Guest dialog Posted May 23, 2013 Share Posted May 23, 2013 Our company is looking for a HIGH END 3D workstation solution and we are not all on the same page. I am pushing a BOXX workstation and others have pushed Dell and the Teradici rack mounted workstation. I am unfamiliar with this style of working. Obviously I would have some minor concerns with the remote access to the station and how the performance would be versus a station that is set up typical at your desk. If anyone has knowledge on this style of workstation that would be great to fill me in. I would guess our ideal solution is to build an in-house system that can handle high resolution renders 4K or greater, scenes will up to a billion polygons and obviously we would like to see no lag in the model workflow while doing this. Our budget may allow $20-30K for this. If any large scale visualization artists can give me some feedback that would be great. Currently working on am under-powered station that is just killing the workflow (not bad for small stuff, but when we have the types of projects we work on and the amount of projects going at once....its not good)..see as follows: Intel Xeon @3.40 Ghz 16GB RAM NVIDIA Quadro 600 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted May 23, 2013 Share Posted May 23, 2013 You won't get a machine faster than BOXX from any supplier like Dell, HP or Lenovo, simply because BOXX overclocks its high-end towers. How can a 3.4GHz Sandybridge-E Xeon - regardless of cores - handle what a 4.5+ GHz Sandybridge-E i7 does with the same ease? For 1P systems BOXX is clearly the fastest "ready made" solution. There are other smaller boutique workstations offered cheaper, and you can always build your own for 1/3~1/4 the cost, but out of the BOXX (lol) this is probably the fastest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest dialog Posted May 24, 2013 Share Posted May 24, 2013 I am a BOXX advocate and I am trying to get them to go BOXX. Our deal with Dell gives us deals and they want to put the Dell Teradici mounted to the racks in the server rooms. I feel like I am fighting a losing battle with this one. I want BOXX, they want Dell. Dell Teradici so "Multiple" Users can use the machine. Not sure if this will be a good workflow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dimitris Tolios Posted May 24, 2013 Share Posted May 24, 2013 Teradici or other "thin clients" are great for their niche, but everything needs to be seen within context. The scenes you are describing - handling "billion polygons" - could be a challenge with stand-alone workstations - BOXX, custom built or w/e. The speqs you are giving there are too vague, still clearly inferior to a high end BOXX box. And you plan to share those resources between many? I also don't get how many people need to be catered for within this 20-30K budget. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest dialog Posted May 24, 2013 Share Posted May 24, 2013 I don't want to share the machines as I am the only 3D artist in the company who works for all 4 cities that we have studios in. They have this idea where they would like to be able to run multiple users on it. So whatever that means I am not sure. The scenes with the Billion Polygons are not everyday occurances, but we would like to plan for it. Some of our revit models we import are VERY inefficient withwith thousands of objects. A typical scene that I work on everyday can hit into the hundreds of millions and after Vray proxies these are usually within 10-15 million polygons. All I know is the machine I have needs to be taken to a field like the scene in "Office Space" with the printer... Right now, we are trying to find a solultion for me for a workstation that can handle having photoshop open, 2 or 3 instances of 3DS MAx opened, Adobe Bridge and sometimes After Effects AND a render farm solution for that budget. Their hopes are that they can get multiple users workin on the Teradici solution though. Graphics card issues is a big one now and it can't power the 2 HD monitors I have now. Viewport displays get lagged down very fast as well. Ideally this solution would be for me, but they seem to think this multiple users having access to the Teradici will make it a better investment... This could be 2-3 people at once maybe. I am not a fan of this at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Dollus Posted May 24, 2013 Share Posted May 24, 2013 (edited) you should render a typical scene, take a screenshot of the system utilization (cpu/memory load) and send that to them to support the argument that having 2-3 people logging in during rendering as a VM setup will not be very productive. If they are set on this, you should suggest getting a workstation for your desk and using the remote Teradici as a rendernode for distributed and network rendering to boost productivity. After a few months, they will be able to evaluate the value of having users share resources on the VM setup. Personally, I feel Boxx is overpriced but a shared VM setup for resource hungry 3d sounds like a bad idea. It makes sense for many applications in a corporate office environment but graphics intensive pipelines like Max/After Effects isn't one of them. Edited May 24, 2013 by John Dollus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest dialog Posted May 24, 2013 Share Posted May 24, 2013 Great suggestion John. Are you familliar at all with working with a setup similar to what they are suggesting? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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