New Computer help!

[alexandrebucsky]

Hi guys.

 

I'm new in the forum and new in archviz. I used to work in retouching (2) years, and CGI (1 year) but for advertising, and it's a little bit different than archviz. It's been 4 months that i work in a architetcture office, and use 3ds Max, Mental Ray and Photoshop. Now I'm buying a new machine for me, and have read a lot of reviews and benchmarks in the net, but i'm still confused. So I'll share it here, hope you guys can help me.

 

New Machine:

 

Processor:

Intel i7 3930K or i7 3770k?? (Does the 3930 worth it's price? In rendering I would have 4 threads more than the 3770k right??)

 

Cooling:

CORSAIR H80 (CWCH80) High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (once 3930k doesn't come with cooler)

 

Motherboard:

Intel BOXDX79SR LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard (any suggestions here would be good)

 

Memory:

G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL10Q-32GBZL (Would Corsair Vengeance be better?)

 

Video Card:

EVGA 04G-P4-3685-KR GeForce GTX 680 FTW Standard, w/Backplate 4GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card (thinking about studyng VFX)

 

Power Supply:

OCZ ZT Series 750W Fully-Modular 80PLUS Bronze High Performance

 

Hard Drives:

Corsair Force Series 3 CSSD-F180GB3-BK 2.5" 180GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

1Tb Sata III (not specific)

 

Thinking about spend US$ 2000 ! What do you think?? Where should I spend more, or less.

Can have a cheaper machine, with almost the same performance?

And my last doubt is: I've always used mental ray as my render engine. Should I try Vray for arch viz? Will it considerly decrease my render times?? I see that most of you guys, and tutorials, archmodels, are for Vray.

 

That's it, sorry about the long post, it's my first one.

 

Thanks,

 

Alexandre Bucsky

My works: cargocollective.com/alexandrebucsky

[Dimitris Tolios]

Some builds I would consider decent for the cause...

Including Gaming, as I am still a kid @ heart.

 

 

 

CPU

Yes, the 3930K will be faster when rendering - about 50% faster (big deal).

Will be just as faster doing video editing in programs that that do not use the HD4000 in the 3770K, and ofc when transcoding RAW files from D-SLRs etc through ACR or Lightroom.

No, the 3770K won't be slower when modelling, gaming and for most PS work.

GPU

The 670 4GB is far better value for money, and 5-8% slower than the 680 in real life.

You save $100 or so.

 

PSU

750W will cut it with the 3770K + overclocking + 1 GPU.

For overclocking the SB-E + headroom for a 2nd GPU perhaps, 750 is too close.

I have the 1000W in there for some futureproofing. This CM unit is pretty good.

OCZ have betrayed me in the past. Seasonic > Corsair > Antec / CM I prefer. In general numbers are a bit over-inflated as these rigs were initially designed to futureproof with 2 GTX 570/580 for GPU rendering. Keplers are as much as 70-80W lower per card in real life draw.

 

SSD

Stick with Samsung 830 or Crucial m4. Best speed + reliability compromise (aka, none of the latter, and speedy enough).

HDD

Just had that in there. Best performance/price I think comes out of the Seagate Barracudas XT 2GB (there are many Seagate 7200rpm 2TBs, the expensive one!).

The WD Black 2TB is also close.

Hitachi's and Samsungs are solid, yet have less warranty me thinks and I don't like it, as ALL HDDs do fail sooner or later...bitter exp.

 

H100

Headroom for O/C

 

RAM

Ram is Ram. G.Skill is as good, if not better imho. Had only 16GB in the 3770K build and did not update. You can figure it out. I like the low profile heatsinks as they leave you space to add a hefty air-cooler (like ND-14 or SilverArrow). Huge ram heatsinks add nothing pretty much, companies make them bigger for your rig to look bad-ass, but tbh Samsung DDR 1600 sticks with no HS at all, overclock perfectly @ 2133 or so, with better timings etc. Too bad those come only @ 4GB sticks.

 

Edit: some prices are off as those were based on discounts and offers etc of the time, or I have put down 4x8 = 16GB for the "cheap" SB-E built etc, but mostly accurate. There is one 830 256GB SSD in there @ $310 for example, but those are regularly on offer at 180-190 now, and a bit less for the m4 256.

 

Edited August 7, 2012 by dtolios

[Umesh Raut]

In my opinion, you need to have at least one mechanical HDD, because of the prohibitively high premium still charged on SSD's and they make the rig faster only marginally, like while loading programs and saving data. Rendering is not mainly dependent on faster disk read write operations and the price performance ratio will remain heavily biased against SSD's until they are widely (read more reasonably priced) available. Rest looks good and always remember - more RAM = better performance. So saving money somewhere else to increase RAM will be a good option any day any time.