new CAD and max machine

warrentdo · 1 Feb 2014 at 23:23

new CAD and max machine £1500 ish

Hello all.
New cad machine time again. Inventor 20000 part plus assemblies
and 3ds Max animations and renders.
Well I think that the CPU is a certainty with a 4770k but now
the graphics card. Does anyone have any opinions, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti maybe overkill. I dont think i can push the boat out for a quadra k4000. I will need fast memory at least 16gig, fast 256 ssd and 2tb fast hard drive. Also quiet ish if possible.
Case not for looks but speed so nothing special.
Please can anyone help. Looking to spend about £1500 ish.
Thanks in advance,
Warren

Fulax · 2 Feb 2014 at 12:04

Are you looking to build this yourself or pre-built by OcUK?

Do you need a monitor/preipherals/OS?

warrentdo · 2 Feb 2014 at 22:51

Hello Fulax, and thanks for the reply.
Sorry I missed the info off. Will get monitors later.
Looking to self build to save some cash, but not sure how much more it cost to get one built. Time is money and all that.
Will need win 7ult plus DVD burner.
I've just seen one on a competitors site for about £1800 but can't find anything similar on OC. That one is water cooled which sounds good to try and keep the thing a little quieter before the graphics card kicks in.
Regards
Warren.

Doomedspeed · 2 Feb 2014 at 23:06

Inventor and 3DS are multi-threaded progrrams IIRC my uni days correctly (not just a haze)..

So, really a Xeon would do wonders. A 6-core beast.

If this is going to be used for gaming too, i strongly suggest against the Xeon but if its CAD and rendering only, its a great great choice.

This is my stab at it:

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Geforce GTX 780 Gaming Edition OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £369.95
1 x Intel Xeon E5-2620v2 2.10GHz 6-Core with Hyperthreading & Turbo (Socket 2011) - Retail £319.99
1 x Samsung 250GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE250BW) £149.99
1 x MSI X79A-GD45 Plus (8D) Intel X79 (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £149.99
2 x TeamGroup Vulcan RED 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-17100C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLD316G2133HC11ADC01) £129.95 (£259.90)
1 x Antec Kúhler H2O 1220 Series 4 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler £81.6
1 x BitFenix Ronin Tower Case - Black £69.95
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-02733) £67.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £65.99
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 550W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £59.99
1 x Pioneer 24x Internal DVR-221LBK DVD Rewriter - OEM £14.99
Total : £1,625.32 (includes shipping : £12.50).

Watercooling for CPU
32GB of RAM (mainly for 3DS rendering)
6-core Xeon
250GB SSD
GTX 780 for GPU rendering (i think 3DS supports that)
Windowed case.

I do realise some parts are out of stock, namely the motherboard and PSU.

spoffle · 2 Feb 2014 at 23:13

You really don't need a 780Ti for 3D work, and you most definitely don't need a quadro. Quadros are marketed as being NECESSARY (as as FirePros) but they're just mug bait to get people to spend money that just doesn't need to be spent.

Also a 780Ti isn't a particularly good choice, AMD cards have a lot more raw power when it comes to GPU rendering via OpenCL (which VrayRT supports).

If you're spending £300+ on a Xeon too, I'd just suggest that you go all out and get a 4930K.

A 290 would be a better option for the GPU, and it has more RAM which is also helpful for viewport performance.

warrentdo · 2 Feb 2014 at 23:47

Hello all and thanks for the input. Inventor isn't multi thread in the main although it does have certain part a that are, fea, IDW (2013) so really clock speed is still king. The 4930 I don't think would help me muck for the price hike. I thought the ti may be over kill but it is a killer card and although the 290 have a gig more I thought I read that they are a little down the the GPU charts compared to the to
ti? Inventor will be run under direct x I think and not open cl. Quadro do have nice drivers. Keep um coming chaps I will have a new PC by the end of the week :-)

Warren

spoffle · 3 Feb 2014 at 00:14

Games wise, the 780Tis are up on the 290s, but GPGPU, the 290s are ahead of the 780Tis. They're not 50% more money faster though (not even close) in terms of games.

joeyjojo · 3 Feb 2014 at 15:29

For heavy rendering in Inventor the AMD cards win. As you say unfortunately DirectX only with them:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-hawaii-review,3650-32.html

spoffle said:
Quadros are marketed as being NECESSARY (as as FirePros) but they're just mug bait to get people to spend money that just doesn't need to be spent.

Not so for critical projects. The price difference is due to the drivers, not the hardware, as they need to be validated and verified. You really, really don't want a bridge to collapse because it was designed on a gaming GPU with gaming drivers and an error crept in.

ZXSpectrum · 3 Feb 2014 at 17:09

joeyjojo said:
For heavy rendering in Inventor the AMD cards win. As you say unfortunately DirectX only with them:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-hawaii-review,3650-32.html

Not so for critical projects. The price difference is due to the drivers, not the hardware, as they need to be validated and verified. You really, really don't want a bridge to collapse because it was designed on a gaming GPU with gaming drivers and an error crept in.

We have always had issues with Radeon Cards and CAD Packages. The support for them to be used in the likes of inventor/3ds max etc isn't great. I would say for all out reliability/compatibility go for a Quadro card for a bit of all round go for the 780ti.

As someone else said a E5-2620v2 is a poor choice as it has very low core bus and it shows when using them with high spec GPUs at it bottlenecks. Either go for a Xeon E5-1650v2 or the 4930K as they are same price as the but the Xeon is only tray.

spoffle · 4 Feb 2014 at 00:14

joeyjojo said:
For heavy rendering in Inventor the AMD cards win. As you say unfortunately DirectX only with them:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-hawaii-review,3650-32.html

Not so for critical projects. The price difference is due to the drivers, not the hardware, as they need to be validated and verified. You really, really don't want a bridge to collapse because it was designed on a gaming GPU with gaming drivers and an error crept in.

I know exactly what the price difference is for, but I simply don't buy that it's as critical as it's made out to be. They have a very vested interest in making people believe this stuff.

This is why I believe nVidia gimped the FP64 performance of their gaming cards, because people realised they just weren't getting their monies' worth from their very expensive quadro/pro cards and buying GeForces instead.

ZXSpectrum said:
We have always had issues with Radeon Cards and CAD Packages. The support for them to be used in the likes of inventor/3ds max etc isn't great. I would say for all out reliability/compatibility go for a Quadro card for a bit of all round go for the 780ti.

As someone else said a E5-2620v2 is a poor choice as it has very low core bus and it shows when using them with high spec GPUs at it bottlenecks. Either go for a Xeon E5-1650v2 or the 4930K as they are same price as the but the Xeon is only tray.

I have never had any, and I've been using 3DMax with AMD cards for quite a number of years now. I also have a group of friends who have been doing the same, and have experienced the same as I, no problems with anything.

joeyjojo · 4 Feb 2014 at 09:39

spoffle said:
I know exactly what the price difference is for, but I simply don't buy that it's as critical as it's made out to be. They have a very vested interest in making people believe this stuff.

This is why I believe nVidia gimped the FP64 performance of their gaming cards, because people realised they just weren't getting their monies' worth from their very expensive quadro/pro cards and buying GeForces instead.

I agree with you, it's manipulative. Although Nvidia left the titan alone which actually makes it a bargain for compute.

But the only way to avoid that kind of thing is competition, and fortunately AMD stepped in at just the right time with the same 1/4-of-SP DP performance on consumer cards. Compare the R9 280X with 1024 GFLOPS at £230 with the FirePro W9000 with 998 GFLOPS at £2765. Unless you're legally obliged to use the workstation card you'd be mad to go for it.

Interestingly, the 290X has more SP, but less DP, than the 280X, as the former do DP at 1/8, but the latter at 1/4 SP.

ZXSpectrum · 4 Feb 2014 at 10:21

We have supplied a fair amount of UK design houses and they have had a lot of issues with 3DS Max and using consumer grade cards. Not just 3DS Max though but also Solidworks, V-Ray and Catia.

warrentdo · 6 Feb 2014 at 21:23

ZXSpectrum said:
We have supplied a fair amount of UK design houses and they have had a lot of issues with 3DS Max and using consumer grade cards. Not just 3DS Max though but also Solidworks, V-Ray and Catia.

I think that I am leaning towards the ti, I'm also a little concerned about the heat the 290 runs at and the fans that it needs, I'm after a quiet ish machine.