New 3DATS Tech articles, Workstation and Render Node configs

[AJLynn]

Shameless plug time

 

3DATSTech.com has a few new articles out in the last couple of weeks:

 

New workstation recommendations for June, with interesting new AMD 24-core (!) render node:

 

Brian Smith reviews the GoBoxx 2600 mobile workstation:

 

Some updates and commentary, including much rambling and a review of GPU power consumption:

 

A very quick one on hard drives and monitors:

[shroomer]

hey Andy,

 

first off, thanks for putting these informative reviews together - they're packed full of useful info.

 

i'll hopefully be upgrading soon and was wondering about some basic stuff:

 

these new systems with all their Watt ratings for graphics and rendering, what kind of cost can i expect for a system that uses, say, 800W when under full load (i.e when it's rendering)? what info do i need to look at and should it be a consideration at all or is the usage cost negligible?

 

what effect does RAM speed have on system performance? is it worth spending more on faster RAM?

 

The Zeons you mention in your round up, why are they so expensive and what do they do that a i930 or 1090T can't do?

 

which of these systems would you recommend? i was thinking of building my own but i've bought from Mesh since the beginning and never had a problem with anything (apart from noise but i sorted this myself). i think both systems come overclocked so this should also be taken into account.

 

AMD system

 

Intel system

[AJLynn]

I'm out of town and checking in on my iPhone so I don't have all my info with me, but here are some things I can tell you:

 

-800w is a lot. Let's say 500w. More reasonable and it's half a kilowatt and electricity is usually billed by the kilowatt-hour. So find out your billing rate per kWH and that's roughly the amount it costs to run your pc for 2 hours at full utilization.

 

-Xeons and Opterons are expensive because you can use more than one per motherboard. You can't make a system with two Core i7 or Phenom chips in it.

 

-RAM speed does nothing. The speed of the memory is determined by the requirement of the CPU. Say you have a CPU that uses 1333 RAM but you put 2000 RAM in the pc. With a few mb/CPU combination exceptions that 2000 ram will run at 1333 because that's what the CPU asks the mb for. But faster ram is used in overclocking.

 

-I can't say for sure without looking stuff up but since that i7 system looks overclocked and the AMD doesn't the intel is probably faster. But as I said unless you have CUDA software see if you can get it with a Radeon instead of the Geforce.

[shroomer]

thanks for the reply - so basically the 1090T is comparable to a stock i930 but once overclocked (which from what i read is a pretty straight forward affair), the i930 is faster? and i guess the same will be true for general use (modelling, image editing)? how easy is the 1090T to overclock and what kind of speeds can i expect for single and multi core use?

 

So find out your billing rate per kWH and that's roughly the amount it costs to run your pc for 2 hours at full utilization.

 

i found this chart which says that the cost is just over 20p or around 10p (i think the 2nd price is night rate?) which would mean that under full load for a 10 hour period, a 500W PC will consume about £1. so in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter.

 

Xeons and Opterons are expensive because you can use more than one per motherboard. You can't make a system with two Core i7 or Phenom chips in it.

 

that's so much more of an investment though - if i needed two processors at these prices wouldn't i be better off getting >1 i9xx PCs?

[AJLynn]

There are a lot of things to consider. An un-overclocked 930 is maybe 10% slower at rendering than a 1090T, but both CPUs are equally overclockable. I'm seeing people getting over 4GHz without too much effort. There's a ton of info on the net and I've never done the procedure with either of those CPUs myself so I'm not going to go into details. I'm not including overclocking in the recommendations because most of the readers are in offices, but if you do choose to do it, make sure to read up on the process before starting, monitor temperature and do testing.

 

The advantage to more expensive Xeons and Opterons is that the power is all in one box, so it can all go to the same multi-threaded operation. This is often better for rendering, at times when you don't want to farm, particularly test rendering, or for doing things that don't farm like processing video.

 

BTW the electric cost might not seem like a lot but if you've got an office and you're making the decisions for a bunch of computers, and then you consider that all that wattage converts to heat (thermodynamics is unavoidable) which contributes to your AC bills, and there are about 250 work days in a year, it starts to add up.

[blumentopferde]

I also postet it on the blog - but I'll post it here again: What do you think about the Opteron 6128 8-core CPUs? With 306$ for a CPU they seem to have an unbeatable price-performance ratio. That would mean 2300$ for a 16-core system - in the same configuration as the 24-core render node posted in the blog...

OK, it's about 40% chepaer but probably over 50% slower (considering less cores and lower clocks) but it seems to have a lot of overclocking potential (don't know if Opteron motherboards are overclockable though) as it runs at lower clocks (1,5Ghz) and less cores than the 12-core CPUs but shares the same architecture, thus should produce much less heat...

[AJLynn]

BTW are you looking for a render node? $2300 would buy you a 16-core render node, not workstation. Look at the differences between the 24-core workstation and render node configs and give the same treatment to the six-core Intel High End config to get a $2300 Intel render node, which is what I'd choose over a 16-core AMD.

 

Can't help you with Opteron overclocking.

[blumentopferde]

What I like about the 16-core Opteron setup is, that you're still at the lowest end of what's possible so you can still upgrade without having to replace you MoBo, RAM etc, while with the Intel solution you are already at the max and any further CPU-upgrade would mean a completely new system.

 

But what I am actually looking for is something in-between render-node and workstation: The Computer should be usable as a workstation AND as a render node. So it's not a waste of money in times where there is not much to render, but if there's something to render the rest of the workstations won't be blocked with work they're actually not designed for. What I am also looking for is SLI-support so I can still scale the rig up if GPU rendering becomes mainstream. I don't think that AMD Opteron boards support SLI, there are actually not even many mainstream AMD boards that do support it, so from that point of view the Intel-Combo would be most probably the better solution...