Graphics Card and NAS Advice.

[Adam Glover]

Hello,

 

I have two topics I need some advice on please. They are sort of linked.

 

I currently have a twin Zeon machine I am using, but am wanting to move this to be my renderer and build a working machine for modelling & test renders etc.

 

1. I need to make a decision on the graphics card.

 

Do I go with a couple of GTX cards or a Quadro?

Is it all about the CUDA, the more the better?

I am wanting to get the best performance in VrayRT as I can.

 

 

 

2. With my work now being spread out over more than one machine. I am wanting some sort of network storage/server.

 

However I know nothing about this other than I want to be able to have 2-3 machines all reading/writing and rendering etc from the same drives.

(With one of the drives providing media to the rest of my house).

 

I'm not sure if just a Nas or an all in one server/storage device would suit me best?

Is windows server hard to get your head around for a novice? I have seen a few with that installed and it's a bit off putting atm.

I would like to spend around £500 -($7-800) and have 5-8 drive bays if possible.

 

Any recommendation or insight into this would be a great help.

 

Cheers

 

Adam

[jackbird]

I'm just about to pull the trigger on a Synology NAS (albeit one with only 2 drive bays - the larger ones may be out of budget). I'm really impressed with everything the various plugins can do, including automated backup to Amazon Glacier, acting as a Windows Domain Controller, iTunes server, and even a scratch Drupal/Tomcat/Whatever environment to test/develop web applications if you ever have the desire.

[Adam Glover]

Thanks dude.

 

Will have a look.

I think just a NAS may be the way to go.

Had a look at LaCie, Qnap and Thecus also.

LaCie had as a backup to cloud too I believe but seem a tad pricey.

[Jeff Mottle]

I'm just about to pull the trigger on a Synology NAS (albeit one with only 2 drive bays - the larger ones may be out of budget). I'm really impressed with everything the various plugins can do, including automated backup to Amazon Glacier, acting as a Windows Domain Controller, iTunes server, and even a scratch Drupal/Tomcat/Whatever environment to test/develop web applications if you ever have the desire.

 

Was just going to recommend the same. I have 3 Synology NAS devices.

[Jeff Mottle]

 

2. With my work now being spread out over more than one machine. I am wanting some sort of network storage/server.

 

However I know nothing about this other than I want to be able to have 2-3 machines all reading/writing and rendering etc from the same drives.

(With one of the drives providing media to the rest of my house).

 

I'm not sure if just a Nas or an all in one server/storage device would suit me best?

Is windows server hard to get your head around for a novice? I have seen a few with that installed and it's a bit off putting atm.

I would like to spend around £500 -($7-800) and have 5-8 drive bays if possible.

 

 

The Synology is an all in one Server/Storage device based on Linux and I highly recommend them. Fast, dependable and excellent support. I have my 5 bay connected as the main network storage using link aggregation to a Smart switch and am able to get between 80-120MB/s upload/download speeds between workstations and NAS on a Gigabit network.

[Dimitris Tolios]

1. Quadro's take advantage of drivers that are optimized for 3D apps like 3DS and Maya.

 

Cuda accelerated apps bypass most such optimizations. There is still a driver compatibility issue with some drivers, but in general the fastest the card, the better results you will get. Most Quadro and Tesla cards for the last generations are based on GTX cards (and vice versa). There is no "Quadro only" core etc.

 

i.e. The K5000 is using the same GK104 chip with same cores as a GTX 680 4GB, but has lower clocks so that the chip runs cooler and draws more power. The K5000 is speced as a 122W board , the GTX 680 is a 195W board. The lower power consumption makes it slower in all-out computation speed, but requires only 1x PCIe 6pin power connector, something that makes it possible for it to be utilized in a large number of existing OEM workstations that are shipped with PSUs in the region of 500W or less, that could not feed a fast clocked 670/680 (those require 2x 6pin plugs).

 

In theory the lower clocks make the chip more stable too, but for applications like games and ofc for GPU renderings were you have either dozens of overlapping frames per second or hundreds of samples that get interpolated per pixel, a graphic artifact here and there is untraceable, thus using gaming cards with fast clocks, no ECC ram etc is far from a compromise when you gauge in the speed and price benefits.

 

Long-story short: for CUDA renderings, fast gaming cards are a clear win-win choice. Cheaper, faster. When I say fast, I would place the line around GTX 660/660ti or better.

RAM quantity is important, but you don't have to go crazy: I got a 670 4GB but trying out interior renderings with some 7M polygons etc, I haven't seen more than 1.5~1.7GB max usage.

 

That said, the viewport performance of even the fastest GTX has nothing against a Quadro. It is not a matter of raw performance potential, the drivers simply do not let the gaming cards shine, and depending on the complexity of your scenes (shading mode, polygons, texture sizes etc) the difference might be from negligible to dramatic.

[Adam Glover]

Thanks Jeff, Dimitris,

 

Some great advice, love this forum!

 

Jeff- Looks like I will be getting a Synology NAS then. Which Model do you have?

 

 

Dimitris,

Read your comment (twice) . I think I understand it a bit better now thanks.

So I could go with a Quadro for stability, power consumption, being Quieter and cooler.

 

The current workstation I mentioned, I built 2yrs ago has a GTX580 in it.

 

Could I have the Quadro as the primary card for modelling etc and put the GTX580 or newer GTX (you mentioned the 680) in a secondary slot and have to two cards assigned as the Cuda engine in VrayRt?

 

Is this possible?

Will this give me the stability etc during the everyday modelling, and the extra power only when I need it in RT?

 

Thanks again!

[Dimitris Tolios]

The 580 is actually the fastest GTX for VRay RT before the GTX Titan. Around 8-10% faster than the 680, as despite the lower CUDA core count, Fermi cuda cores were better suited to VRay RT than Kepler architecture CUDA cores (what GTX 680, Titan, K series Quadros etc are using).

Unless you have the 1.5GB 580 which might hit a VRam ceiling in complex scenes, there is no reason to go to a 670 or 680, and if you would it would be worty only for the 4GB versions. The 580 also works with iRay in 2011 and 2012 versions of 3DS, while kepler based cards work in 2013 or newer - something important for people who are not subscribers with Autodesk's yearly (or sooner) upgrade cycles.

 

The good thing with VRay RT is that in theory it doesn't care about card types: you could have a mix of 5xx / 6xx / 4xx cards in the same system, or over network it and it will distribute the rendering to each. The only limitation is that each and every card has to fit 100% of the scene + assets in its VRam, otherwise it won't be used. In reality you might have some issues with drivers (again), but in theory your are safe.

SLI (i.e. physically bridging the cards) is not required for them to be recognized and/or work together, each one at its own pace.

 

The Quadro/GTX mix is exactly the same: in theory you can do both simultaneusly, with the Quadro taking charge of the display and the GTX cards on standby working only on compute. I personally have tried with a Quadro 4000 and my 670, and it worked well. Others report driver conflicts that ruin viewport stability, and you might have to go into a hit-or-miss cycle of installing Quadro drivers before or after GeForce drivers, rolling back either etc. Not an exact science (at least for us laymen).

[Adam Glover]

That's pretty good then, I had the GTX580 as the second card in my current machine. With an ATI eyefinity card as the display driver (I forget which model).

 

Its the 3GB GTX580 card i have so that should handle all my scenes, and if I get the Quadro K4000 at 2GB i should be fine then.

Apart from any driver conflicts as you say.

 

I believe the GTX770 will be out later this month, how do you think that would compare with the other cards out of interest?

 

Thanks again mate!!

[Dimitris Tolios]

If you already have a Firepro card (did I understand wrong? don't know what you mean by eyefinity, all modern AMD cards have it) why change to a Quadro? Same difference. Yes, a K4000 can contribute to VRay RT, but not significantly.

 

The 770 is still GK104 based. Think of it as a faster, more efficient 680. Around 10%, i.e. it will match the 580 roughly for VRay RT.

It will still be available in 2 & 4GB configurations @256bit bus.

 

The 780 will probably be based on the GK110, like the Titan, with a couple more CUDA clusters disabled. All those are K20 "rejects" that found their way in gaming cards, but I would expect the 780 to be easily faster than the 580. Its price will be pretty steep though, having the relationship to the Titan the 670 has to the 680 now, only the Titan starts @ $1000.

[Adam Glover]

Sorry I couldn't remember the model. Its the FirePro V5900.

I hadn't thought too much about that as it is going to stay in the current machine.

I had thought the Quadro K4000 would have contributed quite a lot to the Cuda engine in RT as well as being a good display driver.

 

How would the V5900 compare to the Quadro K4000?

Edited May 9, 2013 by Adam Glover

[klonk]

This has been discussed many times, and unless something has radically changed you need to consider two things:

 

1) If you mix a Quadro and GTX card you loose the value of the Quadro drivers. It disables them when they sense a gaming card. In other words, nVidia wants you to buy Tesla as companion to Quadro.

 

2) I haven't tried it, but you could theoretically get around this problem by using a FirePro card for high quality display and GTX for Cuda, but then you won't benefit from the render cores on the FirePro.

[Dimitris Tolios]

Niclas,

I have heard of issues in the past, guess I happen to be lucky.

Here, you made me run and dig out a 3rd 6-pin cable for my PSU to mount both cards again...

 

Run Catia benchmark + Luxmark v2.0 for a quick proof.

Quadro 4000 was plugged in, system was restarted and Quadro 311.50 drivers were installed over GeForce 314.22 Drivers using express settings (not even clean driver install was required). Worked straight away with the 1st try.

 

CATIA

Quadro 4000 taking over just fine and running @ Quadro speeds

 

 

LUXMARK

Both cards working @ OpenCL compute scoring the exact sum of their individual scores (as tested in previous times, with different drivers tho

 

 

Click for bigger images.

I don't try to misinform , and I apologize if people had issues with my suggestions.

The roads to hell are paved with (my) good intentions

 

Sorry I couldn't remember the model. Its the FirePro V5900.

I hadn't thought too much about that as it is going to stay in the current machine.

I had thought the Quadro K4000 would have contributed quite a lot to the Cuda engine in RT as well as being a good display driver.

 

How would the V5900 compare to the Quadro K4000?

 

I would not replace a V5900 with a K4000...the latter is probably faster, but not enough to worth the change. Plus, a K4000 is almost as much as 2x 660Ti 3GB cards, or not that less than 2x GTX670 4GB. I would get a single GTX to act as a compute card, and if satisfied by the results I would have saved the money to get a second one. Don't go all-out with 2x GTX cards before you are sure VRay RT fits your workflow.

Edited May 10, 2013 by dtolios

[Adam Glover]

Cheers Fella's

 

Will probably keep the V5900 and move it to the new machine.

I do use Rt in my work but could do with it being a tad faster.

The 580 will do for now and maybe look at the GTX 780 at a later date if its based on the GK110.

 

One last question, can you make use of a No of GPU's over a network then in RT?

 

Thanks again for the advice everyone!

Edited May 10, 2013 by Adam Glover

[Dimitris Tolios]

One last question, can you make use of a No of GPU's over a network then in RT?

 

Yes, you can use distributed rendering with vray rt gpu.

[jackbird]

Jeff, do you use the Amazon Glacier backup? I couldn't believe how much less it cost than Crashplan/Carbonite/Mozy, with the downside of slower retrieval seeming totally acceptable.

[Jeff Mottle]

Jeff, do you use the Amazon Glacier backup? I couldn't believe how much less it cost than Crashplan/Carbonite/Mozy, with the downside of slower retrieval seeming totally acceptable.

 

Hey Jon,

 

No I've not used Glacier as I've found Amazon to be too slow. Not in terms of when you can retrieve but in bandwidth performance. Trying to upload any significant amount of data would be very painful. I have a 100Mbps connection and have never been able to get better than 100-300KB/s downloads on S3, uploads are not much better usually a lot slower. It would take months, literally, to upload large amounts of data. I do use Amazon S3, EC2, and Transcoder services for other things, but not backup. I have used CrashPlan and based on my calc are a lot cheaper than Glacier for larger amounts of data. For example the CrashPlan Pro is $360/yr for unlimited storage. 3TB of data is where the two plans are equal in cost, but if you have to retrieve anything Glacier is more expensive. Also If you have a Synology NAS you there is a plugin for CrashPlan that allows you to backup directly from the NAS.

[Dimitris Tolios]

Which synology unit do you have Jeff?

I've been wondering myself whether i should do a small file server with an old Dell 390 tower i have throwing in a controller, or spend some extra money on a Synology DS411...

 

Bigger units are way out in price, and I doubt i will need more than RAID 5+1 for some time.

For light home/media server + home office work I think 1x Gbit will be fine.

[Jeff Mottle]

Which synology unit do you have Jeff?

I've been wondering myself whether i should do a small file server with an old Dell 390 tower i have throwing in a controller, or spend some extra money on a Synology DS411...

 

Bigger units are way out in price, and I doubt i will need more than RAID 5+1 for some time.

For light home/media server + home office work I think 1x Gbit will be fine.

 

My units are few years old now, but here are their current equivalents. I paid about the same at the time:

 

Main network storage (RAID5) - http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS713%2B&lang=us (~$830 without drives)

Network Backup - http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS1512%2B&lang=enu (~$550 without drives)

 

I've experimented with OpenFiler, FreeNAS and an old Windows 7 box as a storage server and all were either significantly slower or significantly more difficult to configure. The older I get the less I am inclined to piss around with stuff like this. I just want it to work out of the box. Synology has a very nice UI and phenomenal phone support by people who actually know their product, not someone reading from queue cards through email.

 

My network has a Cisco ASA 5505 and a number of Netgear managed and unmanaged switches.

[danb4026]

What is the benefit of using a Synology, or any other NAS for that matter, over using a dedicated drive/drives on your main workstation to house network files (other than safety if system crash)?

[Jeff Mottle]

What is the benefit of using a Synology, or any other NAS for that matter, over using a dedicated drive/drives on your main workstation to house network files (other than safety if system crash)?

 

Speed/Performance, expandability and reliability for the most part. Generally machine to machine file sharing is not very fast, especially on a worksation where you're trying up CPU cycles for rendering. Most higher end NAS devices have built in (better quality) RAID controllers so you can increase data IO, size and redundancy and it's usually a lot easier to add/replace drives in a NAS than a workstation. You can also access the data from more machines a lot easier and more reliably than a windows share. I can't recall the number (around 5-10), but Windows (non file server OSs) only allow a small number of external computers to connect to a single machine.

[Jeff Mottle]

NAS machines like the Synology also have MANY different applications that can be run on them. Here are a few the Synology has ready to install: http://www.synology.com/dsm/dsm_app.php

 

They can also be used to run as firewalls, routers, FTP servers etc.

[nickroz]

I've been running NexentaStor on a home-built box for years after attempting to 'go cheap' and use a 2-bay Synology NAS for production (212J I think). The apps/etc available for the Synology are nice, but the raw speed and backup options I get from my ZFS box are way more beneficial for a production server. I now only use my Synology for a secondary ZFS backup and serving music/etc to the office (non-production stuff).

 

The one thing that you'll notice when running a cheap NAS is the lag when you're working with your project files. Save times are extended and the time it takes for maps to load before a render really add up to a frustrating experience. We would end up downloading projects from the NAS to our local SSDs in order to get work done, which is terrible when there are 5 people working on one project.

 

With a home built box, you have the options to add things like link-aggregated gigabit ports and even Infiniband for not that much money. I managed to build a Xeon system with 16GB of RAM and Infiniband for under $500 (without data drives) and it easily serves 10 machines.

 

If you're just starting out, get the cheap NAS - but look towards the future.

[Jeff Mottle]

There are different levels of Synology NAS. The 212J is one of their lower end devices, so not surprising it did not perform well in a production environment. The higher end Synology devices do support link-aggregation (that's how mine's set up). They also make higher end enterprise level rackmount gear too and I know people who have used them in multi-million dollar IT infrastructures. As with everything you have to get the gear to meet the requirement.

[Tim Nelson]

I'm going to upgrade my server pretty soon and will probably either go with the Synology DS1513+ or DS412+. Right now I have 1TB RAID 1 on a Windows 7 Home OS, which I also use for rendering when I need to, so not exactly an ideal setup. I have a 2 bay Diskstation for all of our home media that's been really great so I'm looking forward to upgrading to the higher end Synology product. Any thoughts on using WD Red drives vs. Black? Red's features sound good but I'm a little worried about speed since I think they are 5400rpm drives.