Spec me an Animators Workstation

MrTomB

MrTomB

MrTomB

Associate
Joined
22 Dec 2014
Posts
31
Hi

I have a budget of £3600 (£3000 net of VAT) for a workstation and monitor. I already have keyboard, mouse and secondary monitor

Minimum requirements are:

32gb RAM
Quadro K4200 Graphics
6 cores
1TB SSD (can be split into 2 x 500mb)
Intel i7 or better

27" monitor
 
YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel 750 Series 1.2TB PCIe 3.0 X4 HHHL Adaptor NVMe Solid State Drive (SSDPEDMW012T4R5) £859.99
1 x PNY Nvidia Quadro K4200 Graphics Card - 4GB GDDR5 - 1344 CUDA Core £799.99
1 x Intel 5960X Extreme 3.00GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3 Processor - Retail (BX80648I75960X) £799.99
1 x Dell UltraSharp U2715H 27" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £389.99
1 x Gigabyte X99-SLI Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard £179.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C16 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit - Black (TPKD432GM2400HC16QC01) £169.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Red 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache WD20EFRX - OEM HDD £77.99
1 x EVGA Supernova G2 650W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £74.99
1 x Antec P100 Mid Tower Silenced Computing Case £62.95
1 x Noctua NH-U12S Ultra-Quiet Slim CPU Cooler with NF-F12 Fan £52.99
Total : £3,486.56 (includes shipping : £14.75 Ex.VAT).




A little something to look at.

• Case has sound dampening/fan speed controllers etc.
• I know the heatsink is quiet.
• PSU has "eco mode" so runs passive at low temp.
• Fast SSD and a reliable HDD.
 
MrTomB said:
To be honest, no. But it has been recommended to me from a few sources
Click to expand...

Could you quote what some have said?

I feel like you'd just be throwing money away by getting that quadro. If you want out and out performance with CUDA software, there are better choices to make.
 
spoffle said:
Could you quote what some have said?

I feel like you'd just be throwing money away by getting that quadro. If you want out and out performance with CUDA software, there are better choices to make.
Click to expand...

Not word for word, i am far from an expert in hardware so reached out to a couple of companies to quote me on a decent workstation for a new employee. Computer Planet and Scan were 2 that recommended K4200 quadro so i took that as being a requirement. If it is not economical to have it then fair enough. What is important is rendering time and day to day usage of Maya.

The K4200 also appears on the list of recommended graphic card for Maya (but naturally so do many others)
 
Personally I'd spend a bit more on your primary display on a graphics workstation. I got a Dell U3014 last year, 30 inches, high gamut at 2560x1600, although now I would probably go for 4k. Can never have too much screen real estate.

Not sure what exactly the K4200 offers you for the money, seems to be way behind on the performance/value curve compared to regular gaming cards.
 
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its not an easy task to spec this computer. So would i be better saving some money on the Graphics card and spending more on the processor?
 
If you're not doing work with critical data (mostly science, engineering, medical etc) then a 'consumer' grade GTX card will get you much more power for your money. Something like a 970 would pair well with a 5960x - anything more than that and you're looking at dual xeons to take full advantage of it for your applications
 
Are you doing any renders? If so, what software you are using for the rendering?

What components in Maya are you using that use CUDA?

Adobe CS uses OpenCL and OpenGL for acceleration, which means any old GPU above a certain level is good enough.
 
It probably would be worth breaking down what tasks you do primarily.

I'd say if you're not rendering that much an 8 core would not be worthwhile, you could go with the 5820k and overclock it to get decent grunt for animation playback.

Maya's making a big push towards viewport 2 which is quite demanding on vram, and gtx gaming cards are perfectly capable of handling maya these days. If you're going to spend that kind of money I would go with the titan X instead of the quadro k4200, as the extra vram will help run multiple programs (maya, cuda-accelerated adobe stuff). Otherwise the 980ti would be a great alternative.

Some more info here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=8025871&postcount=7
 
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