PC Specs

Joseph_T

Carrara 8.5

I've been doing some research and looking and this is what I have come up with. I currently am using an HP 500-164 with an AMD Radeon HD 8570D and it's pretty slow with rendering. Will this be an improvement or should I spend a few bucks more and look at something different?

Windows 8.1

AMD FX-6300

8GB DDR3 Memory

8MB L3 cache

1TB Serial ATAlll Hard Drive

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB dedicated video memory

$899.99

Thanks

Jonstark

If you are thinking of rendering with Octane4Carrara plugin, then that Nvidia card should be very good for that.  Carrara native renderer depnds on CPU cores, so if that AMD FX-6300 has six cores then it means it will render with 6 buckets at a time.  I've got an i7 on my laptop, which gives me 8 cores of rendering, makes the Carrara native renderer pretty fast, but my nvidia card is only 2GB, so while Octane is still pretty fast, I'm limited on memory space.

Joseph_T

Thanks..

I'm now looking at 2 laptops, both come with i7 4th generation, but one has a Nvidia 960 4GB and 16GB of memory, the other has Nvidia 970 3GB and 8GB of memory.

Jonstark

Be careful though, there are some i7 processors that are 2 cores hyper threaded to 4, you want to make sure you get an i7 with 4 cores that will hyperthread to 8, so you can get the max number of cores in rendering.  Googling 'i7' should bring up a list of all the different processors and the number of cores they each have, so you can make sure you get a laptop wth 8 core rendering.  Other than that for Carrara native rendering both that you are considering should be about the same in terms of render speed.  The one with 16 GB ram will mean that in the preview scenes and assembly room should be better/faster response, but then again I currently only have 8GB and have no issues (unless I really pack my scene with stuff and have the textured mode on for previewing) so it might not matter.

If you do plan on getting into Octane 4 Carrara than either of those Nvidia cards will be good, in fact better than what I'm currently running (a 740M) but if I'm reading the wiki on Nvidia 900 series correctly the 960m is actually 2GB, not 4GB, while the 970m does indeed appear to be 3GB (and the 980m if you can find it has 4GB).  with the 970m you can render scenes that are 3GB worth of memory, so it's like 50% more complex scenes, not to mention faster rendering, so quite a jump in performance and well worth the difference.

My own Nvidia 740m is 2GB, and you can render a pretty nice mid-sized scene with 2 or 3 characters in it (and with being careful with how you use textures, maybe more) but I have run into the limits of a 2GB scene before.  I believe the latest Octane 4 Carrara will allow for out-of-core texture rendering, so not everything has to 'fit' into the scene, but there is an accompanying slowing in the rendering scene though.  None of that matters much if you're not considering Octane though.

chickenman

Good Day,

Like Jon said watch out for the 2 core i7's that were released this year. they may be faster clock wise but are actually slower to render as there are only 4 cores when hyperthreaded versus 8 cores when hyperthreaded. You can see the difference in CPU power for double the cores for a marginally slower clock spead you gain more processing power. these i7 chips were released for those who want i7 performance but are not utilizing that many cores such as Photoshop.

Joseph_T

Thanks for the info, your comments have been very helpful. 

 

Philemo_Carrara

For rendering using a cpu based renderer, it's a sound idea to check the Cinebench benchmark for CPU. It's based on rendering with Cinema 4D and very well suited for Carrara. You can see the Cinebench database here, Just check the CPU multi column.

chickenman

One other ting about rendering with a laptop make sure you get a chiller mat which has fans in it and goes under the laptop to increase airflow to ensure that it stays as cool as possible.

Something like this will help a lot in keeping it cooler.

 

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=1_380_718&item_id=057471

Yofiel

If you're thinking of buying a CPU, you may want to wait until January. Intel has promised to release Haswell-E processors (with up to 8/16 cores/threads) on the newest semiconductor process in that month. So they hopefully will run at >4Ghz finally :)

While waiting, I splurged on an MSI GTX970 (I didnt see spending another $150 on the 980 for a 10% performance boost worthwhile, although it does have twice as many rendering engines so it might be more better for Octane). I've never liked a graphics card so much as the MSI 970. It is totally silent 99% the time, and almost never misbehaves. A real improvement over the EVGA 460!

Also I got a Samsung 950 pro SSD. It's quite a bit more expensive than the evo series but is meant to have a much better lifespan (10 year guarantee, and it's possible there wont be any new drives with such excellent reliability in the future). It only needs 3 watts for 512 GB. So I demoted the HD to my backup machine.

The SSD is actually a much better improvement than the graphics card in my opinion so far, it was only $219 on sale, and now I can hear my cat purr in the other room. I dont know if you will see one so cheap in the future, they have been getting top ratings from everyone. 

If you upgrade to Windows 10, I would recommend this free enhancement for the new start menu: http://www.classicshell.net/