Upgrade advice
bicc39
Posts: 589
I have money to invest in upgrading my existing system.
One of the reasons for keeping the existing hardware is that I wish to keep
Windows 7. I would rather scribble on a wall of a cave than use Windows 8
In any case, have about one thousand dollars to spend (maybe more if situation warrants)
Have a phobia about looking at technical specifics but there us a program called Speccy that
gathers the information for you.
The programs in use are Zbrush, Key Shot (regular and Zbrush version)Maya 2012, Adobe Photoshop CS6
and DAZ Studio. My priimary goal is to speed up the Iray, and KeyShot renders.
This is my exisiting system, any advice on upgrading would be a appreciated.
Thank you.
Operating System
MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Processor @ 3.50GHz
RAM
15.9 GB
Motherboard
PEGATRON CORPORATION 2AD5 28 °C
Graphics
V196L (1024x768@75Hz)
SMS27A550H (1920x1080@60Hz)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 630
Hard Drives
2930GB Western Digital WDC WD30EZRX-60MMMB0 SCSI Disk Device (SATA)
488GB Seagate ST500DM0 ST500DM002-1BD14 SCSI Disk Device (SATA) 29 °C
Wacon Intuos 5
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Comments
Take a look at this system: http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/CyberPower_Z97_i7_Configurator
Select Windows 7, 64 bit as the operating system and Nvidia GTX970 4GB as the Video card. You'll be a bit over budget but have a much better system for Iray.
I have bought 6 PCs from these people in that last 7 years, adn they are legit.
Many thanks Fastbike for your response, particularly Video card.
Problem with the link but will investigate
Hardware wise, You're going to want to start considering having a motherboard, power supply and case that's capable of supporting three of four video cards. One video card is great, but being able to add one or two more down the road is what you want. You're going to want to look for a motherboard that can support two or more video cards. Personally, I look for the motherboard first. Buy the one with the best specs you can afford. Then look for a modular power supply that's at least 1000watts. Those are big expenditures, but when you look ahead, you're almost certainly going to want to have a beefier backbone. That way you can add a card here and there and all you have to do is stick it in the slot and power it up. Just be careful that you're getting yourself a foundation that will be able to stand a few upgrades later. You can always start off re-using your components in order to get a higher level motherboard/power supply combo and then replacing them one at a time. The motherboard and power supply will make or break your efforts down the road.
Now this is just a personal observation, but if you're doing a lot of renders and putting a lot on your gpu --whatever you select. You might want to consider looking at a starter water cool configuration of some kind. Corsair makes some solutions for Nvidia cards that are all in one, and Nvida is making a hybrid cooler that's made to work with it's video cards. I noted that adding the GTX 980 ti with my GTX 760 made from some real temperature jumps when using them together. So I'm actually holding off on a lot of rendering until I get a watercool setup going. The last thing I want to do is cook the cards I have. Those are just some of the things that I came up with as I was considering upgrades to take advantage of Iray.
@ Will2power
You really think water cooling on the GPU is necessary? I have a GTX780 in my rig and long (1 hr+ renders bring the GPU temp up to 80C and ~50% fan speed where the temperature stabilizes. I believe that 80C is actually the design operating temperature of (at least) teh GTX 700 series cards.
Ill ask my question here in this thread instead of starting a new thread.
I have a gt520 vid card. I am looking to upgrade but can only use the express 2.0 x16 the GT620 looks like the best one I can use. Any comments on anyother cards??
I don't think you need to if you're doing the occasional, render with a single card, no. However, I think that over a long term, you're going to do more to perserve your Video card if you water cool it. Heat and electronic components don't mix. If you're only doing it once or twice a day, then no, I don't think you'll get anything out of it. But it sounds like to me that you do a lot of renders. If that's the case you should be looking into ways to get the longest life out of your components. The GTX 980 ti represents a signifigant investment for me. I want to keep it running cool so that I can get years of good use out of it. I ran into this doing Octane --on a single card it will render all day long and stay reasonable at around 70/80C. When I added the second card, the temp went up to 90. Now granted, I can take a look at a few blower solutions, but Nvidia offers some out of the box solutions that may be better at helping keep the temperature down, like this. It basically replaces the stock cooler with a 980 card with an enclosed water cooling system. Cosair makes a replacement liquid cooling bracket that allows you to use any corsair CPU cooler to cool your GPU. So you could conceivably convert your video card to water cooling for around 120 dollars or so. if you're investing in a top of the line video card, you're going to want to do everything you can to protect it. Right now, I'm saving up for a motherboard capable of supporting 4 graphics cards and dual cpu's and I intend to water cool the whole thing. When you get to that point, it's a significant investment and I don't want to destroy my components with heat. 4 video cards rendering a scene is going to throw off a LOT of heat. If you're beefing up, then you'll want to investigate ways to insure your investment doesn't burn up. I'm an IT guy from way back, so I know the investment pays off in longevity.
There are custom solutions and there are out of the box solutions. But look, if you're going with just one card, and you're only rendering one or two figure scenes with very little lighting so that your card is only getting hot for a five minute render, it's overkill. More cards, however, equal more heat and you want to do whatever you can to minimize that. You definitely don't want to go with a stock cooling approach if you're investing 980 ti money or Titan X/Z money.
@onefromb5b4_e4659b6fe5: You can use PCI Express 3.0 cards in a 2.0 slot. Nothing uses that much bandwidth anyways. I'm using a Titan X in a 2.0 slot right now. Works great.
About cooling, I have a Titan X. My box is very well ventilated. I'm going with stock fan on Titan X. My first render was close to 30 hours straight. I still render a lot. No problems yet. I also have a R9 290 in there. Also stock and I've had it for a while. My CPU is water cooled though. I'd prioritize having a well ventilated box first. I'd only water cool something if it was generating a significant amount of extra heat that your case cannot dissipate fast enough.
Update:
Today I upgraded the ram by double and purchased the GTX 980.
Have advised technician about building one specifically for me in about 3 months.
Will be using the parts I purchase now in conjunction with a newer motherboard higher cpu count, etc.
One thing I was unaware of a "gaming case" to hold it, never gave the size a thought.
Thank you all for your contributions and advice, appreciate it.
Wanted to update this, thought it was important.
Before the upgrade, created a test scene with Eva 7, Shadow outfit, Hdri lighting.
Rendered at a 1024X1024 size image, render took 1 hr 8 minutes.
After upgrade opened same scene,changed absolutely nothing, render took just under 5 minutes.
Best money ( about nine hundred) I ever spent.
Would you mind sharing the specs for your new machine? I am thinking of moving over from a small Mac system to a larger PC system.
Thanks.
Basic Specs are listed in the question, new additions are the graphics card and ram update.
So far, money (total $920 for parts, labor extra) worth it.
If you can go from 1 hour and 8 minutes to under 5 minutes that is saying something.
Also program is operating much more "smoothly"
Soon or later will have to have machine built for KeyShot ( to upgrade cpu) at that time will be able to
use these parts in the new one.
If you haven't upgraded yet, there's some more info on this thread - I'm about ready to buy a new computer as well.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/60696/help-me-build-my-new-daz-computer#latest
Well, Win8 64-bit had things that speed-up all of what you want, over Win7. Mostly due to threading-control which Win7 does not have and what control it does have, is about to be squashed since they released windows 10.
Windows 7 will also not handle the new pipelines and RAM-control and all sorts of goodies that win-8.1 does, with the new 4xxx chips with 4/6 cores and 8/12 virtual cores.
I personally suggest the use of one SSD, even if it is only 64GB-128GB, in addition to 8GB+ DDR3 RAM, with a video-card that has 3-4GB VRAM DDR5 if it is nVidia, otherwise the internal GPU will work fine, as you are only displaying GL and at most, a 4K resolution, which is less then 1GB. (If not an nVidia, you are not using any of your VRAM for processing, only for displaying the final screen output.)
Get three cheap nVidia's and NOT running in SLI mode, because you want three individual cards doing three individual portions of your rendering, not one acting as a limited co-processor, which give you the ram of the one card with a little also being used from the other cards. With three cards running, unless you have a $400 MOBO, the pipeline will be 8x/4x/4x, or on some rare gaming rigs, 16x/4x/4x. To make it faster... Just link that computer to your home network and pipe the project files to be rendered on that computer. Use your existing computer for editing, not rendering, or both...
Invest in a KVM... Keyboard/Video/Mouse controller. You use one keyboard, Monitor, Mouse for both computers and just toggle between them with a tap on the keyboard.
BTW, having three cards with less cores, drawing less power and distributed workload is better than having one super card with more cores, which still only has a 16x pipeline and it never gets enough workload in one go, to use all the cores. Having three, each grabs new work as needed, with 16x-24x pipeline, but they don't all pull at once, one pulls while another works. They run cooler and each turn-off to low-power as they run out of work.
For something like a TITAN, you are drawing 200% more power for a gain of 50% more cores, in similar setups. It was made for games, not for farm rendering.
Strike a deal, find the older system-pulls of QuadroFX cards and build a farm with 8 of those in one machine. They use the double-precision floating-point numbers and are designed with the sole-purpose of farm rendering 3D graphics for stills and video, in higher quality than any gaming card that uses the lower precision floating-point values that create graphic resolution imperfections. (Usually unnoticed, but they are also less prone to rendering failures too. Those nice green bars and red dots and broken seams.)