2x XEON vs i7 - considering price

[ugofantozzi]

Hello.

 

I know there were already many "Xeon vs i7 for rendering" threads but I want to talk about it considering the price/performance ratio.

I'm building a modelling/render workstation and here is what I found out:

 

SINGLE CPU:

- An i7 6800K (overclocked) workstation with 32GB RAM, GTX1070 card would cost me about 1600Eur (in Germany)

or

- A single Xeon E5-2630v4 workstation with similar spec would cost me about 1900Eur - (Processor, board and ram are more expensive).

 

Both processors have exactly same rendering times in Corona render benchmarks.

 

DOUBLE CPU:

- A 2x E5-2630v4 workstation would cost me about 2800Eur.

or

- Since you can't have 2 i7 CPUs in one machine, I would buy a second machine and use it for distributed rendering. Also I don't need a graphics card in this one so the price would be 1200Eur or 2800Eur for both i7 machines.

 

CONCLUSION:

Interestingly both double CPU setups have identical price tag and I guess the rendering speed would not differ very much. An i7 workstation would be faster for modelling since it has faster cores. When you are not rendering someone else could use the second workstation, so you practically have 2 machines which is a huge plus. The downside is a bigger energy consumption and questionably reliability with overclocked processors.

Personally I would go (again) the i7 way. I have a 4770K machine right now which is overclocked to 4500Ghz with a Noctua cooler and haven't had any issues for 2 years now.

 

What are your thoughts?

[Francisco Penaloza]

nowadays the one thing I consider is what's the purpose of the machine, as you mentioned both CPU will render about the same time. With the difference that you can more easily OC the i7.

If you need just a render node I'll go with the dual Xeons. less licences consistent performance.

If you want a workstation with 'fast' rendering time, then I'll go i7. The higher core speed will help you with viewport performance and overall windows experience.

[Adrian Denne]

Also have you weighed up the price of a GPU based workstation? I'm kind of wishing i hadnt bought 2 i7 rendermachines and instead bought a GPU solution. Just a thought

[Nikolaos M]

The downside is a bigger energy consumption and questionably reliability with overclocked processors.

...

 

What are your thoughts?

 

Makes sense to me.

 

You're forgetting a great +. The X99 render node is still upgradable in the future when the multi-core Xeons will be much cheaper in the used parts market.

 

I don't think that energy consumption would be so greater that could in some way justify the other alternative. How big would the difference in power bills be per year? As for overclocking, usually mild oc's don't cause any type of problems in these setups, of course only if you know what you're doing. A 4.2-4.4GHz oc is easy to achieve with under 1.3V of vcore, which is safe upper limit for core voltage in Haswell-E and Broadwell-E i7s.

[ugofantozzi]

Also have you weighed up the price of a GPU based workstation? I'm kind of wishing i hadnt bought 2 i7 rendermachines and instead bought a GPU solution. Just a thought

 

I've compared Vray RT GPU with Vray Advanced CPU (v3.4) on 3DS Max 2016. Maybe I'm missing something, but CPU render engine makes way way better image quality. I Always get very noisy images with GPU no matter what settings I'm using.

 

For me GPU is not a valid option.

[Nikolaos M]

There cannot be a direct comparison between gpu and cpu rendering for any scenario. Gpu rendering is quite faster in simpler scenes, but as the scene setup gets more complicated (more light sources, more complex shaders, fur and hair modifiers etc.) cpu rendering gradually takes the lead. And the most important factor for ArchViz is Vram amounts. There are pros that usually need more than 20-25gb of memory for their renderings, so gpu rendering is out of the question for the time being. When 24-32gb of VRam is finally mainstream in gpus and the various rendering software optimizes things for gpgpu, then we might see a big change in this field.

[Adrian Denne]

well yes it definitely depends on what you are doing but i would hazard a guess that quite a lot of people don't require 24 gig of vram, and with some serious work being completed with GPU renderers currently, along with potential advancement with real time etc, its worth thinking about when spending a bit of cash. Either way the answer should always be based on what you require.