The Ongoing Tale of the New Rendering System + regular use
daveso
Posts: 8,136
i know there are a ton of threads about systems to render DS, but i get lost in all of them ..
Right now I have hopefully enough to buy a new system ... maybe $1500 max ... would prefer lower.
Nvidia GPU is still pretty darn expensive .. but, necessary to render in Iray.
Do you tihnk it might be reasonable to go back a couple generation or maybe one in the CPU department to save some cash?
I get way confused in trying to build my own system, haven't done it in many years..last one was in 2004, so I'm way out of the game as faqr as knowledge. I found a few configurators which help, but still too many questions.
Even places like Cyberpower or ibuypower confuse the hell out of me, and none of their stock configs really meet my needs. its usually not enough ram, GPUs, drives, always something.
1500 seems low every time I configure or add to a system ..it always ends up $1800 or even a bit more. Obviously it would be good to pay $750 or something, and maybe, compared to my system now, which I bought in April 2016, i7 4790 3.6 mhz, 16gig ram- 1600mhz, an onboard HD4600 Intel graphics... might be at least better. CPU rendering is not all that bad on this system, so anything maybe would be better with an nvidia card..or would a 1050Ti not be any faster than CPU rendering?
This system is not really worth trying to update. The power supply is like 250-300 watts, the case is small and will not fit a video card larger than 7 inches or something. some of the 1050Ti will fit, but not dual fan models.
Its so confusing.
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Comments
If you can find one in your area I would suggest getting a used Z840/Z820.If you can find a bare bones system they usually go for under $900. Then you add the ram, processors and GPU as you can afford.You can even add a second CPU if you find later that you have the funds available. If you are thinkg of doing this the best best is to find one with two low end processors already in it as getting the second heatsink and fan later can be expensive. Then buy one decent CPU and pop it in until you have need for a second. Ebay is a great source for these older chips but watch out, as the Z series won't take an engineering/quality sample so any processor with ES or QS in the part number is useless.
Don't be afraid to do the upgrades yourself, you save a ton of money for three minutes of work. The system is designed in such a way as to make it dead easy to replace anything in the box, even the main board, and it comes with up to a 1100w power supply for the hungry GPU's. Even though they are a bit older they can easily be upgraded and the various components are coming down in price slowly. You should be able to build a decent system for under 1500 and if you compare what you get for the money it well worth it. The expansion capabilities are almost endless with the Z series machines. Also while they are powerful they are also pretty quiet, although I moved mine to the basement and ran cables in the walls for my screens and such because the heat during a render was keeping me from sleeping.
Youtube Z840 and you will see what I am talking about.
As for the GPU, sadley there is nothing to be done. The only thin I can suggest is to watch out for deals and maybe buy used, I have had mixed luck with that, my 6gb GPU doesn't display properly but it renders ok, so I just use the 8gb as my display. Not that many of my scenes fit on 6gb anyway but it helps sometimes. Many times I am doing a cpu render anyway as anything over 3 people maxes both of them out. 24 cores comes in handy.
It helps if you look at the system as if it were two computers in one box. Given enough power and space the GPU is almost always interchangeable, but the ram/cpu/psu and up to date ports are specific to the machine. DDR4 for the Z820/840 ram is still pricey so it would be difficult to go over 64gb in your price range but you always have the option later and the V3 CPU's are in the 150 - 400 range.
Currently I have a maxed out Z600 with two 3ghtz processors and 96 gigs of ram. Minus the GPU's I would say I spent about 1200 on it so far. It's ten years old now so the parts came pretty cheap. I had to modify the case to get the 8gb and 6gb gpu's in it as well as add a secondary power supply, but I find I am limited in speed because it's not PCIe3. I am stuck at PCIe2 speeds for rendering. The Z840 will be my next purchase, there is a shop in Toronto that has them on for 850 so the next time I go I am going to pick one up. I have seen a few dealers on Ebay that are in the US that are pretty cheap but watch the shipping charges, these beasties are heavy, it's better if you can pick it up in person.
So far I have had a great experience with these machines.
Have you looked at Newegg? There are many systems new or refurbished for arround $1000 that would cover use in Studio. You might have to add an external hard drive, but I've seen 8TB for arround $140. If you WANT to build your own, they have all the parts. Just be carefull on that, the instructions included with parts now are REALLY sparse. ( I just finished? building a system ) I had to search for nearly an hour on the net on how to remove the faceplate on the case to install an optical drive. And this was a high class case! If it's been since 2004, watch a lot of build videos on youtube.
Gus
If your budget is tight, $1500 for a render box is pretty tight, and you want the best possible performance build it yourself. You can watch a few videos on youtube and be fully prepped to build your own system.
As to your specific questions, going back a generation, not two, on the GPU would be fine if you could find such a card for a reasonable price or are willing to go with used off ebay or craigslist. The 10xx cards are very good cards, not as good at rendering in DS as the RTX cards soon will be but good. The 9xx cards generally have too little VRAM to bother with at this point.
As to what you can get for around $1000 if you build it yourself:
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/kbs666/saved/#view=ybmK4D
...if you are not adverse to subscription software, you can get Octane4 along with the Daz plugin for 20$ a month Octane employs "out of core" rendering which splits the load between GPU and CPU as opposed to dumping the entire job to the CPU if a scene exceeds VRAM like Iray does. Effectively this means you don't need a very expensive GPU with boatloads of VRAM at the outset to render photoreal scenes in a reasonable amount of time.
Granted Octane does have its own learning curve when it comes to setting up materials (similar to RealityLux), however, it offers a wider palette of options compared to the version of Iray that is built into Daz does.
To expand on what stuurguhart said above, you can get refurbed older HP 7620 severs with XEON I7 E5-26xx V1/V2 CPUs through vendors that sell on ebay and on their own websites. Dual XEON 2670v1 (8-core I7 cpu) servers with 64GB for under $600 (shipping and extended warranty sometimes included). There are Dell equivalents too. These units use DDR3 registered sever ram, which is pretty cheap (used) now.
I decided to buy surplus parts (except a new motherboard and PS) to build my own, but it ended up costing me MORE than if I had bought the same unit through one of these vendors. Be cautious - some vendors sell with only one CPU instead of two (although the single-cpu units still perform pretty well).
Lucked into a EVGA Titan X Maxwell 12GB with factory water cooling on ebay for $370. I got 3 sets (24 8 GB sticks) of 64GB DDR3 Samsung RDIMM 1333 (used) for $300, one bad stick out of the lot so far.
Another caution is that some of the older servers seem to have issues with Windows 10. One major cause of this seems to be the MARVELL secondary sata 3 chips. I am running both Win 7 and Win 10 (separate hard drives, plug selected), but made sure that both boot with the Intel Sata 3 controller.
....when it comes to rendering, memory type isn't as critical as memory channels, CPU cores and clock speed (for non GPU based engines). For myself the ideal 3DL/Carrara render box would be a dual 14c/28t E5-2697 v3 Xeon (699$ ea at Newegg) system rated at 2.9 GHz (3.6 in turbo mode) with 128 GB of 4 channel DDR3 2133 memory. (not sure what the maximum limit of processor threads for Daz is, but Carrara can use up to 100).
Drop a Titan-X in with Octane4, and you have the best of both worlds.
Network this with the other two systems I have and I'd have one nice mini render farm.
Agh. Greymom, you have me dreaming again.
Hmm....someone on one of the other forums was talking about building a Rxzen 9 3900x (12 core, not Threadripper) based system (single CPU) for less than $1500 that would blow the socks off anything we have been talking about here in terms of CPU power. I am skeptical, but the Passmark score for such a system is 31,900! This is not a great indication of rendering power, but it is impressive. This is the same score as some $6000 dual-Xeon systems. In comparison, the system I was talking about has a score of 18,100 (dual E5-2670V1), and the one Kyoto Kid was mentioning has score of 27,400. The INTEL 9900X (single-cpu) has a score of 23,000 at almost twice the price of the Ryzen.
I see a list price for the Ryzen 9 3900X on Newegg of $519 (out of stock right now). With $130 for a mid-range MB, $350 for 64GB DDR4 ram, $100 for a power supply, $80 for a good case, that's less than $1200 with no GPU. I would guess that this beast would be pretty good at CPU rendering.
This CPU has been mentioned many times in these forums, but I can't find any data on CPU rendering with IRAY. Obviously it will be much slower than a current GPU.
Ah, that would be a sweet system! And the prices of those slightly older CPUs keep coming down. But my money is spent and I finally got the thing built, so time to get everything installed and get back to my alleged art : )
As for GPU's, I have had good luck with used ones from ebay (from sellers with high ratings). Some friends recently asked me to help them upgrade for as low a cost as possible, and I picked up a GTX 1060 6GB for $130, and a GTX 1070 8 Gb for $225, for them.
i was just at BestBuy ..they had an ibuypower for $1800 ..but with an Intel i7 8700K ... but an RTX 2080 ... its possible to get better price and config directly at the site ... with one of those beautiful AMD 3900X CPU.
It was my intent to downgrade to a 3800x, but you lose 4 cores there.
Thanks to all so far. I'm going to hope for huge Labor Day sales ... none so far. BTW ..BB was selling 2070s for $480.
That would be quite easy to configure.
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/kbs666/saved/#view=DnWykL
That gets you the 3900X, a decent X570 Mobo, 32 Gb of RAM, a 250 Gb M.2 boot drive, a 3 Tb storage drive and a 1660ti which is a decent GPU and could handle some smaller scenes in iray if you needed. It will certainly blow the pants off any used dual Xeon rack that costs in the same ballpark.