What motherboard ?

[YorK]

Hello you all and sorry in advance for my english

 

I have a simple problem: my cg machine is quite old now:

_ Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 on Intel D975XBX2 motherboard

_ 8Gb DDR2 PC6400 Dual Channel RAM (800MHz)

_ Quadro FX 1700 GPU

_ 2 x WesternDigital Raptor 300Gb RAID0

_ WinXP Pro x64

 

I tried to mount 16Gb RAM on this machine but it's impossible: the motherboard does'nt support it !

 

As I don't have a lot of money to put in it, what I am looking for now is to change only the motherboard and keep the rest as it is. So I'm looking for a 16Gb RAM capable motherboard but ... it seems hard to find as you guess

Anyone has an idea to help me in my "16Gb RAM" quest ? I recently realized the heavy RAM consumption of things like displacement, proxies etc ...

Thank you so much !

[AJLynn]

8GB isn't enough? Honestly I don't know what I'm going to do with you guys.

 

Look here: and in the specifications tab on each motherboard's page it gives memory capacity. There are many models that support 16GB, but be warned, 4x4GB of DDR3 RAM starts at $700, so you're looking at at least $800. At least if you buy some that's compatible with both your new motherboard and one for a newer chip, like this: which supports the new AMD 6-core chips, you can save money next time you upgrade your CPU.

[YorK]

Thank you for your answer, very useful

 

The matter is that now I am waiting to know what kind of graphic card is going to be ready with the next VRay version coming soon, the one that will use the gpu to render, not only the cpu, like Octane render. Because I think that my old Quadro FX 1700 may not support the new VRay version. So I have to wait a little to have a clear idea of the total cost of my new machine.

Again thank you for the links you provided to me.

About the RAM: I recently worked on a scene with displaced brick walls, some vrayproxy plants, lit by a hdri domelight (7000 x 3500 resolution) + some reflections / refractions (maxdepth 5), VRay dynamic Memory Limit set to 7000 Mb, render size: 3200 pixels width ... A quite common work, and I got stuck because of my 8Gb RAM: the render did finish but it was quite long because of the use of hard disk instead of RAM.

That's why I want to have a 16Gb machine.

Maybe some of you have an idea to circumvent this problem ?

I heard about using .vrimg file to decrease the use of RAM ...

Or maybe use region renderings instead of rendering all the image in one pass ... I didn't try yet

[AJLynn]

Ask on the Vray board about lowering memory usage. As for video cards - a GPU-enabled Vray isn't on the market. It's on the way but some things aren't entirely clear, despite whatever is seen in demos - exactly what it will do and exactly how useful it will be in production are unanswered questions. As is exactly which video cards it will run on. Don't go shopping for a new card until the software is available and you get this information in detail. It could turn out that a $1500 Quadro card run it slower than a $300 Radeon card.

[YorK]

Ask on the Vray board about lowering memory usage. As for video cards - a GPU-enabled Vray isn't on the market. It's on the way but some things aren't entirely clear, despite whatever is seen in demos - exactly what it will do and exactly how useful it will be in production are unanswered questions. As is exactly which video cards it will run on. Don't go shopping for a new card until the software is available and you get this information in detail. It could turn out that a $1500 Quadro card run it slower than a $300 Radeon card.

 

Yes I am going to wait until everything is clear with this new Vray version. Thank you again for your answers AJLynn !