Rendering with Blender - GPU/CPU?

droyden · 4 Jul 2012 at 17:43

Hi,

Can anyone provide hardware experience/suggestions with rendering with Blender?

I've seen some benchmarks for GPU rendering (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Atfi5YqN3LOqdEw2Rlcxa0RnZm4yY2tEMklINkJQbkE#gid=0)

Which seems as expected, more is better (especially VRAM) - although there is no results for 6-series cards.

I'm thinking a decent i5 with single / dual 680 4GB?

Doomedspeed · 4 Jul 2012 at 17:50

What kind of Budget have you got?

Id say go for a i7 if you can. Either a 680 4GB or a 670 4GB should be good. You can OC the 670 to be nearly as effective as a stock 680, though you can OC the 680 to me much better.

The GTX 670 is way better value for money. It looks like CPU's offer quite a bit in performance terms.

droyden · 4 Jul 2012 at 19:35

Budget - not sure, its for work so it can be justified with lost man hours.
Would I need to go i7 even tho i'm offloading onto the gpu for encoding?

edit: thanks for the reply

droyden · 5 Jul 2012 at 11:52

Not sure how people manage to paste the cart with formatting, I can't figure it out.

YOUR BASKET
1 x KFA2 GeForce GTX 680 EX OC 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with FREE NVIDIA GPU Keyring £539.99
1 x Intel Core i7-3770K 3.50GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - OEM £263.99
1 x Corsair HX 750W ATX Modular SLI Compliant Power Supply (CMPSU-750HXUK) £105.98
1 x MSI Z77A-G45 Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £104.99
1 x Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive (CT128M4SSD2) £94.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD1002FAEX) £89.99
1 x Antec P183 V3 Super Midi Tower Case - Gun Metal Black £89.99
1 x Prolimatech Genesis Mega Performing CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/1366/1155/1156/AMD AM2/ AM2+/AM3) £53.99
1 x Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX8GX3M2A1600C9) £49.99
2 x Akasa AK-FN057 Apache Super Silent 120mm Fan - 4 Pin PWM £9.98 (£19.96)
Total : £1,431.56 (includes shipping : £14.75).

Can anyone see issues with this? PSU is high incase I want to SLI it later.

Also added:
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD1002FAEX)

but cant be bothered to reformat the paste!

Doomedspeed · 5 Jul 2012 at 12:06

First off, here the shopping cart converter. Work best on chrome, though there also a non-chrome version.

Non-chrome
Chrome

That build looks great. I would do exactly the same, though probable get more RAM. I think you'll need 16Gb to be sure.

droyden · 5 Jul 2012 at 12:10

perfect thanks bud, will get that addon too