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I am also looking to update (going to get back into using Carrara), so am going to be watching and asking. My current computer is a dual core Cyberpower AMD gamer, running 32 bit XP pro....great in its day & still kicking, but giving me memory allocation errors.
Is it worth it to upgrade the internals, or better off to just purchase a new box as SileneUK is doing?
OK I am all ordered and it should be with me in about 10 business days. WooHoo! Thank you all.
Can't wait to try Carrara on it first thing. Whether or not there are updates or improved versions, Carrara 8.5 Pro has a lot of good features that I am likely as not using properly, or at all really. And I have lots of other companion software that would be useful if I had better performance.
PhilW's tuts will be getting a dusting off so I can dive back in. Also can try out some of the excellent tuts from forum members, too! Life is exciting again.
You will enjoy the new found speed of rendering and not having to worry about burning out the CPU on long renders.
Peace of mind while rendering.
It will last a long time and able to take a second graphics card (could be a gamer card) which is beneficial when using LUXCore.
I will likely follow the same path as Silene and just bite the bullet... I also would like to thank those that gave advice on this thread.
worked a few extra days this holiday, saved 600$ for a new desktop. best i can hope for is prolly i5.
then use my curent dual core to be a render node.
does a node care about video card?
thanks.
using C8.5P. setting up for rendering animations
If you are rendering with Carrara's built in renderer, then the video card is not a factor. Same is true for network render nodes. The big factor is processors and RAM. For both, the more and the faster, the better.
I do use a slower computer as a node on my network, but the extra processors make up for the slower chips. I also keep the render tiles at 48. That way, the slower tiles aren't working as long on a particular area in the render.
Oh Congratulations, Silene!!! You are going to be sooooo amazed when you see those eight cores rip through your renders! The rest of that hardware will all add together to make that whole rig just shine for you - I'm so happy for you! I have been away from my workstation for that whole period where I was mostly absent from the forums, except for those few quick posts... getting back to it now is so incredible compared to my quad-core laptop. Just a nice warm spring day compared to a freezing winter evening! LOL
I can't wait to hear your reports! So cool!
As Mac guy, I can only say that the i7 is a nice CPU; my iMac has a 3.6 quad core i7 which does pretty well. My MacPro has Xeons and it does pretty well, too; I got it for heavy hauling as it is basically a wind tunnel for cooling and can run for hours. Sadly, the AMD GPUs are not used by Carrara or things would really fly. Thunderbolt mentioned above is very fast, but at a pemium price. I personally have two RAID systems, one on TB and one USB3. The latter was cheaper and does quite well.
An easy way to help renders go faster is to add a seccond machine and run batch queues over render nodes. You could set up you now old machine as a render node; it could cut some work times in half. I wish Carrara's regular render function would use the nodes... would make things a little smoother.
I've never bought a computer, in a box, with all the bit's.
Choose a case,. Motherboard processor, RAM, HDD, Power supply and cooling system etc ..that way every part of your system is the parts you want to have,. not what a manufacturer has determined "will do" to meet a price point for a complete (off the shelf) boxed system
Buying individual components means you can choose the parts that matter to your needs.
it also means that you don't have a single large purchase,. you can buy individual components when you can afford to
To my mind It's the best selling point of PC's,. it's an Open ended system which is designed to be easilly upgraded by the user (without any knowledge of electronics)
Rather than a sealed box which is designed not to allow the user access to replace components. which ranges from physical design restrictions,. to (little stickers "threatening" the invalidity of the consumers rights) .. an almost empty threat since all components can be easily replaced by the user,.which is more cost effective than physically transporting a complete system back to a manufacturer or service centre for diagnostics/repair,.or upgrading.
Just my 2 cent rant
would love an i7, but not seeing any i7 Win7 in my price range.
Don't want to bog myself in an OS learning curve.
I'll respectfully disagree a bit Andy.
Excluding tech heavy forums like this one, my observation is that the Mac users I know tend to be more tech savvy than the Windows users I know. There are of course exceptions, but they tend to be, shall we say, a bit more on the mature side of things... ;-)
i7 hyper threads, so how many render buckets you see rendering?
I'm with you 3DAGE.
Building my own box has always been my choice. But on boxing day I checked out bestbuy, and ended up buying me first store bought computer. I got a smokin deal on an Asus g30ax tytan.
i7 4790K cpu @ 4.00GHz,
32 gb Ram,
3TB hd,
350GB SSD,
GTX 980 4GB.
All for under 2200 canadian dollars. So far I am pleased as punch.
Generally speaking an i7 is 4 cores, 8 threads so you would see 8 tiles when rendering
an i5 is 4 core but no hyper thread so only 4 tiles in the render room.
at least that's how I understand it
I totally agree, and it's super-fun!
But especially getting jus the right components... as well as the fact that we don't need to have a degree in electrical engineering - just enough ambition to perform a little light reading and we know what works with what, and how it all goes together.
Still, I can see why one would prefer the piece of mind that a omplete machine can bring, and Silene's machine looks like a whopper! ;)
love my i7 Dell - had it for years - never a problem with it.
Used to build my own using AMD, but have had so many problems with overheating and other h/w failures I finally jumped over to Intel for better reliability.
Have a newer i5 laptop that gets used occasionally, a bit slower - but still a doable mobile workstation and it fits in a bag.
As my eyes get older, I don't build stuff anymore - can't read the tiny print on instructions. :)
I see 8 on a quad-core machine. But, then, on my 6-core Xeon machine, I see 12 threads. That said, the i7 quad can beat out the Xeon 6 at rendering in Carrara; quite possibly in the last stage of exporting the movie, where the i7 has a built in function for this thatthe Xeon deosn't. The Xeon is in a windtunnel, though, so it can work all day. And the MacPro just looks awesome sitting on my desk.
I'd love a Mac Pro, and that ashcan design is growing on me (at least, now we have no smoking offices!). But the lack of NVidia GPU options kills it for me, since I need to be able to run Iray at a reasonable speed. Alas, it probably means I shall have to go over to the Dark Side (ie Windows) for my next beast machine.
I'm lucky. Carrara is just a hobby and doesn't use the GPUs anyways. Final Cut Pro, on the other hand, puts them to very good use! I am waiting for a competing 3D app that has four legs and is Mac only to get updated. The new version will support AMD cards; in fact the developer and I bought the same MacPro at the same time. Sadly, his update is taking a while. But at least he is open about what he is working on; I wish Daz were a little more forthcopming about their plans for Carrara. I can alway hope that they will magically release a new version optimized for AMD GPUs... hahahahahahahahahaha.
The MP has not been updated in a very long time, so if you can wait... (famous last words of many a machine buyer).
final cut pro looks the best for editing video.
wish i had something to look awesome on my desk.
Wow. That sounds exactly like my first computer build. It's not being used, but it still works like new thanks to the filtered case I built it into.
My opinion: Upgrading the current machine is out of the question. If it still works great, pack it up (after it's replaced) and keep it safe, if only for heirloom sake ;)
For Carrara's render engine, I suggest going for the highest total number of cores (cpu), whether through hyperthread or actual, physical cores. I may have gone a little overboard with RAM, but I gave each of my eight cores 2GB of RAM (I know it doesn't actually work that way, but it was an indicating measure for how much RAM to buy), so I have 16GB RAM, but bought a motherboard that supports 32GB RAM, just in case.
I prefer keeping all of my software installed on the same drive as the OS, and also prefer to save my file there too... so I went with a 6GB/sec SATA Hard drive (1TB back then) instead of going for a much more expensive and much smaller SSD, but I've heard good things about SSD - I haven't noticed any bottlenecks - this computer just flies!
It can be a real blast designing your new machine using a custom wishlist at newegg. I start with the processor and then pick out a motherboard that can use that cpu, and shop for one that will give me what I would eventually like this beast to become if I suddenly win the lotto, but design out the rest of the components with what I can afford at the time, which is compatible with my base support - being the motherboard. Like others have suggested, I went with a good, high-powered power supply - one with good protection circuitry, great output consistency, and plenty of power options for things like graphics card power connectors and such. My PSU has actual circuitry for GPUs so I didn't have to resort to using an adapter. GPUs are too expensive to fry like that. I have a higher-end GPU now than when I first built this, but it's no better than the budget nVidia card that I originally bought, but just eventually lost its fan bearings.
So with my motherboard and cpu picked out and a good set of RAM sticks in the wishlist as well, I go about filling out my neccessary slots with what I would consider "Yesterday's Best" to give me high quality at much, much lower pricing. I also spend a good amount of time browsing for the perfect box to build everything into. Ever since that first build with an older model Thermaltake tower with filtered intakes and lots of fans (after being told by my engineer brother to just get a $20 cheapo), I'll never go cheapo with a case - ever. That thing wasn't a whole lot more than the cheapos (remember... Yesterday's Best!) but the quality is amazing. Easy drive installation, great fans, great motherboard support, just a great case but most importantly, good high-quality intake fan filters that are washable. Not all filters are good and don't use swiffer cloths! They have electro-static charges!
Always happy to share ideas if you ever want.
I have both Sony Movie HD and Corel Video Studio Pro. I love the ease of use with the Sony, and the screen capturing of Corel. Sony's interface has built-in "Show Me How" tutorials that puts pop-up bubbles into your project answering your questions and pointing at what it's talking about, so it was super-easy to get to know how to use.
I like the Sony enough as to have not taken any time yet to learn the Corel, but I will eventually. I got that in a deal when I bought PaintShop Pro. The screen capture is really convenient and works very well. So at least I have good use for it before I learn how to use it. I don't remember all of the features that got me to go for it and buy it, but it has nice features for tracking objects within a video for many various reasons and comes with a good pile of filters and effects and features galore. For where I am in this game, it just didn't make sense to wait until I can afford something like Sony Vegas Pro or something like that. I used to use Windows Movie Maker until I got Windows 7, whose Movie Maker is "Live", which just bites compared to the version we got with XP Pro.
Sony Movie HD (really inexpensive) is really easy to learn and use. You almost know exactly what to do just looking at it. The most difficult part for me was to figure out what type of output I want to use for YouTube. The simple way is to use the "Save to YouTube" function, but that resulted in YouTube filters making my videos too dark. Not sure if that's still an issue or not. Then I've read that YouTube is friendly to Windows media player video files, so I use that for now, until I get to the point where I need to learn more.
Oh yeah... I forgot to mention: I agree. I wish I had a Windows version of that! ;)
FCPX is awesome. Grab some effects from FXfactory and you can do just about anything. Add in Logic Pro and produce a score for you movie; I mainly work with conversation and narration, with some simple BGM and sound effects. I have no idea about a Windows equivalent. I have seen people here comment about Hit Studio (Mac and PC).
Yes, I was thinking of Cheetah. It actually was my first step into 3D; my complete lack of artistic talent led me to search for models to use, which led me to Carrara and so I haven't used Cheetah so much recently. I don't think it has clouds (I had not gotten that far). It has a different way of doing things than Carrara and there is no terrain editor, but for modeling there are some really nice examples online. Now that I know something I have been thinking to look at it again for fun; a new version has been announced but the release has been pushed back a ways. Also the price point is quite reasonable. It is no longer available on the Mac App Store (Carrara isn't either) so you have to buy direct. Lately lots of developers are moving away form the MAS because of rules and fees and no upgrades.
Hey Selene How is the new rig? a lot quicker than the old I am sure.
Now just get a network drive, put all the Carrara content on it and network the old computer and youhave a nice little render farm.