Educated opinion

[Zander Adrian]

I'm looking forward to building my rendering computer after spending nights reading benchmarks, forums and articles...
Budget: ~3000 dollars

Specs:

Intel i7 3930k
GTX 580
Kingston Hyper X 32Gb ram
ASRock X79 Extreme7 Mainboard
Samsung 128 Gb SSD
WD Caviar black 1 TB
Corsair Professional Series Gold AX850W
Corsair hydro h100 water cooling
Nzxt phantom white case

I have no one in the industry or possessing these parts to ask so i think i might have a better chance here.
I'm counting on your support and advice regarding especially the video card. I would like to have good viewport performance especially with heavy foliage and architecture scenes. I do use 2 monitors ( 21" and 27" ) but the 21" is almost always used for reading or comparing so no acceleration needed.
I would choose the gainward gtx580 phantom 3gb. The only problem is that it is hard to find. Will the same card but with half memory version (1.5 gb) be enough? I read as much as I could but i'm still not sure. How important is the memory for viewport acceleration?

Thanks!

[Riley Iwamoto]

Hey there. The specs for the most part look fine but I'd make a few comments here and there.

GPU: Memory on the card does help, yes, but for productivity purposes it's best leveraged by the firmware on professional cards like Quadro and Firepro. The 580 is a beast of a gaming card but puts out a great deal of heat. A Quadro 2000 or Firepro V5800 could be had in that price range for less heat output (and possibly noise) and better viewport performance. A bit more scratch could get you the new Firepro W5000 (assuming availability).

SSD: I'm assuming you'll be using this for your system drive. While I do have a number of games installed on my machine, my experience is that 256GB is a safe size for all of your programs. You could possibly manage with a 128GB but you might find yourself cleaning it up very frequently to avoid filling it. I'm running a 256GB Vertex 4 and it's been a good experience.

HDD: On the same assumption, this will be your data storage drive? Black series are higher performance/power/noise and might be excessive for this purpose. I'd recommend a better GB/dollar value setup of two 2TB Green drives set up in RAID 1 (software RAID). More storage with redundancy, and they'll run quieter and cooler to boot. I've heard some people doubt the reliability of any Green labelled drives because they use recycled/recovered materials but my experience has only been good.

Cooling: I don't have any experience with sealed off-the-shelf water cooling systems. However, unless you're going with a big custom setup I'd say go for a big air solution (Thermalright and Noctua are good picks). For the price you get a simpler device with more or less equal cooling performance.

Lastly, make sure you check ASRock's product page to verify compatability with that RAM.
Hope that helps.

[Zander Adrian]

Hello,

Thank you for your answer.

I choose the 580 mainly because it is an nvidia card. I also use a lot of adobe after effects and premiere and I it helps alot because of the GPU rendering capabilities. ATI cards are not supported. http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html
But I will take a look at the Tesla 2000.

Regarding the storage thing I might go with the bigger ssd. Space on the secondary drive is no problem because i have an external rack in raid10.

I would like to keep the watercooling since I had some experience with it and it is less noisy and more reliable for long renderings.

The ram is compatible with the mb.


I will read a little bit about the Tesla and i will come back. Is there any one around here having the 580 so he or she can give me some first hand informations?

Thank you!

[Dimitris Tolios]

Riley did nail it in most aspects.

GPU: Depending on the program you are using, GTX cards might be adequate to great in performance. In general the nVidia gaming cards are heavily D3D optimized, so D3D based viewports work great with them - 3DS Max Viewport in either Nitrous or D3D mode works great.
As far as OpenGL goes, GTXs are known to be not the best performers, providing more or less similar performance through the last 3-4 generations (2xx->6xx). AMD Radeon cards are a far better solution if you are using OpenGL programs such as Maya regurarly and you don't want to invest into mid-range Quadro or FirePro cards...I don't think a low-end Quadro can do much better than a top of the line Radeon, but ofc as Riley explained, all this raw power the gaming oriented cards provide, translates in great power draw, that equals to heat and greater PSU requirements. GTX 580 under load will be drawing more power than even an overclocked 3930K (that puppy can be close to 250W itself).

If you are concerned about VRam usage and GPU load, you can always download GPU-Z Video card GPU Information Utilityhttp://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ that can report to you real time the current GPU buffer utilization. Run or create models you are expecting to be using in your sofware suite with your current setup, and log memory usage. Experiment with larger than usual textures too, just to be safe.

Cooler: totally with the previous poster in that too.
Unless you go to a mid/high end open water cooler, top of the line air coolers are a safer and quieter bet than the H100, while outperforming anything with a 120mm rad. A relatively affordable XSPC watercooling kit with a Rasa block/750 pump/RS240 rad is not that more expensive than a H100, but surely outperforms it.

H100 receives increased complains for pump rattling noises etc after less than a year of use. Corsair provides a great 5y warranty, but that involves sending the unit back for replacement and downtime on your side. A Noctua ND-14 or Thermalright Silver Arrow will do the job the H100 does within 1-2oC with less noise (H100 outperforms them only with fans @ 12V/high, which is really loud), and for $85 give or take.

Make sure to get ram modules with low profile heat-sinks, like the G.Skill Ares or Corsair Vengeance LP or you might run into trouble with the huge CPU heatsinks blocking your dimm-slots.

[Riley Iwamoto]

That's a fair reason for going with an nVidia card. On the up, starting with CS6 onward, Adobe is moving towards using OpenCL in addition to CUDA. This is a good read for that, it's something I was pleased to hear as I'm not a fan of vendor lock-in (I also run a 7950 ^_^). If you can wait, and it makes sense for other reasons, from CS7 on you won't be so hamstrung on an AMD card as CS5 or 6 would have left you.