Fastest Computer possible? For Rendering

shannakae

Hi all, I am doing a lot more renderings for my clients lately and I am wondering about investing in an even faster computer than i have now... Currently I have a Asus Gaming Machine with a separate graphics card(i think it is 3 gigs) and 16 gigs of ram... I would be willing to invest in a desktop computer that I could render faster on if it was worth the investment and it would yield the results I am looking for....

Anyone have any ideas or input on this subject? I am using V-ray render and although it is super fast compared to some of the others it is still relatively slow especially with the amount of renderings I need to be doing...

So what is the fastest computer I can get and what should i be looking for?

Thanks!

numerobis

The "fastest computer you can get" would be maybe a quad socket or even octo socket Xeon system using the fastest available octocores or 10-core Xeons - but i don't think that this would be a good choice unless you have $20000-$100000 too much...

To be able to make a relalistic suggestion for a new system i think it is necessary to know your current system specs and your budged.

Generally spoken there are basically two different options to build a workstation: single socket or dual socket (as i said above there is also multi socket, but this will make your budged explode...). Dual socket components are already much more expensive than normal desktop components.

Another "cheap" option to speed up rendering is to use one or more render nodes for network rendering.

The sweet spot for single processor systems would be an i7 3770(K) or 4770(K) as quadcore or a 3930K as hexacore (with it's successor coming in the next weeks as 4930K).

The problem of the cheaper dual socket systems is their low clock speed which results in a lower single thread preformance (like in sketchup). For a workstation you should look for a high single thread performance.

shannakae

Thanks, I have attached an image of my current computer specks. It is a pretty fast and nice computer...I'm not even sure I am using it to its fullest capabilities...

You are right, I dont have 20k to 100k lying around! I spent 2k on my current computer... I would like to explore some other options like render nodes etc... but I am not sure what those are? Is it like render farm? If so what is render farm? I would think it is some sort of way to render on another "system" or area of the computer so that I could continue to work on my model while rendering.... Not sure if the new Vray has something like this built in or not?

Thanks!

shannakae

Thanks, Vray has added GPU and RT support in the new beta release... From what i can gather, my computers graphic card is a GPU? And does support GPU Rendering... but I have not really seen a speedup of rendering with it.. but i have not really tried it much yet... So you are saying that I can get another desktop and connect it to my network then send something to render on it while i continue to work on my other computer? I like to model on my laptop so maybe getting an even faster desktop for Rendering would be great. I will look into farm rendering, Thanks.

dkendig

http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/help/rt100/render_gpu.htm#hardware This should give you an idea of what we like to have in a system for RT rendering.

numerobis

So it looks like you're using notebook hardware at the moment. Pretty good notebook components but desktop components will always be faster. The 3630QM is a quadcore with 3,4GHz single core turbo.( http://ark.intel.com/de/products/71459/ ) I'm not sure about the all core turbo, but i think i read somewhere that it is 3,2GHz.
So switching to a desktop hexacore like the 3930K with 3,2GHz, 3,8GHz single core turbo and 3,4GHz all core turbo will give you roughly 50% more CPU power.

Yes, render nodes are simply normal PCs that can be accessed over the network for rendering. And if there is a bunch of render nodes networked together it is called a "farm".
Distributed rendering should be supported by v-ray for sketchup
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=38908
Render nodes don't need a good graphics card (unless you want to use vray RT on GPU over network - not sure if this is already possible with vray for SU) only a good GPU enough RAM and good cooling.

Gwyatt

Here is my Build and will see me past the next 5-10 years i hope

Asus Z9PE-D8 WS
2X Intel Xeon E5-2667 2.9GHz Six Core 15MB 130W
2 x Corsair Hydro H60 Rev2 Liquid Cooling System for 2011
7 120mm fans in the case Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced Full-Tower
128 gig corsair 1600
2x Quadro 4000 3gig each SLI ((items i had from old system not in price below))
Dual boot Linux & Win 8 pro

best £6874.98 i spent ((did sell the ex-wife to get it ))

numerobis

Yes the GPU is the "Graphics Processing Unit". I'm not sure if it is really uasable for you for production rendering because v-ray RT still doesn't support all features (like displacement) and is limited by the GPU RAM. But this is a general thing.
Concerning distributed rendering only on the render nodes i'm not sure if it is possible to select only the nodes or if the "manager" is always involved. But in this case you could maybe decrease the threads for v-ray on your workstation.
If you don't need v-ray RT over network now you could buy a small card now and add a faster card later (the next generation of nvidia cards next year will support unified memory addressing to enable the GPU to access the system RAM!)

One thing to keep in mind is that buying a render node will not speed up your daily modeling and testing workflow - unless you always have your node running also for short tests.

One other point to improve your laptop performance could be to replace the HDD by a SSD. (this wouldn't cut your render times, but could be a general speedup)