Building a Workstation

[carlovsky]

Hello everybody, i'm planning to build a workstation for my little business, i want to ask you if you can recommend me the right hardware pieces, the most convenient in the price-performance aspect, the objective is to work faster with 3D projects and wait less time for my renders.

 

I'm reading good stuff about the new Intel i7 microprocessors, the ASUS Motherboards,etc.. i know there's a lot of options in the market that just make me feel lost, that's why i wrote this thread, for reading the recommendations you make for me and for all those people who read this post.

 

Thank you, and tell me if you need more information about.

[rgb]

Hi Carlos,

if you are going to do business with the workstation your about to buy then i advise you to get a pre-built brand and not make it your self.

when building your won workstation it can be very tricky to get the hardware to work together with optimum speed,might also run into a cooling or Noise issue.

what would be ideal for you as a small business is 2x quad core Intel xeon CPU's and a powerful graphics card, and more than 6GB Ram.

the new Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series is the best cpu for 3D by far,

if you cant afford 2 of them then one will do the job but youll have to live with longer render times.

there is a company called CAD2 and they make good workstaions for good prices, but i highly recomend the HP Z800 it is a monster.

 

take yor time and think about investing in a Brand PC.

good luck.

[AJLynn]

There aren't a heck of a lot of Z800 models that are dual CPU, and those that are are pretty expensive. For a very small business, if you feel comfortable doing so, there's no really good reason not to build your own PC. Having to "get the hardware to work together with optimum speed" is largely a myth, PC components these days plug and play and unless you do serious overclocks there's little to nothing to gain from any tweaking - much less from anything HP would do for you.

 

A very reasonable starter system for a freelancer or small studio would be an i7 (probably a 920) on an Asus P6T with 6GB (3x2GB and you can add another 3x2 later if you want) a hard drive or two and a cheap video card (a 9800GT is cheap now). Don't skimp on the case (I like Lian-Li aluminum cases) or the power supply (an Antec 650W TruePower is enough for almost anything).

[rgb]

There aren't a heck of a lot of Z800 models that are dual CPU, and those that are are pretty expensive. For a very small business, if you feel comfortable doing so, there's no really good reason not to build your own PC. Having to "get the hardware to work together with optimum speed" is largely a myth, PC components these days plug and play and unless you do serious overclocks there's little to nothing to gain from any tweaking - much less from anything HP would do for you.

 

A very reasonable starter system for a freelancer or small studio would be an i7 (probably a 920) on an Asus P6T with 6GB (3x2GB and you can add another 3x2 later if you want) a hard drive or two and a cheap video card (a 9800GT is cheap now). Don't skimp on the case (I like Lian-Li aluminum cases) or the power supply (an Antec 650W TruePower is enough for almost anything).

 

i see your point AJLynn, i would completely agree with you if the machine was to be used for small to medium sized freelance jobs,but in markets like we have today you have to be ready to handle what the clients will through at you and their demands are getting really high specially in the Arch Viz market, with a home built PC one will most likely loose large jobs because of the hardware restrictions they have, plus how far can you upgrade an asus board with a single CPU?? when talking about the HP Z800 you are talking about a huge upgrade capability and the Z800 is configurable so you can choose one or 2 cpu's, 1 to 192GB Ram and multiple Graphics cards, Raid arrays, powerful power supply and you name it.

 

so i think if its for small freelance or hobbyist then build your own, but if you want to be ready for the large client demands then you should invest more in something that you make a living from. you get what you pay for at the end.

[Elliot]

Carlos

 

Hello...... Build your own computer. I lived in Guadalajara for 2 years and I know there is a lot of people that will be able to help you in assembling a workstation.

 

Buena Suerte

Elliot

[AJLynn]

Shadi - That's sort of the point of doing it yourself. Choose your own hardware. No limits imposed by manufacturers.

 

Anyway, you don't lose projects because of your hardware. You lose projects because potential clients don't like your portfolio, your pitch or your price.

[rgb]

Shadi - That's sort of the point of doing it yourself. Choose your own hardware. No limits imposed by manufacturers.

 

Anyway, you don't lose projects because of your hardware. You lose projects because potential clients don't like your portfolio, your pitch or your price.

 

AJLynn if a client wants his renders in 5 days and your core i7 will take 10 days then you lost that deal my friend!

even if your work is mind blowing and you cant deliver on time or at least as quick as your competitors then you lost.

looks like we are in 2 different boats when im answering carols's question i put in mind worst case scenarios.

im personally a big fan of build your own pc, at home i have built my own and at work i use HP workstation and there is difrance when it comes to production. its allways good to save the $$$ where you can.

i wish carlos the best of luck in putting his studio together.

[carlovsky]

Thank you for all your answers to my question they all are very helpful to me, i really appreciate it. i'm now visiting the websites do u recommend me too.

 

Elliot.. hi, i'm living in Guadalajara too, can u recommend me a place or a person to help me design a workstation?..

 

Thanks to everybody.

[manish_mv]

i would agree with AJLynn and would like to add something

 

See normally a simple system with quad processors like i7 would give you a certain amount of performance (with performance i mean rendertime) within some "X" price. Now to get about top notch performance (about 30% increment in the render time) through a single system (workstaion) you may have to pay 3-5 times of that x amount.

 

within such an expense you can get more than 3 i7 system or probably more than 7 phenomII based system. check this:

 

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=2

 

One thing is there which one always have to consider in his mind while purchasing a workstation for arch visualisation is that the rendering by whatsoever the render engine is absolutely dependent upon the system's PROCESSING POWER where as RAM is needed as per the scale of details and projects for example rendering a stadium will always ask more and more ram than an interior bedroom scene. And the video card is required just to make your viewport display faster and time efficient it has seriously nothing to do with the rendering speed untill and unless you render on some kind of GPU based rendering engine like Nvidia Gelato which i think no one uses for arch viz so far.

 

So my recommendation if the user is single is to get a simple x64 (i7 or PhenomII(recommended)) workstation with a powerful display card and high speed hard disk and to get separate system nodes (separate desktop i7 or phenomII based system) as much as you need and use all of them in the same time and for the same image or video generation through network or distributed network rendering.

 

This solution is much more scalable and efficient than buying a single costly workstation like z 800 (which i myself would never opt for even if m working with GM ) because you can add as much nodes as you want even with some other family upgraded processor based system in the future. And gives you the flexibility of your hard-earned money.

 

Note: for network or distributed network rendering you must use some sort or gigabit ethernet lan devices because regular 10/100 lan network system would hinder a lot on rendering speeds. There must be a frequent flow of datas between the workstaion and nodes. Also the storage should be more faster than regular.

 

Thanks

[XITIJ412]

-What is the final conclusion????

 

-what system we could buy for 3d rendering?????

-intel i7 or any ohter????pls.rply...

-which graphic card best for i7????

[Jimy]

Get a Dell or Boxx machine, especially for business. There's a reason why all the big studios get these; warranty, quick replace if anythings wrong, cheaper and components that go well together.

 

It's all very well building your own machine and great fun but you'll cost yourself a lot of time (how much is your time worth?) and although you might be choosing the best hardware individually, together they might not work so well and you'll never really know this until you've got them together.

 

If rendering time is an issue through 1 machine you could also look at the option of buying some cheaper 2nd hand machines as render nodes to use in distributed rendering. We use distributed rendering on stills to grab the power of around 25 machines into 1.

[John.RenderStream]

-What is the final conclusion????

 

-what system we could buy for 3d rendering?????

-intel i7 or any ohter????pls.rply...

-which graphic card best for i7????

 

Recently we have seen a real push to dual quad core Intel Nehalem processors by the architectural community. The price point for Intel right now is the 2.26GHz Intel Xeon E5520 processor. This means you get the most compute power per dollar spent. Here is an example of a system we build that may prove useful as you shop:

 

Processors (MPU): Dual 2.26GHz E5520 Nehalem with hyperthreading Memory: 12GB (6X2GB 1333MHz non-ECC)

Graphics Card: GTX 260-core 216 w/0.896GB DDR3

HDD (boot): 320GB, 7.2krpm-Enterprise class

HDD (Media Cache): 150GB, 10krpm-Enterprise class

DVD Player: DVD

DVD±RW: DVD±RW

Card Reader: All-in-one Internal Card Reader

Audio: Realtek ALC883 (7.1 Channel High Definition Audio)

LAN: Dual Gigabit

Enclosure: Workstation

Power Supply: 700W

Cooling: Air

Operating System: Windows 7 Professional

Installation: 5-Stage Quality Testing & Burn-In

One Year Warranty Parts & Labor Yes

Optional One to three year On-site warranty offered by RS

 

Graphic Card Options: GTS 250 w/1GB DDR3, GTX 285 w/2GB DDR3,

Quadro FX1800, FX3800, FX4800

 

If an FX card is not an option, I personally have a strong preference to the GTX 285 w/2GB DDR3 but it is about a $500 card whereas the GTS 250 is about $165 and the GTX 260 is $200. We think that all these cards will do the job.

 

One thing people do not pay enough attention to is the media cache. The system shown above is a basic vanilla but we find our happiest customers use a four or five-drive RAID and if the budget allows a migration to solid-state-drives from traditional rotational hard-disk-drives or even to the new PCI-e storage solutions.

 

The basic system shown above sales in the neighborhood of $3k and delivers 18.08 GHz of compute power and with hyperthreading effectively 25 GHz relative to the previous generation of Intel processor (5400-series Xeon). As a reference we have a single frame render benchmark that runs in 8 minutes and 21 seconds on a single 2.66 GHz quad-core i7-920 and in 4 minutes and 42 seconds on a dual quad-core E5520.

 

With all the major suppliers as well as us on-site International service warranties are available options.

 

I hope this helps.

 

John

[Slinger]

Why the heck would you make the faster drive the slave drive? That is backwards logic. You might as well throw in another 320gb hdd and set them up in raid

[John.RenderStream]

Good comment, if you visit our web-site you will see we want to run RAID for the boot too. However, due to limited budgets many times folk do not want these and it was for these people that we showed the layout. In the system we described it is not a slave in what I consider a traditional sense of data storage. This drive is used for media cache and data streaming becoming an integral part of the I/O. Further,these systems are designed for networked environments where the slave is remote. Amongst our fastest systems we use two to eight 32GB or 64GB Intel X25-E solid-state-drives in RAID 0 though we now have even faster systems available using PCI-e storage and our preference is to use dual RAID.

[AJLynn]

Actually my comment would be that I don't see the reason to put so little hard drive in a system like that. I understand the desire for "enterprise" drives but if you're working on image sequences, keeping a Lightroom library, editing video or something you're going to want one or more terabyte drives in there.

[John.RenderStream]

Actually my comment would be that I don't see the reason to put so little hard drive in a system like that. I understand the desire for "enterprise" drives but if you're working on image sequences, keeping a Lightroom library, editing video or something you're going to want one or more terabyte drives in there.

 

Yes of course, that is why most of our RAIDs have an aggregate storage greater than a terabyte. However in this case it met a specific need which was a bit more speed while meeting a short term storage requirement. In general especially with solid state drives we use a multi-tiered approach where the SSD acts truly as a cache and then we have a slower but large RAID feeding the cache followed by several levels of network storage.

 

Thanks for the discussion and sorry about my confusion.