Terragen Friendly New PC Spec?

[donnievegas]

Hi guys and gals,

I have just started playing around with Terragen 2 after a few years off and I have quickly come to realise that I may well need a new PC to speed things up a bit. So my question is this, could you please recommend a good Motherboard and Processor and a Graphics Card that will by useful for this sort of thing. I really don't have any real idea on what would be best for these sorts of applications rather than games.

I was thinking of the following...

Asus Sabertooth X58 Socket 1366 8 Channel HD Audio ATX Motherboard

Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz Socket 1366 8MB Cache

PNY NVIDIA Quadro 600 1GB DDR3 DVI DisplayPort PCI-E Low Profile Graphics Card

I have built all of my last 3 PC's but I do not pretend to know exactly what all the bits do! So any help in this department would be greatly appreciated. My budget for the whole PC will be around £1000.

Thanks

DonnieVegas

[Oshyan]

What you have in mind is going in the right direction, but the components are a bit outdated. You should go with a newer "Sandy Bridge" Intel CPU, like an i7-2600k and that needs an LGA1155 socket motherboard and I'd recommend the Z68 chipset or newer. That combo will be similar in price to the i7 950 but faster and use less power.

Then get as much RAM as you can afford. 16GB is a good target, and fairly cheap these days. If possible, and if you expect the machine to last for a few years, get it with 2x8GB DIMMs instead of 4x4, then you can upgrade to 32GB in the future (and make sure you get a motherboard that can support it).

The graphics card doesn't matter that much for Terragen 2, it's not used during rendering, only for the 3D preview object display and node network view, so you just need something fairly capable in OpenGL with good drivers. A Quadro is overkill. A decent "gaming" card will do fine, and give you more performance for the dollar. That being said if you use other 3D apps they may prefer a 'workstation' card with certified drivers like a Quadro, and that particular card seems to be fairly cheap (largely because it's pretty old). A machine I bought about 4 months ago has an nVidia Geforce GTX 570 and I'm quite happy with it. It runs about $300 now, so a bit more than your Quadro, but you could step down to the 560 or other options to save some money if need be. Tom's Hardware's gaming graphics card list is usually a good reference:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html
Looks like they're recommending the AMD Radeon HD 6870 in that price bracket.

- Oshyan

[donnievegas]

Oshyan thank you kindly for your time and advise squire!

I will read the link you sent and go from there. Cant wait to build a new machine and then really get my teeth stuck into Terragen again!

Donnie

[Oshyan]

It's really pretty amazing working with a new machine and TG2. Awesome to see how fast you can crank stuff out. I got an overclocked machine and while it's not for everyone, modern motherboards and CPUs make it super easy, and decent coolers that can support pretty significant overclocks (15-30%) are also quite cheap ($50 maybe) and common. I've got my 3.4Ghz 2600k running at 4.6Ghz, rock solid stable, I can render for days on end without a problem, and it is *damn* fast.

- Oshyan

[coremelt]

For 1000 pounds you should be able to get an Asus P79X Standard mother board with Socket 2011 and a 6 Core Intel Xeon Extreme 3930K.  That will be considerably faster than a 2600K.  The cpu is approx $500, $250 for the motherboard, leaves you approx $750 for everything else.  ($1500US = 1000 pounds)

[Oshyan]

Yeah, if you can afford it that would be even faster. But I reckon in the UK prices will be a bit higher, so the exchange rate doesn't help quite as much as that. But definitely if it's in the budget, the 3930k would be a screaming TG2 machine.

- Oshyan

[efflux]

I've got an ASUS P8P67 with i7 2600k. 8 gigs of RAM. I also have a quadro FX 2000 but you don't even need a particularly fast graphics card unless you use other apps that need it. I use some other apps that can use Cuda on the Quadro. TG2 runs fast. I don't overclock but I find boards like this are more reliable and last longer.

8 gigs of RAM does me fine for 2D work where I might have stacks of high res layers and it's useful for 3D apps. However, the RAM you need for TG2 will depend on how you use TG2. If you need lots of various imported meshes etc then you'll need the RAM. I don't work in TG2 like this though. Primarily I work on procedural landscapes. I don't even know how much RAM I'm using for this but I know I have way more than enough with 8 gigs.

Just one point though. The ASUS P8P67 has given me problems on the extra Intel SATA ports. I have two SSD drives on the SATA 6.0 GB ports. One is Linux, the other Windows. However, the SATA 3.0 GB ports seem to be random in actually finding extra drives I've connected. These are larger capacity normal drives for basic backup and sharing between Windows and Linux. When the motherboard doesn't find an extra drive here it stalls for about 10 seconds on boot. Don't know what the issue is.

[Keiyentai]

I agree with the recommendations everyone has mentioned. Also unless your going to go in to heavy 3D work ie 3DSM/Maya/Zbrush/MudBox with scenes with polygon counts in the millions or more really no need for a Quadro. Decent midrange or higher gaming card would be fine and probably couple hundred less. So unless your planning on doing like Pixar/Lucas Arts quality 3D and animation I don't see the need for a Quadro honestly. The HD6xxx series and GeForce5xx series are more then enough. Also if your an AMD person the Phenom X6 are nice. 6Core CPU and you can cross-fire two ATi HD6xxx series cards (have to be same card) and get some killer performance same with GeForce5xx cards and SLI.

[donnievegas]

Hi guys,

Thanks again for your thoughts and input, basically after a bit more digging around after reading some earlier comments I have chosen the following components for my new pc, the price went up a bit but I will get around £450 for my current pc. I also really hate to hear PC's so I have gone for the quiet option where possible!

So here is the list, I wont order till next week sometime, so any further comments are welcome.

Asus P9X79 PRO Socket 2011 8 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard

Intel Core I7-3930K 3.20GHz Socket 2011 12MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor

Antec P193 V3 Case

WD 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s Caviar Green Hard Drive - 64MB Cache - WD20EARX x2 RAID STORAGE DRIVE

OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 SSD 2.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s Read 550MB/s Write 500MB/s 85,000 IOPS SYSTEM DRIVE

Sapphire HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 DVI HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card

Coolermaster Silent Pro 700W Modular PSU - Single 12V Rail with 50A

Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CL9 1.5V Non-ECC Unbuffered

LiteOn iHAS124 24x DVD±RW DL & RAM SATA Optical Drive

[Oshyan]

That will be an excellent machine.

- Oshyan

[Tangled-Universe]

The only slight improvement you could make is replacing the OCZ SSD for an Intel SSD as they have a proven record for better reliability and stability.

[Hetzen]

I agree with TU, but I'd also suggest you use the SSD drive as your Windows swap file, rather than your C drive. When they go, you have no warning, or way of getting data off them once they've gone.

[donnievegas]

Thanks for the tip off's guys, I am looking at Intel SSD drives as we speak, and also about using that drive as a windows swap drive, though I really want it for the speed that windows an other applications will open. I was thinking of using one of my old 2T Maxtor external drives as a back up so if the drive did go I would only be a day or so away from where I was.

Thank you all again for your time and advise, you are all scholars and gentlemen (maybe ladies too)

Don

[Oshyan]

With 16GB of RAM I would hope you won't really ever need the swap file. I'd suggest instead using the SSD as your main/boot drive and then just keep regular system backups/images, which everyone should be doing anyway.

- Oshyan

[efflux]

I've used OCZ vertex SSDs. I've not had any problems at all, at least yet. I've used some for a long time. I have a 240 GB one in my Macbook and that gets used daily. That one was to enable large sampler drum banks to load into RAM quickly. Cost a fortune though. I've got three others in computers. As you can tell, the problem is that once you go SSD there is no going back. You have to put them in every computer you own. You definitely want the system on an SSD. Other drives can just be used for excess or backup. In fact I don't have TG2 files on the SSD but I only have simple procedural planets with no big meshes to load. It's jut for pure speed of booting opening apps etc.