Dumb-Arse Question Time...

[Bad_Rabbit]

I finally got clearance from the Bad_Rabbit Family Minister of Finance to replace my faithful but aged PC.
I'm doing this primarily to cope with the animation renders in Terragen 2, because one decent sized render on my current pc takes four hours.
(and yes that's after taking into consideration all of Neuspadrin's excellent advice.)
So living in sunny KL, I'll be building the thing and I'm just wondering what kind of processor would be recommended by the resident experts here.

I was thinking of going for an Intel i7-930 or dual Xeon E5405 processors.

Any thoughts or counter recommendations.  For me it's all about grunt and the ability to get renders done faster and better.
I'm more the arty type as opposed to the tech typeso at times I'm lost and any advise will be gladly accepted...

[Kadri]

Here are maybe some answer , Bad_Rabbit :

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9489.0

[piggy]

I finally got clearance from the Bad_Rabbit Family Minister of Finance to replace my faithful but aged PC.
I'm doing this primarily to cope with the animation renders in Terragen 2, because one decent sized render on my current pc takes four hours.
(and yes that's after taking into consideration all of Neuspadrin's excellent advice.)
So living in sunny KL, I'll be building the thing and I'm just wondering what kind of processor would be recommended by the resident experts here.

I was thinking of going for an Intel i7-930 or dual Xeon E5405 processors.

Any thoughts or counter recommendations.  For me it's all about grunt and the ability to get renders done faster and better.
I'm more the arty type as opposed to the tech typeso at times I'm lost and any advise will be gladly accepted...

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9489.msg100290#msg100290

Specifically, the i7 860.

Get the mobo that can carry humongous amount of RAM, and populate it with as much RAM as the Finance Minister's budget can allow.

Edit: Opps ! I just checked with lowyat, i7 920 is cheaper than i7 lapan enam kosong.

[freelancah]

I would go with the dual quad xeons. This setup would cost around 2k$.  If you want to go a bit cheaper then it would be a setup with i7 920

[leafspring]

Just a hint: If you plan on an i7 don't go for any more than the 920 because everything above can easily be reached with overclocking, especially the 930. The difference between these two is the multiplicator of 20 on the 920 as opposed to the 21 on the 930. Takes you about 20 seconds to change it in the BIOS without any heat, voltage or whatever increase. And if you want, you can achieve the level of a 975 anytime as well with some in-depth OC'ing. Just make sure you get a D0 Stepping since it needs way less voltage and therefore runs a lot cooler than the older C0, even at stock speed.

[neuspadrin]

I think the big question would be, how much finances were allowed by the wonderful Finance Minister. Since its easy to shoot for the stars of insane price on computers but it also isn't too hard to build a very powerful machine within a reasonable budget. 

So whats the budget?

[Oshyan]

Yes, I agree that knowing the budget is key to giving relevant advice. If dual Xeons are a possibility, it's definitely worth considering seriously. The E5405 is a bit slower than the 920 as far as clock speed. You can make up for that by having a whole additional CPU of course, allowing up to 16 threads, but this starts to become a memory issue in TG2 as each thread needs its own cache at present. So ideally you could better balance raw clock rate (which will give you faster renders without having to multithread as much) with lots of threads/cores. The best thing of course would be a fast dual Xeon setup, like the E5530, but that'll run you about 2x as much *per cpu*, plus the higher cost of the motherboard and more RAM. If your budget allows it, a dual E5530 machine would be amazing, but a 920 or 870 based system is probably more realistic.

- Oshyan

[FrankB]

I recently had access to a 4 socket server, each CPU being the latest Intel high end 8 core. So considering hyperthreading, this was a 64 CPU machine. It had 256GB RAM. The whole thing was quite a beast

[Kadri]

I recently had access to a 4 socket server, each CPU being the latest Intel high end 8 core. So considering hyperthreading, this was a 64 CPU machine. It had 256GB RAM. The whole thing was quite a beast

As what do they use it...web server ? It would be a killer as a render machine !

A little off topic but ...
If i am right even a 3D software like Lightwave can only access 32 cores (for now) .
Do you know the other 3D programs guys?

[neuspadrin]

If i am right even a 3D software like Lightwave can only access 32 cores (for now) .

Even if that is true, it would still be beast at rendering animations.  1-32 render starting frame one heading up,  33-64 rendering starting last frame heading down all on same machine with two windows open Unsure about limits of threads right now on various tg programs though. 

[FrankB]

I recently had access to a 4 socket server, each CPU being the latest Intel high end 8 core. So considering hyperthreading, this was a 64 CPU machine. It had 256GB RAM. The whole thing was quite a beast

As what do they use it...web server ? It would be a killer as a render machine !

A little off topic but ...
If i am right even a 3D software like Lightwave can only access 32 cores (for now) .
Do you know the other 3D programs guys?

It was running 120 concurrent virtual machines in a lab environment.

[Kadri]

...
It was running 120 concurrent virtual machines in a lab environment.

Great that they doesn't waste it 

[Kadri]

...
Even if that is true, it would still be beast at rendering animations.  1-32 render starting frame one heading up,  33-64 rendering starting last frame heading down all on same machine with two windows open ...

Would love to try it. LOL 

[freelancah]

If dual Xeons are a possibility, it's definitely worth considering seriously. The E5405 is a bit slower than the 920 as far as clock speed. You can make up for that by having a whole additional CPU of course, allowing up to 16 threads, but this starts to become a memory issue in TG2 as each thread needs its own cache at present.

- Oshyan

You could just run 2 or more instances of terragen when rendering a scene. This way the memory limitations wouldn't be an issue. I do this all the time

[piggy]

If dual Xeons are a possibility, it's definitely worth considering seriously. The E5405 is a bit slower than the 920 as far as clock speed. You can make up for that by having a whole additional CPU of course, allowing up to 16 threads, but this starts to become a memory issue in TG2 as each thread needs its own cache at present.

- Oshyan

You could just run 2 or more instances of terragen when rendering a scene. This way the memory limitations wouldn't be an issue. I do this all the time

You mean the two instances of TG2 share the same mapped memory?