I am an IT Tech that's been given the fun task of reducing costs for my company's 3D modeling team. They do large and complex static 3D models and presentations of buildings, landscapes, but nothing animated. They use 3DS Max, Vray and Photoshop. Every year these guys ask for more and more powerful and extremely EXPENSIVE computers:
-Superfast processors with as many cores as possible
-RAM RAM RAM RAM
-Graphics cards that cost as much as the rest of the PC
Their justification has always been the 3D Grunt "We need it. If not, we can't work." and so our company has been buying these guys what they want without question, basically because the decision makers wouldn't know the difference between dual core and hardcore (although my guess is that they're fully into the latter from the traces I can see in the firewall logs.)
I've been looking into this and it seems to me that the hardware requirements for Modeling and Rendering are completely different, so a machine designed to do both is obviously expensive.
Hence the idea behind Render Farms.
So, I plan on building these guys a Render Farm with about a dozen or so of their old PCs, which will give them about 80 Cores to render on. It then stands to reason that I should be able to spec a machine Just for Modeling that is significantly cheaper than one that does both Rendering and Modeling.
Sorry for the long story, but here's my question. Everywhere I look, I can find hardware specs, advice and discussions for building cost-effective systems designed for either Rendering or Rendering and Modeling combined, but never Just Modeling alone, without the Rendering part. Why? Am I missing something?
Also, could someone please give me their best advice on the following:
i7 or Xeon? Which path should I take for a Modeling PC?
RAM - ECC or nonECC, does it matter for Modeling?
Clock Speed is more important for Modeling than number of cores. True?
How important is disk speed for Modeling?
The graphics card I get ... Just buy the biggest, baddest Quadro or Firepro your budget will allow.
Thanks for your time.
