CPU & RAM recomendations

[danstone]

Good Afternoon All!

 

 

I have a question for you, my fellow professionals. I realise that this group is a place for us to showcase our work, but my question is slightly off topic as it regards the hardware that you use.

 

 

I’m looking to build a new PC that can cope with very high polygon counts in SketchUp and also be able to render using VRay 2.0. I have an approximate budget of £1100 ($1650 or €1550).

 

 

Whilst researching potential components; I found that there were plenty of gamers that suggest one part or another, but us SketchUp/3DS/VRay modellers/renderers are somewhat of a rarer breed, with different needs from our PCs and this is why I value your opinions so highly!

 

 

My intentions are to go for an Intel i7-5930k processor (to take advantage of their Hyperthreading technology), does anybody use this and/or recommend an equivalent CPU that is of better value?

 

 

In terms of RAM, I have been told to not look for anything less than 16gb. For a final render, what sort of RAM usages do you tend to achieve?

 

 

Many thanks to you all and apologies for the long post!

Dan

[Dimitris Tolios]

The 5820K will be able to achieve very similar performance for a notably smaller pricetag vs. the 5930K.

The true power of those CPUs is that those are 6-core. Hyperthreading does boost multi-tasking, but doubling the threads each core handles is not doubling the performance - that's maybe somewhere in the +20% avg vs. having the same CPU do the same things with HT off.

 

HT does little for single threaded performance (actually, it might be penalizing it a tiny bit), and single threaded performance is what counts for Sketchup or 3DS or w/e when handling big models. The fastest CPU for this tasks would be a 4790K, exactly because it boosts the clock for one of its cores all the way to 4.4GHz - much higher than any of the 6-cores above.

 

Multi-threaded performance is applied when rendering with VRay, transcoding videos, deploying winrar packages etc, and 6-core i7s really pick up their game in these. So you have to achieve a balance between the two, getting as high GHz as possible for modelling, while keeping a healthy core * GHz aggregate available for when the rendering tasks come along.

 

The 5930K is a higher clocked CPU, but I think the % performance difference vs. the cheaper 5820K doesn't warrant the cost.

 

As far as RAM goes, I agree that 16GB is workable, but on the low end. 32GB is becoming more and more mainstream for workstations.

If you are on a budget that limits you, I would suggest going for 16GB initially, and plan ahead for adding 16GB later on.

To do that as painlesly as possible, dont be suduced by Quad channel memory mambo jumbo. There is no tangible difference in real life performance, much like RAM speed doesn't really add to real life performance past a threshold.

 

Go for a 2 x 8GB DDR4 2133 or 2400 kit, run it at dual channel and trust that you are getting all the usable performance out of your CPU with it. Later on, you can add 2 x 8GB of identical sticks and go 32GB (with Quad channel).