Dual Xeons in 2018? Still worth it?

[dhaivatsoni]

Hello guys, It’s been a while since I posted here. It is time to upgrade, We are in need to render multi-minutes walkthrough(s) in-house. Workload is very heavy. Corona, GrowFX, Sometimes VRay and Sketchup.

 

I just consulted a friend of mine, who is providing high-end machines to other studios as well. I am currently using i7-5820K with 32gbs of ram and there are two of it. He said that I should go for dual e5-2630 xeons or dual silver 4114 for price per performance. We are not talking about that as node. It will be separate system with monitor and all. Suggest if making them node can give me better performance per dollar.

 

My Budget is around 4,50,000 INR which is around 6,500$. I can not stretch more than that. I stumbled on internet and even AMD Threadripper 1950x is performing good in cinebench. Even some i9s.

 

I don’t know should I go for dual xeons? Or research more. Only concern is faster rendering in corona, Other things are not very important.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Raytracing is very straightforward, the more cores at a decent speed will be always better, Two head thing faster than one, in this case.

Having said that, you should see cinebench scores of the CPU you are looking for and compare with what you have now, is very easy and it will help you to do an educated decision of how much money is worth to spend on render nodes.

 

Now if you need a workstation that also works as a render node, then it gets a little more complicated because for most of the app is always better to have a faster CPU, instead of many cores.

 

Check cinebench socred, there is also a Corona render bench scene and a list of many people who posted their result, you can search for something similar and see how faster it could be.

You could use this website to compare CPU performance too. This is a synthetic benchmark but still can give you a good idea of how CPU stack between each other.

Best luck.

[Zdravko Barisic]

I think they are still worth of it, specially looking the DDR4 price these months (say hello to miners).

You can check these links to make your decision easier

 

https://benchmark.chaosgroup.com/cpu

 

https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/all

 

You can use search by CPU name. When talking about E5 xeons, 2630 are too weak, E5-2670 is the slowest you should get.

Also, SINGLE board x99 with DDR4 are good, like E5-2695 V3.

1950x is the best, if you already have bunch of DDR4, otherwise, I am not shore.

So, basically, RAM price and amount would direct you to your point. E5-26xx V3/V4 are the beasts, btw.

I hope this helps you anyway.

Cheers!

[dhaivatsoni]

I researched and I am finally going with Dual Xeon Silver 4114 and 32 GB ECC Ram. I am not going to work on it as a workstation. This will be my render node only. I am expanding studio so it will be in rack mounting and Will fill other racks too in near future. Thankyuo so much. Guide me if I am doing anything wrong.

[Josef Wienerroither]

I got some used dual xeon dell and HP workstations based on X79/C600 chipset last summer

 

1* Dell T5610 for ~€350,- ( that one was a real bargain ), including 250MB SSD, basic graphics card

2* Xeon E2680 V1 ( 2 * 8/16 Cores ) for a total of ~€220

32 GB DDR3 RAM ( registered, bufferd ECC which is dirty cheap ) for ~€99,-

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makes it a total sum below €700

 

not bad for a system that achieves a score of 2070 with Cinebench

The dual Xeon silver 4114 score is about 2400 as far as a googling for it revealed

 

Of course it takes some time to find the stuff and willingness to built it yourself ...

[dhaivatsoni]

I am interested. Drop me private message at https://www.facebook.com/dhaivat.soni.7