's an old linux habit of mine. In the past this has often entailed formatting the entire hard-drive. But these come with a small SSD as well as a main HD, and from what I have read, the OS by default is installed (as I would want) on the SSD. My desktop is like this now: the SSD has the OS and a very small number of apps, but almost everything else is installed on the main HD. As long as the computer comes without bloatware and with the OS installed on the SSD, then my normal M.O. now is to just format and partition the main HD, and then make one of the partitions my "Documents" drive (and then one for Games, and one for Apps).
...some custom houses offer a "Win7 downgrade".
You can also purchase Win7 separately if you are into doing the "wipe and clean install" routine.
I know, but it's not official, not sanctioned by Microsoft, and not the best plan for the next 5 years.
The OP is planning to go with 8.1 anyway.
...well I know my next build will probably be Win7 Pro, until MS gets things ironed out with what WIn10 will include and not include. Thankfully it appears I will not have to deal with that ugly tablet based UI and they also dumped both the "corners" concept and "Charms". It looks like they're moving towards more of an 'Apps Store" setup similar to Apple. Maybe I can actually get just the core OS without a bunch of other rubbish included (would be nice if I don't even have to deal with IE as well).
It is official but only with OEM licence http://www.microsoft.com/OEM/en/licensing/sblicensing/Pages/downgrade_rights.aspx
I didn't test Windows 10 yet but it may be the best option with new hardware especially if the upgrade is free
the past 5 years of computing power there has been a noticeable lag with CPU speed gains. A five year old i7 is not hat far behind todays fresh batch of cutting edge CPU's.
Gains have mostly been made with storage and GPU power. If you're going to render in a GPU assisted app this will be an improvement. If your going to render in 3Delight and you weren't running out of RAM to begin with the advantage to you using this for a 3Delight rendering rig (IMHO) will be subtile.
Well I am sure RAM was one of the bottlenecks, but I never got an "out of memory" issue from my PC. The render would just freeze... and sit... and sit... and sit... and then resume.
That sounds like a symptom of when the PC is swapping back and forth between memory and hard drive. Is your swap drive on a SSD or normal hard drive?
The swap is on the SSD, along with the OS. Most other stuff is on the regular HD.
Having the swap on the SSD certainly helps, but transfers back and forth to SSD are still much slower than main memory. Also you do not know that the machine is swapping like mad, as you can not hear the disk rattling, as you do when the swap is on a normal HDD.
So here is a quick test I did using a very large scene, with Urban Sprawl 2, 3 supervillains, a superhero main character, and some high-quality vehicles. It is very slow editing. I rendered this scene at 2000x3200 or so because it is a full page spread for my webcomic. I chose this scene to tax the PC during the test.
To load the scene, I was at 7.98 GB RAM used, high CPU on 1-2 cores (total CPU usage was ~15-20%, RAM near 100%) - first pic below.
Once the scene was loaded, the PC was running at 6-7 GB used, 10% or so CPU.
Upon starting to render... while "Optimizing", CPU use was around 60^, RAM at 7 GB+. Took ~ 4 min to optimize.
While rendering the image (using progressive render), I was at 7.75-7.99 GB, 90+% CPU on all cores, often pegged at full RAM, full CPU (generally the resource monitor was reporting 0 RAM free, a few hundred cached). Took ~10 min to render after optimization (14 min total). - second pic
After the render, we dropped down to 4.5 GB, <5% CPU, and stayed that way.</p>
After DAZ shutdown, even though < 3 GB was in use and < 5% CPU, the computer still froze for 3+ minutes (mouse could be moved, but no responses to clicking, or HIGHLY delayed response, i.e. double-click the Photoshop icon but wait 3 minutes for PS to start up). The computer acts for all the world like it is RAM locked, but the system is not reporting a RAM shortage. Which is very odd.
At any rate, I think there is no question that my current system is both RAM and CPU limited.
I also have 8GB in my box, and for work reasons I typically have a number of apps continously running which needed 2GB or so between them. I find the best way to handle scenes with multiple characters is to convert them to props once I am certain I do not need to change the pose again. This massively reduces the memory needs of a typically Genesis 1/2 figure, and when rendering the additional memory needed for this is also not so much.
Hm, that is an interesting idea. I had not considered converting them like that.
But in terms of the test, some folks had asked if I was maxing out memory or not and clearly I am.
Well, I went with the 24 GB version of this bad boy which also has RAID 0 configuration on the SSDs. I will let folks know how it does in the Render department when it arrives.