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peterletten

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  1. Is that because SSDs are so much more stable? no need for RAID? So no-one can offer any good reasons why its not great practice to keep media cache/scratch on same drive as OS? Strange because I'm sure I've seen this point come up repeatedly. No speed implications? And re your Gigabit NAS connection - so if you're saving a 1Gb PSD file to your NAS it might take 15-20secs. You'd expect on a local SSD it'd be 3-4 times quicker? If thats the case, to me it'd be worth the effort to store the big current project files on a local SSD. Unless I'm misunderstanding something? Re the cache - if there are benefits to a seperate drive, I'd use it for the big cache programs, like AE, and PS. The other apps for sure can make a mess where they want. But I was under the impression caching would be much quicker to a seperate drive. Again, I could very well be mistaken.
  2. Thanks Juraj, As of a few weeks ago I'm no longer "purely freelancer" - theres going to be 2 of us accessing a NAS. My thought was use the 2nd 256GB for media cache/scratch and certain project files - for example large PSD files, exrs for when I'm doing 5k stills in AE. Presumably I'll get much better speed if I'm loading multiple (10-15) 32bit exrs from a local SSD? And the thought was that these 'special' files/folders would be synced with the NAS - so my employee can also access them. And even without the project files issue - I seem to remember reading in lots of places that its a good idea to keep media cache/scratch seperate to System drive. Do you know the line of reasoning behind this? Is it just quicker because you're dividing up the workload between drives? I think Stan likes the 1TB SSD local because he IS working as a solo freelancer... and I believe he also works on some fairly huge cityscape style project files. Is this right Stan? Thanks for clarifying the GPU querie. I am absolutely not a gamer, dont have enough hours in the day as it is - so cheaper version it is. And yeah - I'll go the 850 EVOs route and just have to source them from a different supplier. ...and while I have the attention of some experts - can anyone point me in the direction of some good sites/discussions regarding NAS? Ie QNAP vs Synology vs others. The main considerations when buying? My IT guy was espousing the benefits of deduplication of their EonNAS, which for example will get you 10 increments of a 1Gb PS file for only 1.5Gb storage used. Which sounds awesome! But maybe dedup is something all decent NAS systems have? I was about to push buy on the Synology DS1515+. 5 bays, expandable, supports LA. Any reasons to look elsewhere? Synology certainly seems to be the most frequently mentioned on this forum.... I'm sure there has to be some previous healthy discussions on this topic but the forum search function isnt great - all I can find are from 2013. Thanks.
  3. To be honest - the long life expectancy is a path my IT guy was leading me down. But theres a fair chance I'll be moving to Montreal in 2-3 years so not sure why I allowed myself to get guided down that route....! So basing it on Stans spec, but downgrading on some components as Juraj suggested, (which Stan also agrees with ) and trying to comply with what my supplier has in stock, this is where I'm at: Intel i7-5820K ASRock X99-EXTREME4 Apacer 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 2400MHz Commando Overclocking Corsair Hydro Series H90 140mm High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler, 760W "Corsair" AX760 100% Modular ATX Power Supply, 80 PLUS Platinum Corsair Carbide Series 200R Compact ATX Case - (Juraj - does this qualify as a 'good' case? Or does something bigger = better cooling and performance?) 2 final queries and then I can put this puppy to rest: SSD: I'll go 256 and then either 512/1TB. Alas - I dont think my suppliers selection is crash hot. Any recommendations on these brands for SSDs: Intel, Corsair, Apacer, Galaxy, Asus, ARam? Intel good but comparatively slow? Looking at benchmarks - its prob worth getting Samsung 850 EVOs from an independant supplier? GPU: Gigabyte GTX970 GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD/ 4GB GDDR5 256-bit/ 1178 & 1329 MHz/ DVI-I/ DVI-D/ HDMI / Display Port x 3 / PCB form ATX vs Gigabyte GTX970 GV-N970WF3OC-4GD / 4GB GDDR5 256-bit, 1114/1253 MHz / 16 x PCI-E 3.0 / Dual-link DVI-I / DVI-D / 3 x DisplayPort / 1 x HDMI "GAMING" version is $30 more expensive but not sure what the pracitcal implications are? All up, with OS build, etc - this comes to a much more respectable AU$3600 ex. (2k less than previous!!) Yup Juraq, everything is expensive in Australia. 6 euros for a beer, 1700 euros per month for rent... Good price on koalas though. Oh and Juraj, your comment: "You can keep their (PS & AE) scratch disk out of system one, but then you loose the benefit of speed, and why even do so ?" So are you saying its better to keep media cache/scratch disk on system drive? Why is it slower to be reading/writing to a seperate SDD? Thanks again guys. Really appreciate everyones input.
  4. Alright guys, following a (slightly desperate) plea to my supplier, I asked him to spec me up a machine. This was my brief: Must have: GTX970 4GB 64Gb RAM - not too fussed whether this is DDR3 or 4. CPU: 6 cores, overclockable, base around 3.3 GHz - something along the lines of the 5820K Mobo - whatever works! He's come back with 2 options - both clocking in at a hefty 5k +: Option 1, Xeon E51650: 4 x Kingston 16GB DDR4 ECC Registered 2133MHz CL1 336x4 = 1344 Intel 6-Core Xeon E5-1650V3 3.5GHz, 15MB Cache, 1 740 ASUS X99-E WS MB, Socket 2011-3, Intel X99, 8x DD 685 Galax GF GTX 970-4GD5 HOF. PCI-E3.0. 4GB 256-bit 490 1 x Plextor SSD M6e M.2 PCIe 2280 256Gb 309 1 x Corsair 240GB Neutron XT Series SATA III MLC 7mm I 194 (Mobo cant support 2 Plextors) Corsair Obsidian Series 450D Black High Airflow Mid-T 159 1000W "Antec" High Current PRO" 80PLUS Platinum 286 Corsair Hydro Series H110 Liquid CPU Cooler - Move t 147 And apparently this can be safely Turboboosted to 3.8GHz without voiding any warranties. Or, Option 2, i7 5930K Intel i7-5930K Core i7 CPU, Six Core 3.50 GHz, 15MB 809 2 x Apacer 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 2800MHz Commando O 1694 2 x Plextor SSD M6e M.2 PCIe 2280 256Gb 618 All other parts the same. With OS, build, warranty etc comes to approx AU$5000, which is 1k more than I was originally thinking, but at this stage, I'd rather get a great, good value machine and get back to earning money to pay for it... NB. i7-5820K vs 5930K - he was quite against the 5820K for a few reasons that I'm afraid went over my head. One of his points was that for a build of this price its a far inferior CPU to the 5930K... the 5930K operates at a lower temp? and has better grade silicon? so you can expect the 5930K to last a lot longer... Which he felt was important for such a high spec machine which will hopefully stay useable for the next 4+ years. Overclocking - He was very wary of OC, as he said its easy enough to setup (2 clicks) but you need to be really careful how its going to effect all the other components. And if you dont know what you're doing (thats me), it can be very risky. So... what are your thoughts?? Thanks again for all your input - really appreciated.
  5. So Numerobis, it sounds like I'm speccing things the wrong way round. I know I want 64GB RAM. I don't think there's any need for me to be chasing after ECC. So perhaps I should select my RAM first and work back from there? Potentially with 8x8GB DDR3 sticks? As they're cheaper with currently not much noticeable performance difference to DDR4. I've just belatedly stumbled upon some pretty useful looking sites (logical increment.com, lifehacker) relating to how to go about choosing parts so I might go back to the drawing board a bit and then come back to you guys. Thanks.
  6. Hi Jan and Nikolaos, Thanks for the quick response. So thats very good to know that my motherboard and RAM arent compatible! Will def look into that. Yes Nikolaos, thats a very good point - would help if I clarified what I'm using. This machine is primarily a workhorse but being a tiny company of 2 people, will also be doing a lot of rendering. Zero gaming. Main software is 3ds max 2014, VRay 3, VRay RT, After Effects & Photoshop. I often do my initial composite (5k 32 Bit images) in After Effects which is very RAM heavy - hence the desire for 64GB of the stuff. I use RT for exploring lighting setups but would like to get much snappier response than my current machine with a Geforce GTX 660Ti - 2Gb. Jan, I'll also look into a QNap NAS. My supplier stocks EonNAS - does anyone have anything to say about them? And while on the topic, NAS vs SAN? He was suggesting that SAN would be better for my purposes "this is due to the CPU only working on storage in a SAN while on a NAS you need a more powerful CPU to increase throughput." Tbh it was another can of worms I didnt want to get into and had seen a lot of positive comments here about Synology NAS so my thinking was play it safe and go with that. Anyone have any input on this? Nikolaos - re point3. 5930k vs 5820k - I beleive my thinking was that the $200 extra might be worth it for the additional 0.2 GHz single core speed... But looking at this again, it does seem pretty steep for such a minimal gain. Re point 4, GTX 980 vs 970 - again it came down to perfromace, but (again) perhaps you're right re whether its worth $250 for such small gains. And you're saying save $450 on the above two points and rather put that into the 5960X? Even though its clocked at 3GHz base? Its got a pretty dismal write up on userbenchmark.com: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Intel-Core-i7-5960X/Rating/2580 Thanks guys - really appreciate your input.
  7. Hi Guys, First up - thanks for such a rich and generous community. This forum has been my go-to amongst the 20 or so I've added to my bookmarks bar in the last 2 weeks. Until 2 weeks ago I have been chronically IT adverse. I had only a vague knowledge of what the various parts did in my machine. An impressive feat given my 15 years in the industry. Taking on a new employee, and as a result speccing up a new machine and setting up a basic network has forced me to face my demons. So I've literally spent much of the last 2 weeks trawling through forums, comparison sites, benchmarks, naming conventions, wikis etc and slowly but surely penetrating the jargon. I now have a spreadsheet with 5 pages of detailed info, including lots of copy and pasted blurbs from people like Dimitris Tolios, Juraj Talcik, Numerobis and others. (So thanks again). I say all this because I hope to demonstrate that I've tried to the best of my ability to "do my homework". Now I just feel like I'm out of time and can't afford to prolong this decision any more. I need to get back to earning money! Network So - I'm following the advice of many, with a router to managed 8 port HP Gigabit switch (with plans to LA) to NAS DS1515+ with Cat6 cables. NAS will probably be RAID 6, and hold all project files and Library assets - and will service the 2 workstations. That was the easyish part. Next up: The Workstation I've tried to navigate the arguments that keep coming up - Quadro vs GTX, DDR3 vs DDR4, i7 v sXeon, cores vs processing speed etc. And this is where I'm at, my budget is around AU$4000: i7-5930K - best performance in my budget MOBO: ASUS X99-A (potentially to buy an additional NIC if I want to LA between my WS and Switch in the future) - 64GB RAM (I use a lot of After Effects and this devours my RAM). I'm pretty limited here by my supplier - theres two choices: 4 x Kingston 16GB DDR4 ECC Registered 2133MHz CL15 w/Parity 288-Pin 8 x Apacer 8G (1x8GB) DDR4 2133MHz DIMM 15-15-15 1.2V SSD: 2 x Samsung 850 EVO 250GB. One for OS and Programs, other for Media cache/scratch disc and potentially current project files GPU: Asus Strix GTX980 4GB All other parts I'll get mid-high end, PSU, Cooling, Case etc Queries: Is this a solid build? Any glaring errors? Re my limited RAM options : I've been told that its better to use fewer slots where possible for speed - which would suggest the Kingstons. But also seem to remember reading that ECC isn't really targeted to our needs. But am I right in thinking that Kingston is a far superior brand to Apacer? Given my very limited choice - Kingstons the go? Thanks guys - I'd really appreciate any feedback. I'm hoping to put in the final order in the next 24/48hrs so hopefully I'll get some words of wisdom before then!
  8. Hi Thomas, I find my self in a very similar situation to you at the beginning of this thread. So I'm very curious... How did it go? Did you get the LA working? How much of a headache was it? How much of a speed difference did you notice? Thanks
  9. Yes - I'd be very interested to here peoples opinions on this. I've just taken on a new (first) employee so besides purchasing a new workstation we're also looking at the best way to share project files/assets libraries and backup. And potentially use the NAS/fileserver as a rendernode when necessary??
  10. My problem is similar but not exactly the same. Keyboard shortcuts seem to be working fine EXCEPT the delete key!? Any ideas? Its working fine in other apps and my install of 3ds max 2012 - but not in 2015.... Thanks
  11. I've rendered a LOT of scenes with similar levels of landscaping: http://vimeo.com/peterletten/showreel2 password cgarch I'd be happy with around 30 mins for a shot with that amount of planting and resolution. Try isolate whats taking so long. If you do a grey override does it render pretty quickly? Then its your materials... you can get away with turning off reflection/refraction on non-hero plants and trees. The other key setting will be your noise DMC noise, before rendering a scene like this I'll render 5 frames of the noisiest region - from your image attached possible the high detail grass in the shade of the tree - and then tweak the settings until you get a decent compromise between lack of noise and render times. As a start for this scene I would say min subdivs 1, max subdivs 16. DMC Sampler .009..... and the drop it if you're still getting noise, may need to go down to 0.006. Reflection and refraction of trees and plants will be massive, as will bitmaps in the opacity slots of leaves. Geomoetry will render faster in these cases. Like I said, I doubt you'd be able to get it much below 30 mins and still have decent quality - which sounds like still is too long for your client. You can always try an online render solution like Rebus or Foxx? I recently used Rebus and it worked great.
  12. Great materials, mood and lighting. Nice volumetrics... Only critique is that its a bit hard to make out whats going on on the back left wall? what are the dots in the grid pattern are on the left hand side of image? And that bright reflection looks wrong on the floor at the base of the wall. Unless I'm reading the image wrong? Also - maybe a touch under exposed?
  13. The composition needs a lot of work. The furniture in the foreground is shutting the shot down. Try ditch the two chairs on the front right and rotate the white chair, (front left) so its more open to the viewer and makes the shot more welcoming. Theres some scale issues, the bricks on the path look too big, and the birds look too big to me. You could have more drama in the sky. And I think you need to bring your plant greens together - the hues are too mixed/far apart, doesnt look very natural too me. I'd try get some direct light to hit the furniture in the foregound to give this part of the shot more interest and to contrast the pink tinge you're getting everywhere. Theres some weird texture/lighting issues going on to - like the black potplant.. and the dark wall top right is distracting. But for your first effort, it shows promise. Biggest comments would be work on your composition and textures. Hope this helps.
  14. Studio/Institution: Virtual Ideas Genre: Other Software: 3ds max, Vray, After Effects, Photoshop Description: After posting my initial reel, where it got politley lambasted for terrible music selection and being too long, I've now brought the soundtrack into the 21st century and done an aggressive cull of over a minutes footage, Timing prob not quite finessed but would be great to get any other feedback. Thanks: http://vimeo.com/peterletten/showreel2 password: cgarch (For those who care, the original is still here, same password): http://vimeo.com/peterletten/showreel
  15. Ok chaps. Comments taken on board. Music has been brought into this century and theres been an aggressive cull of over a minutes footage. Timing prob not quite finessed but would be great to get any other feedback. Thanks: http://vimeo.com/peterletten/showreel2 password: cgarch
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