2 new Powerhouse Computers required

Mono

Mono

Mono

Associate
Joined
7 Nov 2005
Posts
247
Location
UK
First off, I would like to say I have built several computers in the past and I have a working understanding of doing so. The reason I am being even more hesitant is because the budget for my latest project is a bit bigger than normal.

I will try to detail out as clear as possible because I dont have the money to get this wrong ;)

- I have been allocated a budget of £8000
- I will be responsible for buying constructing and testing 2 full systems.
- The systems will be used for 3D rendering/ animation & Game design.
- Minimum is dual monitors.

I have checked components over OCUK and can see that this is easily achievable but I would like to know what parts other people would select for this build.

Even though the budget is £8k it does not mean I have to spend every penny :)


Some things I have considered
* Dual 28" 4k monitors with 2 smaller monitors
* Nvidia 980GTX SLI
* CPU i7 (but which one)
* Ram (what would be best for this type of work?)


Thanks for your responses.
 
What software are you using? That's pretty much going to determine what hardware you need (rendering software, specifically).
980GTX are gaming cards. Chances are if you're using GPU-accelerated rendering software there are more appropriate options.
 
kaku said:
What software are you using? That's pretty much going to determine what hardware you need (rendering software, specifically).
980GTX are gaming cards. Chances are if you're using GPU-accelerated rendering software there are more appropriate options.
Click to expand...

Software mention to me so far:

- Autodesk Maya
- Blender
- Unreal Engine 4
- Office 2013
- Adobe CS6

Does that cover your question or should I get a full requirement from them?
 
Both machines identical? so basically upto 4K each.

Need everything from OS< keyboard+mouse etc?
 
Mono said:
Software mention to me so far:

- Autodesk Maya
- Blender
- Unreal Engine 4
- Office 2013
- Adobe CS6

Does that cover your question or should I get a full requirement from them?
Click to expand...

If you use specialised rendering plugins for Maya/Blender then it may be worth speccing for that, depending on how optimised they are. I know with VRay for 3DS Max the GPU-accelerated version is missing some features compared to the standard version, so people don't really bother outside of very specific circumstances.

For general-purpose grunt, you're probably best off with with an 8c16t X99 system coupled with a gaming card. For example with a plugin like Furryball you can get 95% of high-end rendering performance with a gaming card (780ti or so) but some features aren't available on AMD cards.
 
At the top end of your budget there's something like this...

YOUR BASKET
1 x amd firepro w8100 professional graphics card - 8gb gddr5 - 2560 shaders £1544.99
1 x intel xeon e5-2630 v3 2.4ghz 8-core with hyperthreading (socket 2011-3) - retail £532.99
2 x dell ultrasharp u2713hm 27" widescreen led monitor - midnight grey £479.99 (£959.98)
1 x crucial 32gb (4x8gb) ddr4 pc4-17000c16 2133mhz quad channel kit (ct4k8g4dfd8213) £289.99
1 x msi x99s sli plus intel x99 (socket 2011) ddr4 atx motherboard £159.95
total : £3,512.02 (includes shipping : £20.10).



add your own case and drives. would be crazy-fast. don't need a big psu either (550-650 w i would guess).

gpu review http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firepro-w8100-workstation-graphics-card,3868-7.html
 
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YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel 5960X Extreme 3.00GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3 Processor - Retail (BX80648I75960X) £761.99
2 x OcUK GeForce GTX 980 "Reference Design" 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £419.99 (£839.98)
2 x AOC U2868PQU 28" 4K 60Hz 1MS Gaming Widescreen LED Monitor - Black £389.99 (£779.98)
1 x Crucial 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-17000C16 2133MHz Quad Channel Kit (CT4K8G4DFD8213) £289.99
1 x Gigabyte X99-UD4 Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £167.99
1 x Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter CT512MX100SSD1) £154.99
2 x AOC I2369VM 23" Widescreen LED IPS Monitor - Black/Silver £129.95 (£259.90)
1 x SuperFlower Leadex GOLD 850W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £89.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-Bit DVD - OEM (WN7-00614) £77.99
1 x Corsair Carbide 330R Silent Mid Tower Case - Black (CC-9011024-WW) £69.95
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £61.99
1 x Noctua NH-U12S Ultra-Quiet Slim CPU Cooler with NF-F12 Fan £52.99
1 x Gigabyte KM7580 Wireless 2.4GHz Keyboard & Mouse Set £19.99
1 x LG GH24NSB0 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £3,687.60 (includes shipping : £38.25).

 
kaku said:
If you use specialised rendering plugins for Maya/Blender then it may be worth speccing for that, depending on how optimised they are. I know with VRay for 3DS Max the GPU-accelerated version is missing some features compared to the standard version, so people don't really bother outside of very specific circumstances.

For general-purpose grunt, you're probably best off with with an 8c16t X99 system coupled with a gaming card. For example with a plugin like Furryball you can get 95% of high-end rendering performance with a gaming card (780ti or so) but some features aren't available on AMD cards.
Click to expand...

Thats really handy to know. I will get a more detailed view on the software they will be using and especially what plugins.
 
stulid said:
YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel 5960X Extreme 3.00GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3 Processor - Retail (BX80648I75960X) £761.99
2 x OcUK GeForce GTX 980 "Reference Design" 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £419.99 (£839.98)
2 x AOC U2868PQU 28" 4K 60Hz 1MS Gaming Widescreen LED Monitor - Black £389.99 (£779.98)
1 x Crucial 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-17000C16 2133MHz Quad Channel Kit (CT4K8G4DFD8213) £289.99
1 x Gigabyte X99-UD4 Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £167.99
1 x Crucial MX100 512GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter CT512MX100SSD1) £154.99
2 x AOC I2369VM 23" Widescreen LED IPS Monitor - Black/Silver £129.95 (£259.90)
1 x SuperFlower Leadex GOLD 850W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £89.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-Bit DVD - OEM (WN7-00614) £77.99
1 x Corsair Carbide 330R Silent Mid Tower Case - Black (CC-9011024-WW) £69.95
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £61.99
1 x Noctua NH-U12S Ultra-Quiet Slim CPU Cooler with NF-F12 Fan £52.99
1 x Gigabyte KM7580 Wireless 2.4GHz Keyboard & Mouse Set £19.99
1 x LG GH24NSB0 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £3,687.60 (includes shipping : £38.25).

Click to expand...

Thanks for this! Looking at the PSU would there be any reason they would need more power? (I have never needed more than 850 in my boxes) but I have never run sli before (well since my 7800GTX's :) )
 
Can't really recommend the AOC 4K unless your budget can't stretch to it stand aside the Samsung is a much better buy.

For that kind of use (image editing, level design) I've got a AOC U2868PQU alongside a Samsung PLS panel (no longer made sadly so I can't recommend it) the 4K panel is definitely very useful but you want atleast one panel in there IMO that is 2560x1440/IPS that has good image quality.

EDIT: TBH from my experience for this kind of use - though this will depend a LOT on the development pipeline they are using - you'd be better off with fairly decent but nothing too extreme CPU wise on the workstation systems (i7 5820K maybe 5930K if they are spending a lot of time with a pipeline connecting multiple packages and spending the extra money on a 3rd system that can be used to dump time consuming jobs onto).

EDIT2: Though with unreal engine 4 development there is a lot less time spend crunching pre-baked lighting, visibility sets, ai routines, etc. than in the past.
 
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OP, I would choose this case for a workstation build.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=ca-167-sv

these coolers are quite, and there reliable with these co fans.
http://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/freezer-i30co.html

Again for workstation you need very reliable SSD/HDD. I would be looking at Samsung 850 Pro SSD's that can sustain a large amount of writes. HDD's you need Weston Digital Black, or Weston Digital RE if your running raid. I would also look at Raid recovery on the boot drive, you can use a HDD to Raid recover an SSD.

I would also consider if you need a 6 or 8 core i7. The 6 core i7 is a huge saving over 8 core.

Any workstation build is balancing these things.
1) Noise as someone has to sit 3 foot away for maybe 40 hours a week.
2) The computer is performing a high value task, so you need to minimize downtime. So you choose high quality components, think also if a application drive fails. Whats the downtime cost of re-installing software compared to buying extra RAID disks.
 
Id side with JoJo on this one, as incredible as stulids spec is you really need to look into the requirements of your software, which I don't think you have done.

CPU wise a lot of cores, virtual are important but the core speed is not so, making the Xeon a much wiser choice.

The GPU is the area you need to pay the most attention too though as if you get this choice wrong its a lot of money down the drain. I think the GPU in JoJo's spec is a wise choice. For one, a lot of these programs, adobe and maya especially, aren't able to use multi GPUs so SLI is useless, less than useless, a waste of power..

Another thing, I bought up in another thread is the performance of gaming GPUs in professional tasks. I was looking into Maya use age and found the GTX TITAN (£600ish) is outperformed two/threefold by a professional card half its price (£340). This shows how the hardware and drivers of the professional cards are so adept to these tasks. With the budget you have it would be a massive waste not to go for one, as you'd get incredible performance. Considering the range of programs you use too, a professional GPU is an obvious choice..

Take another look at JoJo's spec please..
 
With the crossover between animation use and game design you probably don't want to be going for too specialised professional cards as your going to want a balance of compute power (depending on software) and realtime 3D performance. (Only thing I would say here is that a lot of VRAM can be useful for working with unoptimised work in progress data/builds).

I like jojo's choice of monitors and the CPU would be worth a good look at - but I'm not entirely convinced by the GPU and I do a lot of that kind of stuff on a i7 4820K without any performance issues CPU wise. IMO your better off having a 3rd PC you can dump i.e. long render jobs onto if that is part of your workflow and then get on with other stuff while your waiting rather than going nuts on the CPU side.

EDIT: I really would strongly recommend that each has atleast 1x 2560x panel with good image quality whatever other setup you go for - my current setup I've got prefabs, texture/material libraries, etc. spread over the 4K panel and the main workflow on the 2560x1440 panel and its pretty convenient being able to overview so much at a glance on the 4K panel then drag it over to the other panel to actually work on stuff. But I wouldn't say a 4K panel is essential.
 
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I can tell you what I put together a couple of months ago, pre v3 Xeons for a 3DS Max/Vray workastation, albeit with a fleaBay purchase, i.e. NVidia Quadro K5000 as the bargain factor is too high to ignore...

Motherboard: Supermicro X9DAi x1 £287.20
Memory: 16GB RAM Samsung M393B2G70BH0-CK0 x4 £418.00
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 x2 £2476.90
HD: Crucial 1TB SSD M550 x1 £277.60
Case: Fractal Design ARC XL x1 £66.66
Gfx Card: Nvidia Quadro K5000 x1 £671.00
PSU: Corsair AX 860W x1 £106.66
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 x2 £108.22
Blueray: LG BH16NS40 x1 £51.28
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U2413 x2 £367.98
Total £4831.50 +VAT

Not including OS. keyboard, mouse, and the monitors aren't 4K but are 10bit.

A bit over your 2 machine budget, but I can attest to the fact this is at least 250% faster than the workstation it replaced, a dual Xeon X5680, as it devours high poly renders without a pause:D
 
Rroff said:
With the crossover between animation use and game design you probably don't want to be going for too specialised professional cards as your going to want a balance of compute power (depending on software) and realtime 3D performance. (Only thing I would say here is that a lot of VRAM can be useful for working with unoptimised work in progress data/builds).

I like jojo's choice of monitors and the CPU would be worth a good look at - but I'm not entirely convinced by the GPU and I do a lot of that kind of stuff on a i7 4820K without any performance issues CPU wise. IMO your better off having a 3rd PC you can dump i.e. long render jobs onto if that is part of your workflow and then get on with other stuff while your waiting rather than going nuts on the CPU side.
Click to expand...

Animation and game design (UE4) are certainly 3D tasks, so gaming cards do shine in that area, for value. The fact, the W8100 Jojo specced is equivilantto a R9290 in terms of 3D performance (gaming) is ideal for the uses.

UE4 isn't amazingly heavy on GPU's and doesn't support SLI well: (a quote from a staff member of the UE team:

Out of the box, if you wish to use all the features of UE4, you should forgo SLI.

The most common form of SLI is know as AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) where each GPU handles a different frame. [ This is what we did with Samaritan on UE3 - 3 GPU's each handling a different frame ].

The deferred rendering techniques used by UE4 rely on data from the previous frame to render the current frame and as a result are not SLI friendly. You could investigate which features are needed for SLI and potentially avoid them, however since that is not a usecase we have here at Epic, i'm not sure how well it will work as we keep extending UE4 with new functionality
Click to expand...

This is what i'd go for:

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD FirePro W8100 Professional Graphics Card - 8GB GDDR5 - 2560 Shaders £1544.99
1 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 2.4GHz 8-Core with Hyperthreading (Socket 2011-3) - Retail £532.99
2 x Dell UltraSharp U2713HM 27" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £479.99 (£959.98)
1 x Crucial 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-17000C16 2133MHz Quad Channel Kit (CT4K8G4DFD8213) £289.99
1 x Samsung 500GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE500BW) £184.99
1 x MSI X99S SLI Plus Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £159.95
1 x Corsair Obsidian 550D Quiet Midi Tower Case - Black (CC-9011015-WW) £119.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £61.99
1 x Noctua NH-U12S Ultra-Quiet Slim CPU Cooler with NF-F12 Fan £52.99
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £49.99
1 x Gigabyte KM7580 Wireless 2.4GHz Keyboard & Mouse Set £19.99
1 x LG GH24NSB0 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £4,024.90 (includes shipping : £27.55).

 
Your paying a lot for the W8100 for a card that can do both and I'm not convinced (though lacking enough information to be sure) that the DP performance and feature set is worth paying the extra for for what they are doing.

UE4 (and a lot of windows development/content creation applications also) don't tend to take advantage of SLI its true but they can be quite GPU heavy especially when working with complex, unoptimised, environments though you can use techniques like cubic/far plane clipping to reduce the GPU load but thats not really ideal.
 
Doomedspeed said:
Animation and game design (UE4) are certainly 3D tasks, so gaming cards do shine in that area, for value. The fact, the W8100 Jojo specced is equivilantto a R9290 in terms of 3D performance (gaming) is ideal for the uses.

UE4 isn't amazingly heavy on GPU's and doesn't support SLI well: (a quote from a staff member of the UE team:



This is what i'd go for:

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD FirePro W8100 Professional Graphics Card - 8GB GDDR5 - 2560 Shaders £1544.99
1 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 2.4GHz 8-Core with Hyperthreading (Socket 2011-3) - Retail £532.99
2 x Dell UltraSharp U2713HM 27" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £479.99 (£959.98)
1 x Crucial 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-17000C16 2133MHz Quad Channel Kit (CT4K8G4DFD8213) £289.99
1 x Samsung 500GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE500BW) £184.99
1 x MSI X99S SLI Plus Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £159.95
1 x Corsair Obsidian 550D Quiet Midi Tower Case - Black (CC-9011015-WW) £119.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £61.99
1 x Noctua NH-U12S Ultra-Quiet Slim CPU Cooler with NF-F12 Fan £52.99
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £49.99
1 x Gigabyte KM7580 Wireless 2.4GHz Keyboard & Mouse Set £19.99
1 x LG GH24NSB0 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £4,024.90 (includes shipping : £27.55).

Click to expand...

Doomspeed I know your trying to help the OP, but for a £4k rig you really need a higher quality PSU then the 550W Green HX. You need more wattage to counter capacitor aging, and something at least to quality of Seasonic X Gold.
 
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