Good spec for a rendering machine ?

Snow-Munki

Snow-Munki

Snow-Munki

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
10,080
Location
At home
Workstation 490 Desktop/MiniTower
Qty

1



Two Intel® Xeon® 5160 (3.00GHz,1333,4MB), Genuine Windows® XP Professional English, SP2 (NTFS)(+ Media)
Unit Price

£3,830.00






Module
Base
Two Intel® Xeon® 5160 (3.00GHz,1333,4MB)
68507
1

Operating System
Genuine Windows® XP Professional English, SP2 (NTFS)(+ Media)
11

Memory
4GB DDR2 667 Quad Channel FBD Memory (8x512GB)

3

Keyboard
Quietkey USB Black Keyboard -UK/Ire (QWERTY)

4

1st Monitor
No Monitor Required

5

Graphics Card
256MB nVidia Quadro FX3450 Graphics Card

6

1st (Boot) Hard Drive
80GB (7,200 rpm) Serial ATA II Hard Drive with NCQ

8

Floppy drive/Media Card Reader
3.5in 1.44MB Floppy Drive

10

Mouse
Black 2 Button USB Scroll Entry Mouse

12

Optical Device(s)
16X DVD-ROM Drive

16

Speakers
Internal Speaker

18

Shipping Documents
System Documentation (UK)

21

Chassis Orientation / Front Bezel
Vertical Chassis Orientation (Minitower)

27

Standard Warranty
3Y NBD International (Next Business Day) On-site (incl. e-
29

AntiVirus & Security Software
No Anti-Virus software required

40

Vista(tm) Business Support
No Business Support Required

61



Quick Reference Guides
Quick Setup/Ref Guide - Eng,Fr,Ger,Itl,Spn

775


TOTAL :£3,830.00



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Sound about right and good enough spec ???
 
Last edited:
Looks like a pretty good spec. So this is a 3D work station system? I'd say the term "rendering machine" is abit vague as it could mean a computer designed for a render farm. But its obviously a work station PC.

I would still consider a self build. I do a lot of 3d work using the prgrams in my sig (Maya and Houdini) and I use a QX6700. Great for CPU rendering. 4 GB of RAM would deffinetly be useful. Hard disks, I'd consider some fast drives like Raptors in RAID 0 array so you can transfer your sequence of rendered images to whereever very quickly (that if your doing animation, you may be doing CAD stuff, let us know) The graphics card should be fine for pretty much everything, but you could get the Quadro 4500 if you wanted just that little more smoothness in your viewports. Overall though, good spec but remember your charged quite abit more than its really worth cos it is Dell.
 
I have the feeling that a Mac Pro would be a much better deal but my efforts to spec one were foiled as the Apple Store is down for updating. That should be sufficient for your needs. You might want to consider the Xeon 53xx series since software rendering is largely CPU bound and is highly parallelizeable.
 
thanks.

It is acutally for my g/f at work, I know next to nothing about rendering.

She uses 3D studio max i believe and said that a render takes about 18 hours at the moment but the res is crazy big like 18000 * 12000 ??? As it is for a huge poster measured in meters !

Will suggest:

Xeon 53xx series
Quadro 4500
raptors in raid
 
Here's a spec you might consider. OcUK doesn't stock any multiple socket kit like the 53xx processors or LGA771 motherboards so I made due with a Core 2 Quad. A pair of quads coupled with an appropriate motherboard would be better if you've got the cash.

specwp5.gif

If she's loading large data sets faster hard disks would be wonderful. I spec'd a Raptor for the data sets and a 320 GiB AAKS for storage or completed work, other programs, the OS, etc. If you really want fast disks you could get a PCI-e SCSI card and a few 15k drives. I threw XP in there. If you need to join a domain you'll have to pony up the extra for Professional. The GPU is probably over the top but it should hold up well with time. The mobo has dual PCI-e x16 slots (that sometimes run at 8x but that doesn't matter) so you can add a second graphics card if she wants to drive more monitors. The case is classy and understated and would look appropriate in a business environment while simultaneously keeping the components cool and quiet.
 
I just had a go at spec'ing a Mac Pro for you.

Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 4GB (4 x 1GB)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI) (I think the Quadro might be a bit OTT as this will do a magnificent job.)
250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s (I'd get a Raptor in addition to this and use the Raptor to store your data sets.)
One 16x SuperDrive
Apple Keyboard & Mighty Mouse - British (I'd recommend a better mouse than this)

All for:
Price: £2,789.79
VAT: £488.21
Subtotal: £3,278.00

Ready to ship:
5 - 7 days
Free Shipping

Dual quad cores at 3 GHz will FLY through models. :D Throw in a copy of XP home (assuming the applications she uses don't run on OS X or Linux), a new mouse, a Raptor if you feel like it, and you're ready to go.
 
I think I'd actually go for the dell over the mac on this one, you should get better performance rendering using 8X512MB rather than 4X1GB in the Apple.
 
DAVEM said:
I think I'd actually go for the dell over the mac on this one, you should get better performance rendering using 8X512MB rather than 4X1GB in the Apple.
Click to expand...
Why? It's quad channel so the full benefit is seen from using multiples of four. Four and eight both apply. Plus, is whatever benefit seen worth ~£400?
 
BillytheImpaler said:
Why? It's quad channel so the full benefit is seen from using multiples of four. Four and eight both apply. Plus, is whatever benefit seen worth ~£400?
Click to expand...

I didn't look at the technical details of the Mboards involved. It does tend to hold that smaller modules in more slots often results in faster performance, I know this has happened for me in the past switching from 2X512 to 4X256,
 
DAVEM said:
I didn't look at the technical details of the Mboards involved. It does tend to hold that smaller modules in more slots often results in faster performance, I know this has happened for me in the past switching from 2X512 to 4X256,
Click to expand...
Hmm, conventional wisdom with parallel RAM, like that on most consumer equipment, says that fewer modules are better as it reduces the load on the memory controller. LGA771 boards like the ones in the Mac and the Dell use FB-DIMMs. These are serial modules. I'd still reckon that fewer modules are better.

Buy me a few and I'll benchmark 'em so we can know. ;)
 
BillytheImpaler said:
Hmm, conventional wisdom with parallel RAM, like that on most consumer equipment, says that fewer modules are better as it reduces the load on the memory controller. LGA771 boards like the ones in the Mac and the Dell use FB-DIMMs. These are serial modules. I'd still reckon that fewer modules are better.

Buy me a few and I'll benchmark 'em so we can know. ;)
Click to expand...


ha ha, your may well be right, I've got some old 16MB 486 era modules! ha ha you can have those! lol

Davem
 
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