Need some advice for a new computer

henrib · Post by **henrib** » Tue May 29, 2012 3:45 am

Hello everybody,
first, sorry for my poor english...

i'm planning to change my computers, "working" and "networking".
For the "working" one, it has to be a mac laptop, so, i will wait for the new macbook pro.
Until then, i will buy the "networking" parts.
I need some advice to choose the right config. My budget for this part is max 2.000 €.
My first idea :
- One computer
- Intel 3960x processor
- HDD
- 16 Go ram
- Simple graphic card

Any opinion ?

thx
Henri

Headroom · Post by **Headroom** » Wed May 30, 2012 12:53 pm

Depending on what kind of environments you render perhaps upgrade to a more recent CUDA enabled Nvidia graphics card to be able to use GPU support. as of right now simple pathtracing is the only render ode which is supported by the GPU. in the not so distant future bidirectional pathtracing may be added to the GPU supported feature list.
If you are rendering scenes with many small light sources and lots of curved ( non co-planar ) glass surfaces creating a lot of caustics then get as many CPU cores as fit in the budget.

henrib · Post by **henrib** » Wed May 30, 2012 7:57 pm

Hi,
"perhaps upgrade to a more recent CUDA enabled Nvidia graphics card to be able to use GPU support"
Even on network computer ?
I've read on this forum that with a network rendering, on the network computer, only the cpu is used. The graphic card too ?

Henri

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Wed May 30, 2012 9:08 pm

Yes the GPU should be used on the slave too!

One thing that I would like to clear about Headrooms comment:
In the latest 3.4.0 build OpenCL is even a few samples faster then CUDA on my NVIDIA Card.
I wouldn't actually focus on NVIDIA just because of Indigo.

At some point multiple GPUs could be supported by Indigo (I don't know the actual statement about that from Glare) but here a Main-board with multiple full bandwidth PCIE3 slots would be a great base to update your slave with some even lower budget cards to help rendering...

PigsOnTheWings · Post by **PigsOnTheWings** » Thu May 31, 2012 2:18 am

For the CPU, depending on your budget (which I assume is high due to the SB-E CPU) I would maybe point my eyes towards Ivy Bridge, Xenon or Opteron.

Look at this page: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the- ... k-review/6

Single threaded performance for Ivy Bridge is up compared to 3960X, while the 3960 still holds the multithreaded performance. But for a 2.5x-3x price premium and higher TDP it might be a better idea to look at dual CPU setups (Xenon/Opteron).

This is of course assuming Indigo supports 18-24 threads?

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Thu May 31, 2012 2:33 am

PigsOnTheWings wrote:This is of course assuming Indigo supports 18-24 threads?

afaik its not limited and scales linearly!

henrib · Post by **henrib** » Thu May 31, 2012 2:37 am

it's true, i can buy three 3770 cpu for the price of one 3960.
Does indigo support this kind of computer configuration ?

Henri