Quadro vs. GTX for 3DS Max machine: Here are my priorities...

[Kirsten Zirngibl]

Hello Kirsten Zirngibl

 

I know it had been a while for your post, but can you share us your final decision for hardware rigs. I am in charge for hardware management of small studio and i keep studying for hardware knowledge.

 

Sorry for my bad English

 

Best regards

 

Hi Tuan,

 

Sure thing. My rig is working out really well, although I haven't been putting real time render demand on it like I thought I would, so I haven't tested that part out (yet). I also ended up spending less than I thought, going with the better performance-to-price ratio.

 

For the graphics card, I went with the Nvidia GTX 970, specifically the one made by MSI. (I spent a little more on the MSI one since it has an on-demand fan).

I went with the 970 over the 980/Titan because the performance/$ for it was much higher. I didn't want to fall prey to diminishing returns.

I'm really happy with the performance, overall. To give you some perspective, I can rotate through a scene with 25,000,000 polygons with only minor stuttering, whereas my old rig started really lagging at around 10,000,000 polys. I shelled out the small extra for the MSI one because it had a great on-demand fan system for power saving, and it came overclocked (stable & with warranty). (I think I actually reverted it, but don't remember actually, lol.)

 

The only negative is that I still get viewport flickering when a heavy poly scene is set to anything but "shaded" and "wireframe" in 3DS max, but it is less frequent than before.

 

For the CPU, I went with the Intel i7-4790K CPU (4.00 GHz). No problems there, and I think it's part of the reason why my viewport performance is so good. However, render times aren't... stellar. If I were rendering all the time in Mental Ray I'd probably have gotten multi CPU's or something, but having a really fast single CPU is supposedly better for viewport perormance.

 

I have 32 GB memory, which in hindsight was probably overkill, because my RAM meter approaches but rarely exceeds 24 GB... although perhaps it's good to have a certain buffer. (I frequently have more than 1 main application open at once, with a bunch of peripheral stuff running, plus the memory hog that is Chrome... and no slowdown that I can tell.)

This is what I went with: HyperX Beast 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model KHX16C9T3K4/32X. It was recommended due to the integral heat sink hardware and for being really fast and error-free.

 

This was my motherboard... could've done better with it I suppose, but I got it for free from a friend who discovered it wouldn't work for his server machine. It was an "ASRock H97M Pro4 LGA 1150 Intel H97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard." I remember having problems getting it to recognize my graphics card. It has to connect JUST right, turns out. A finnicky connection, but ultimately worked fine.

 

For the main OS drive, I splurged and went with the Samsung 850 Pro. It had really excellent reviews, and supposedly twice the life as a standard SSD. I don't upgrade computers often, so that appealed to me. Also, the benchmarks I saw showed pretty noticeable R/W speed increase over the equivalent Evo.

 

 

I am no expert on hardware for this stuff by any means, just took care to learn what I could for my purposes. I also don't have any similar competing hardware as a reference point with which to test performance, but I'm a happy user overall, with money in my pocket I thought I'd have to spend but didn't. Best of luck to you!

Edited December 23, 2015 by kirstenzirngibl

[joelmcwilliam]

Hi Kirsten,

 

Thanks for the feedback. May I ask you what monitor (resolution) you are using?

[Kirsten Zirngibl]

Hi Joel,

 

My monitor is pretty bad, resolution-wise: Only 1600 x 1200. (Because I do a lot of 2D work, I use an old Cintiq 21UX.) Sometimes I switch to my secondary monitor (1920 x 1200).

 

I tested screen res vs. performance on my secondary monitor by rotating around an entire 28 mil poly scene in full screen (expert mode) and no bounding boxes. For both, the FPS was about 12, no difference that I could tell. If I had one of those super high res monitors, I'd imagine it would be noticeably laggier.

 

When I eventually upgrade tablet monitor, I'm going with at least the 1920px wide one because 3DS Max's UI takes up so much screen real estate.

Edited January 3, 2016 by kirstenzirngibl

[joelmcwilliam]

Thank you for your reply.

 

I also use a wacom, but not a fancy one like yours, just an old intuos 3 A4. Great against rsi and also great for sketching.