I need advice on 2 machines

[Brian Cassil]

My head is swimming with questions!

 

I need 2 new computers here at work this time. One for actually working on (Max). The other as a dedicated rendering server. As I see it, the computer for working on would obviously benifit from a really nice video card, fast hard drives, but not necessarily need dual procs or tons of ram. The rendering server would be just the opposite, no need for a video card at all, probably doesn't need really fast hard drives either, but would clearly take full advantage dual procs and 2 gigs or ram (maybe more?). That's the way I see it right now. But maybe I'm totally wrong?

 

Regardless, the questions I really have are regarding 64 bit processing. We seem to be at the cusp of the ushering in of a new technology, and these computers need to last me a little while. I realize that any time I buy a new computer it's going to be outdated by the time it hits my doorstep but I think this is a little different. I would hate to buy a pentium 4 EE and see max 6 be 64 bit enabled and basically see my output potential cut in half in one month or so.

 

So as far as processors go what do you all think I should go with for both computers. Right now I'm leaning toward getting the single pentium 4 EE for the "working" computer. It seems to be the clear cut winner there. Maybe that all changes though if Max 6 is going to be 64 bit enabled. The rendering machine I really have no idea what to get. I'm considering holding off and waiting a couple months or so and possibly going 64 bit after it all falls into place. But if that's not going to help (in other words if there isn't going to be a 64 bit version of max soon)I would rather get something now. I really can't wait on the "work" computer because I'm limping pretty bad with what I have right now.

 

So any help or insight would be greatly appreciated right now. Thanks!

[bigcahunak]

What do you have right now?

A single machine for all tasks?

How many people?

Do you do vid editing? lots of it?

Do you really have enough rendering tasks to keep the render slave busy?

Rendering lots of animations?

 

You are quite right about your configuration assumptions, accept for fast hard drives, which unless you do video editing, arent at all needed (what did you meen by "fast").

However, if I were you, and that depends a lot on how much raw rendering tasks you really have, I'd probably configure it differently. In my opinion the modeling/texturing/lighting setup phase of the job is where we want our fast machine. Most of our renderings are actually test renders - adjusting materials, tweaking lights, cameras, shadows... The final render itself is usually done when we go to bed. Also maintaining two machines to be configured the same - plugins, settings, paths, usernames, textures... arent always that easy. If you ment using the render slave through network rendering then both machines are going to render, which in that case the single cpu machine isnt going to be available for working and on the other hand isnt going to contribute that much for the rendering to justify its existence. Another aspect is the multitasking while working on the project. MAX and PS opened together is a normal situation in which a dual xeon will speed things a lot.

I would go for the singe machine solution - a powerfull dual xeon rig. If you have to have nother machine for non related side work, get another cheap system (an athlon or older p4 on a SIS chipset, maybe a laptop or perhaps your current system). Save for a nice LCD monitor set, a digicam, printer... you name it.

 

I dont know much about 64bit stuff, but I would guess it will take a while for its prices to come down.

 

Good luck

[Brian Cassil]

To answer some of your questions:

 

What do you have right now?

A dual xeon 800 megaherts machine with 512 megs of ram.

 

A single machine for all tasks?

I would like one machine for setting things up, and another to render on. I'll explain why that would be so nice below.

 

How many people?

If you mean in my office there are approx 90. But it's just me and one other guy off and on doin the 3D stuff.

 

Do you do vid editing? lots of it?

Not lots, but some.

 

Do you really have enough rendering tasks to keep the render slave busy?

Absolutely! Especially close to the end of large projects where I may need to generate 10-20 high res images within a short period of time.

 

I guess I could explain why the rendering server would be so nice now. People don't want to wait "overnight" to get there final images. Someone comes to me in the morning asking for an image of a model from a certain point of view and it is difficult enouph to explain that it will take some time to set up the specifics for that view like making sure the camera is creating an interesging image that tells the story I want it to, as well as placing plants, people, cars, etc. in an interesting way, you know, all the stuff that makes the difference between an amateur and a proffesional rendering. That says nothing about... drum roll please... rendering time! I don't know what kind of experience you have had with architects but here they don't want to hear about how long it's going to take my computer to render something. They think that because I have built the entire exterior of the model that they should be able to present pretty much any view of that model and a moments notice. Then couple that with that there are lots of "sniches" in my office who can't wait to tell the bosses that Brian isn't working hard enough because they dont see me crashing away on my computer building thier next great project, which of course I can't be doing becuase my computer is busy rendering someone elses job. Whew! I hope that all made sense. I kinda feel like I've just had a session with a shrink there! Okay back to buisness.

 

Rendering lots of animations?

Yes.

 

...fast hard drives, which unless you do video editing, arent at all needed (what did you meen by "fast"?)

I'm thinking SATA-150 7,200 rpm in a raid-1 configuration.

 

Most of our renderings are actually test renders - adjusting materials, tweaking lights, cameras, shadows...

Agreed. I would intend to send test renders to the rendering server as well. I would simply use a KVM switch to check on their status.

 

maintaining two machines to be configured the same - plugins, settings, paths, usernames, textures... arent always that easy.

Understood, but I have set up network rendering in several offices and I think I'm prepared to deal with maintaining all the necessary configurations.

 

Here's the premise. I usually have several jobs that I am busy with at various stages at the same time. If I had a dedicated rendering server I could send something to render (which may take a couple hours or more) and get to work on one of the other jobs and not have to worry about Joe architect who sits next to me gettin all antsy because he sees me twiddling my thumbs while something is rendering. This may sound like a joke but it has been a real issue here. And please, don't tell me I need to look for another job because I already am. I'm just trying to make the best of the situation I'm in now. I have been alotted certain funds to do this with and it's ample, so money isn't too much of an issue.

 

Congrats to anyone who has reached the end of this post!

[Greg Hess]

Super brian away!

 

I'll post some comments in a little while .

 

When's your buy date? I shall soon have a Dual opt to test on, and can answer some of your questions with direct data if need be.

[Brian Cassil]

I need to throw out an idea at the people who write the checks tommorrow. Arghhh!

 

I won't actually be ordering for a week or so though.

[Greg Hess]

Brian,

 

Whats the budget?

 

Are you using a 3rd party renderer?

 

If your using Vray/Brazil/FR...a Dual Xeon system with hyperthreading is a safe bet.

 

I haven't actually tested any opterons except at siggraph (a dual 1.8 was roughly equivilant to a dual 2.8B Xeon in max, but only have a few select scenes I tested on, so I can't make recommendations based on that data).

[Paul Pok]

I had exactly the same problem, ever since I switched to PURE PCI card; problem solved.

[Greg Hess]

Only problem with switching to Pure, is longevity.

 

What happens when a new render technology comes out, that isn't supported by Pure, that would give you an edge against your competition if you switched to it?

 

Speed is one thing, stability is another, but never forget adaptability.

 

Just pointed this out as Brian wants the systems to last a very long time.

[Brian C]

Hi guys! It's me, Brian Cassil here. I had to create a new acount because as I was updating my account information I guess may password got changed. I can't retrieve my password becuase e-mail here at work is down. So I created a new temporary account and had the pass sent home, I called my wife and she gave me the info I needed.

 

Greg - the budget for both systems combined will be about $7,000. I wont be needing dvd burners or video capture cards with that becuase I can use those from the system I have now. I would like some new monitors though. Those things I saw on the news post here yesterday would sure be nice. Wait, I just spent my whole budget! :gebigeek:

 

I am using FR stage-1 right now. I'm fairly happy with it, although I would like to start playing with v-ray simply because it seems to have more of a future. I guess it really doesn't matter which 3rd party renderer I would be using though.

 

BigCahunak - I am in the process of setting up this office for net rendering right now. I need the dedicated render server for use while people are sitting at their machines. There is always someone who isn't here and I could try and use their machines then but then I would have to browse the office and find an empty desk and I wouldn't have any idea whether they were going to be gone all day or for 5 minutes. Also the idea is to get still images done as fast as possible and the 90 "other" machines aren't all that fast.

 

I'm not too sold on the pure cards. It's a great idea but I also worry about adaptability. I've also heard of some heavy bugginess in rendering certain types of sceanes. And Greg is right about these systems needing to last a couple of years.

[Brian C]

Let's change the budget on that to ~$8,000

[Greg Hess]

7,000 EACH???

 

Thats a huge budget for just two systems. You could build 10 2700+ XP systems for that .

 

I mean really...You could easily afford a very fast dual xeon, and the fastest available opteron .

[bigcahunak]

Hi again Brian

OK, now I gotch'a.

In that case you are probably very much right.

BTW: what about networking all those 90 machines, or some of them, in favour of some rendering tasks...? could be nice...

[Brian Cassil]

That's 8,000 for both systems: The workstation and the rendering server.

[bigcahunak]

8000 for both is still more than enough.

You might even be able to get 2 dual xeons machines depending on monitors, ram amount and vid cards. Wait, you also mentioned SATA raid.... hmmm

Question: Are you going to get parts and get your hands into it, or buy a pre built machine?

 

Just another though, and not anything that I know of, but - is ther any kind of utility, or farm managment program, that will pick, lets say 10 CPUs, out of 90 networked CPUs and make them available for the task, and also give first priority to local user, so if there is over 30% of CPU usage by local programs it will cut the network job off and look for the next available CPU? Maybe even being smart enough and out of available CPUs it will pick faster ones?

Anyone knows about an existance of such a thing? Does it make any sense, or am I dreaming? Just some thoughts here while trying to help you do the actuall work on the dual...

[Brian Cassil]

I mean really...You could easily afford a very fast dual xeon, and the fastest available opteron

Therein lies my question. What is the fastest for my workflow (max w/ FR stage-1) Dual xeon, Dual P4 EE (can you do those dual, and is xeon still faster anyway?), or Dual some version of athlon 64 bit be it 64 FX or Opteron. It seems to me that the only way the 64 bit beats out the P4 EE is if max is going to be 64 bit enabled, or if you can't go dual with the P4 EE.

 

Here's a breakdown of my questions then:

 

Is max going to be 64 bit enabled upon release?

 

Assuming it will not, which order would you place the following procs in performance with max + 3rd party renderer: Dual xeon, Dual P4 EE (if possible), Dual athlon 64 (FX, 3200, or opteron)?

 

for the rendering server -

1.

2.

3.

 

and for the workstation (in this case single, not dual procs I think)-

1.

2.

3.

[Brian Cassil]

Bigcahunak -

 

At this time the bosses are wanting to go with a pre-built system so that we can have support on it.

 

You can set up the monitor in backburner to do many of the things your talking about. The one big thing you can't do is set it up to stop rendering when a computer reaches a certain percentage of usage. That would be cool though. I'm not sure that's even going to help me out here however, because none of these 90 machines are even close to what I want in a rendering server.

[bigcahunak]

Brian

With pre-built, within a week time fram, I'm not sure you'll have all those platforms you mentioned. Have you started looking with manufacturers to see if its even possible to get those configurations (dual CPU+SATA Raid)?

If I got it right than the P4EE is a Xeon chip with 800mhz fsb and 2mb cache that was packed into a P4 shell, but I might be wrong on that. I dont think there is a mobo chipset to support it yet. Maybe the new 875 chip for the xeon (which runs in the Asus PC-DL mobo) will be able to take advantage of EE's characteristics with bios updates in the future.

At the moment, for MAX (no 64bit for max) + 3rd party renderers, I think that Xeons are faster and probably cheaper.

[Brian Cassil]

Well, it sounds to me like there are just a few too many unknowns at this time to really make a good decision. I may end up going with just a good p4 solution to get me by for a month or 2 then get my dream system and hand over the p4 to one of the cad guys.

 

BTW, my question about max being 64 bit enabled is relating to whether or not max 6 will come that way when it ships, or if it will come later in a patch or 6.5 upgrade or something like that. I could speculate myself but I wonder if any of you out there who are in the know are willing to spill the beans or at least give a hint.

[Greg Hess]

Hey Brian,

 

First off....

 

1) The P4 EE is just a Xeon thats had its MP ability removed. (Xeon is 604, P4 EE is 478 pins...the MP part is ALOT of pins)

 

So P4 EE is just for single proc's.

 

If you had to make a decision now, I'd just go with two dual Xeon systems. Is going with boxx possible? I could give you some names and such, might be able to get a system out to you pretty fast. (And at a slight discount)

[Brian Cassil]

It looked to me like there were a few other differences. Aren't xeons 533 FSB and p4 EE 800 FSB? Also it looks like the p4 EE's are the only system that have a 2 meg L3 cache. But that's good to know about them not being multi-proc capable.

[Greg Hess]

FSB is simple to fix .

 

There are Xeon variants with that much cache Brian...their just HELLA expensive.

 

http://www.dljsystem.com/detailsCPU.asp?productID=1462

[Brian Cassil]

Who would buy that!? $3,200 for just the proc!?

 

So tell me what you think of this. Like I stated earlier, it seems to me that my "workstation" really doesn't need dual procs. So what about getting the p4 EE for that. Then go with the dual xeons for the "render server". Would you be able to show me a link or something on how to "fix" the 533 FSB Greg?

 

edit: how important is the extra big cache. If not very important and if I can turn 533 FSB into 800 FSB, then I could see sticking with a XEON or maybe even a good old fashioned p4 on the workstation.

 

[ September 29, 2003, 11:23 AM: Message edited by: Brian Cassil ]

[Greg Hess]

Brian,

 

I meant the FSB isn't a big reengineering. Aka they don't have to do much work to fix it.

 

The xeon's are currently at 533, and the P4 EE is at 800.

[Brian Cassil]

hmmm.. I see. So are you saying there will be 800 FSB versions of xeon's soon? That would be just one more reason for me to wait a little while.

 

[ September 29, 2003, 11:56 AM: Message edited by: Brian Cassil ]

[Greg Hess]

Q1 2004 is what intel last quoted for 800 FSB xeon's.

 

Same time span as the new nvidia cards as well.

 

Wait until want turns into need.

 

If you just wait for the next best thing, you'll be waiting forever.