MarcellusW Posted June 17, 2015 Share Posted June 17, 2015 If I were to purchase a new workstation, which would be preferable in terms of rendering speed? 10 Cores at about 3.1 Ghz (single CPU), or 20 Cores at 2.4 Ghz (dual CPUs) I assuming the lower Ghz wouldn't affect modeling ability adversly. Anything I'm not thinking about properly here? Trying to put together a proposal for my office. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aaronrumple Posted June 17, 2015 Share Posted June 17, 2015 Lots of variables there. Probably the 20 @ 2.4. Maybe. Are they both Xeon's? Same on-chip cache and all? Or is the single chip and overclock-able i7? Extra memory on the dual chip system? Memory bus speed the same? What's the budget? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarcellusW Posted June 18, 2015 Author Share Posted June 18, 2015 Xeon E5-2687 v3 3.1ghz (single CPU, 10 cores) or Xeon E5-2650 v3 2.4Ghz (dual CPUs, 20 cores) Same cache. They both have turbo, but this seems like a gimmick. 64gb ram, 4gb quadro k4200 I cant overclock where I work, and I'm leary of it anyway. Xeons are stable, my home computer 8 core xeon has never had a blue screen that I can remember. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aaronrumple Posted June 18, 2015 Share Posted June 18, 2015 1 CPU Xeon E5-2687 Cinebench 15 score of: ~1227 $1900 2 CPU Xeon E5-2650 Cinebench 15 score of: ~2043 $2250 1 CPU i7-5890 Cinebench 15 Score of: 1393 @ 3.0 ghz and 1747 @ 4.45 ghz $1000 The dual is clearly a better value in the two systems you describe, but Xeons are low on the price to performance scale. I've got an office full of i7-4770's at work. Never seen them crash. I have an i7-5890 at home. This chip is designed to run at 'overclocked' speeds. The older 4770 systems only benchmark at 731, but they are cheap and I can offload rendering to the other cheap (3x731 = 2193 for $900 in chips.) ) systems using backburnner and still keep working. Staying productive while still rendering is important. Personally, I'd build a couple of i7 (probably the i7-4930) systems for the price the dual Xeon and probably come out way ahead in both cost and speed. And have a better workstation experience overall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nikolaos M Posted June 18, 2015 Share Posted June 18, 2015 Multi-threaded performance would mainly affect rendering times, but in all other cases, a Xeon with a 2.4GHz clock would be much slower than any processor of the same architecture with higher clock frequencies, because most applications and tasks are single threaded. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
numerobis Posted June 18, 2015 Share Posted June 18, 2015 (edited) 10 Cores at about 3.1 Ghz (single CPU), or 20 Cores at 2.4 Ghz (dual CPUs) I assuming the lower Ghz wouldn't affect modeling ability adversly. Anything I'm not thinking about properly here? Trying to put together a proposal for my office. ... Xeon E5-2650 v3 2.4Ghz (dual CPUs, 20 cores) They both have turbo, but this seems like a gimmick. 64gb ram, ... Xeons are stable, my home computer 8 core xeon has never had a blue screen that I can remember. The turbo is no gimmick. This is how processors work today. Lower idle speed and then turbo speeds depending on the number of active cores. Cache size and RAM speed (above 2400MHz) does not matter. You have to look for the all core turbo to get the rendering speed. And the single core turbo for everything the is single threaded, like modeling. And there is the problem with most of the "cheaper" Xeons with more cores. They have a lower single core speed than the more expensive ones or an i7. I wouldn't take anything below 3.5-3.7GHz single core turbo for a workstation (well, personally i wouldn't go below 4.3-4.4GHz, but this means overclocking...) Stability shouldn't be a question of Xeon or not today, if the system is done right. Maybe they are theoretically a bit more stable for longer calculations if you use ECC-RAM - but i don't think that this is really needed for rendering. Here is a list of all Xeons and their clock rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors#Xeon_E5-26xx_v3_.28dual-processor.29 You have to add the number in the fourth column multiplied by 100MHz (or 0.1GHz) to the base frequency, depending on the number of used cores. For the Xeon E5-2650 v3 this would mean single core turbo: 2.3 + 7x0.1 = 3.0GHz and all core turbo: 2.3 + 3x0.1 = 2.6GHz Edited June 19, 2015 by numerobis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarcellusW Posted June 18, 2015 Author Share Posted June 18, 2015 Thanks for the responses. I dont think we can get i7's bc its not in our supplier contract, long story. Looks like the dual xeons is the way to go for the supplier quote I got. Would be using this mostly for the actual rendering. I have another computer that I can do the setup on. The turbo boost goes to 3.1 GHz so for single thread apps it prob isnt that bad if it actually works. Thank you all for the input, based on my office constraints, prob going to go just the 1 computer dual CPUs. The Ram is for mental ray, it seems to need a lot for bigger scenes. (no, prob not able to get Vray anytime soon.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now