Need some help building a system for 3D rendering

[bobmarker]

I'm planning on building a dual Xeon X5690 rig for heavy 3D and After Effects work.

I just finished building an AMD Opteron 6272 render station (32-cores, 64GB ram), but now I need more power as a workstation.

Can you take a look at what I'm planning on and give me feedback with any insight you have?

CPU: 2 Xeon X5690 (or X5680) - to be overclocked
PSU: Corsair Gold 1200
RAM: 48 GB Corsair... not sure which
MB: EVGA SR-2
Coolers: ??
Case: LIAN LI PC-P80
HD: SSD ?

I'm torn since the Sandy Bridge chips are due out any time, but I need a hard-crunching work station now. If I knew they were coming out next month, I'd wait, but once they come out, it probably will take a while for all the other components of it to come out too (like EVGA's SR-2 motherboard).

Any thoughts on that?

[Slicker]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042

The Antec 300 case has just as much cooling if you add the additional fans and it is $300 less. If you buy fans with LEDs, it will look just as cool too. There is also a $15 rebate, so the Antec 300 case ends up being only $45.

[bobmarker]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042

The Antec 300 case has just as much cooling if you add the additional fans and it is $300 less. If you buy fans with LEDs, it will look just as cool too. There is also a $15 rebate, so the Antec 300 case ends up being only $45.

Thanks. Yeah, I don't think that case will work since the SR-2 is enormous. There's only a few cases that hold it that I know of.

[Fire$torm]

Thanks. Yeah, I don't think that case will work since the SR-2 is enormous. There's only a few cases that hold it that I know of.

Yeah cases that support HPTX are few. Newegg lists only ten units (Link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&Description=hptx%20cases&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20)). I am also surprised that Cooler Master's new Cosmos II doesn't support HPTX but does support other esoteric form factors like XL-ATX & SSI CEB.

[Duke of Buckingham]

I am helping you all, being in silence.:o

Always Helping Duke:rolleyes:

[DrPop]

Hi Bob, thanks for stopping by the forums. That is a serious demand for power. Before I could offer any "usable" advice, we need a few more specifics, because when you're talking rigs of this caliber, every little tweak for each program is going to count.
Since you just made an AMD Opteron 6272 render station, can you tell us what you like / don't like about it? Where is the speed lacking - in which program(s) or is it just lacking in raw crunching power for what you need? Where do you perceive the bottlenecks to be coming from at the moment?

Which rendering program(s) and what other programs (video editing, stills editing, audio production software, etc) will you want to run on the new workstation you plan to build? Certain hardware will perform faster with different programs, some are optimized for specific hardware.

Also, I'm just curious now - would you mind telling us a bit about yourself? I mean, are you a producer or an "Indie movie" studio, or just doing your own project for an animation class, etc? The reason I'm asking is . . . there is actually a BOINC project that renders! :D So, you could create a BOINC project, and "farm out" your rendering tasks to all of us that would sign up for it, and in return for our rigs rendering your movie(s) and stills, we get "imaginative points" i.e., numbers on a spread sheet for how much our computers "crunched". Sounds like a deal, doesn't it? :o It could really work in your favor if you have *a lot* of rendering to do for the next year or so...you wouldn't want to make the commitment of setting up the project unless it could have work for at least a year, I think. Longer - several years worth - even better.

I am actually curious about the project, though. If you don't mind sharing. :)

[bobmarker]

Hi Bob, thanks for stopping by the forums. That is a serious demand for power. Before I could offer any "usable" advice, we need a few more specifics, because when you're talking rigs of this caliber, every little tweak for each program is going to count.
Since you just made an AMD Opteron 6272 render station, can you tell us what you like / don't like about it? Where is the speed lacking - in which program(s) or is it just lacking in raw crunching power for what you need? Where do you perceive the bottlenecks to be coming from at the moment?

Which rendering program(s) and what other programs (video editing, stills editing, audio production software, etc) will you want to run on the new workstation you plan to build? Certain hardware will perform faster with different programs, some are optimized for specific hardware.

Also, I'm just curious now - would you mind telling us a bit about yourself? I mean, are you a producer or an "Indie movie" studio, or just doing your own project for an animation class, etc? The reason I'm asking is . . . there is actually a BOINC project that renders! :D So, you could create a BOINC project, and "farm out" your rendering tasks to all of us that would sign up for it, and in return for our rigs rendering your movie(s) and stills, we get "imaginative points" i.e., numbers on a spread sheet for how much our computers "crunched". Sounds like a deal, doesn't it? :o It could really work in your favor if you have *a lot* of rendering to do for the next year or so...you wouldn't want to make the commitment of setting up the project unless it could have work for at least a year, I think. Longer - several years worth - even better.

I am actually curious about the project, though. If you don't mind sharing. :)

Well, I started off with a dual 6128 (AMD), and it was just a little slower than my i7 980x (OC 4.2 Ghz.). I wasn't very satisfied with that, so we went with two 6278s. I'm VERY happy with that set up.

After running some tests, it's 1.3-1.5 times faster (when rendering) than my i7 980x.

I have this set up as a dedicated render station.

I have no problems with it, especially for the price. This is my first AMD build and I couldn't be happier.

Tomorrow the rest of my parts show up to build a dual Intel Xeon x5680. It will take a bit of tweaking, but I want to OC it as I will be using Corsair H80 watercoolers.

The reason for going with an overpriced (IMO) Xeon is so we can have a very fast workstation.

The AMDs are like a freight train at this point. Once they get going, nothing will stop them. But they aren't as snappy to work from. They are 2.1 GHz, so when you apply an effect in C4D or After Effects, it takes a bit longer than I like to see the effect live.

The Xeons should fix that problem for me.... I hope. I want to apply some heavy effects and not have to wait to see them or drop the resolution so low.

We'll see how it goes. Building the AMD 6272 station was well worth it, but it is half the cost as the Dual Xeon I'm building. I hope (but doubt) that the Xeon will be TWICE as good as the AMD 6272 station. But I remain hopeful.

We do a TV show for kids that is live action mostly, but contains a lot of graphic effects and 3D sets (with shadows, reflections, etc.--render heavy items). Nothing very complicated, but stuff that takes hours and days to render.

For example, one part of the show takes around 24 hours to render on a regular machine. On the:

i7 980X - 21 hours
Dual 6128 - 20 hours
Dual 6272 - 13 hours

So that's a real time saver for us.

I don't think the render-farming idea would work since we have slow internet. Sounds like a very interesting and awesome idea. We have a lot of HD footage that gets incorporated into the AE and C4D projects as alphas (greenscreen), so it would take me longer to upload it all so it could get compiled than it would to just render out the projects solo.

But a fantastic idea nonetheless!

[zombie67]

FYI, there are two renderfarm BOINC projects:

http://burp.renderfarming.net/
http://www.renderfarm.fi/

They have slightly different rules about who can submit projects.