Indigo Renderer Forum

The new Nehalem based Mac Pros are out

I'd like to see 8-socet motherboard coming out for i7/Xeon.

8 cores or 8 sockets?

Lets see 8 sockets * 8 xeons@ 1469.99 = $11759.92

And thats just CPU's nevermind the 32GB of ram, Motherboard, LARGE case, SSD drives in raid0.

...by the way there are Xeons now that can operate in more than pairs, they are the 7XXX series and I can assure you they are more than that per cpu. From memory they are around 2 x $ over the price of a dual capable Xeon of the same clock speed.

So long story short an 8 socket Xeon system (still not sure Xeons can go that high yet; AMD Opterons can) would cost you a very large deposit on a very nice house.

That and I don't even know if 8 socket is currently possible with intel or amd's cpu's

Yes 7000 series are very expensive ~ 4K $ / 1 cpu. But 8 Xeon E5420 cpu-s are like 3070 $ (8x L5420 ~3670 $).
Some cheaper fbd memory 667mhz 2Gb ~ 80 - 100$ ---> 16x ~ 1600 $.
Nvida GT9600 is more than adequate ~140 $.
No need for expensive harddrives. I had raid0 4x 250Gb (200 - 240 Mb/s) ~250 $, never used it much so i removed it.
Watercooling + case for mATX MB.
Total might be ~5500-6000 $.

i7 920 is about 30% faster than E5420
8x i7 920 is 36x faster than my c2d e4500
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

My c2d e4500 rocks
8Gb was to little for 4M ve, temp was 13Gb cpu load 1%, is it normal?

I am very excited. The dream is finally a reality.

My Intuos4 arrived today and I just pulled the trigger on the new Mac Pro. Due to custom setup I should have the new machine in about 2 weeks. Earlier if I'm lucky.

Quick Summary:

2 x 2.66 Nehalem
6 x 2GB Ram

1 x ATI 4870
1 x 30" ACD Monitor

1 x 640GB, Boot
2 x 1TB, RAID0
1 x 1.5TB, Backup/Permastore

So excited I could burst

*lust*

thats a rather nice machine you've got there...

WytRaven wrote:I am very excited. The dream is finally a reality.

My Intuos4 arrived today and I just pulled the trigger on the new Mac Pro. Due to custom setup I should have the new machine in about 2 weeks. Earlier if I'm lucky.

Quick Summary:

2 x 2.66 Nehalem
6 x 2GB Ram

1 x ATI 4870
1 x 30" ACD Monitor

1 x 640GB, Boot
2 x 1TB, RAID0
1 x 1.5TB, Backup/Permastore

So excited I could burst

do want!

Argh! I have everything now...Monitor, hard drives, blu-ray burner, graphics tablet, software....only thing that hasnt shown up is the Mac Pro itself...

Just received word that the MP has shown up at work (had to be on my day off didn't it) so I'll be picking it up shortly. I should be able to give some performance results over the weekend, assuming of couse that installation etc all goes smoothly

Hopefully nothing is DOA

Very nice setup you have there, but why the 4870? do you play any games?

Why does everyone think a high powered 3D card is only for games? What do you think is going to power OpenGL blender viewports with hundreds of millions of polys at 2560x1600 resolution??

I have it now, I just installed the 3 additional hard drives and blu-ray drive...talk about painless this thing is a work of art and a feat of engineering at once!

can't actually wire it up yet as I have to do some work first using this old PoS

Godzilla wrote:Hopefully nothing is DOA

You had to jinx me didn't you 1 of the 6 2GB DIMMs was DOA. Not Apple's fault. The RAM was the one thing installed by the reseller I bought the machine from. They will have another module out to me first thing Monday.

This means the machine is running slightly crippled right now as the triple channel mode of DDR3 is out of action so my memory bandwidth is nowhere near as good as it should be.

Despite this I decided to do a quick test of rendering speed anyway just to get a feel for what I'm in for. I chose a scene I did as a quick demo of my real diamond material which involves nk gold and 80 odd diamonds (diamond uses cauchy and tabulated absorption). It's being rendered at 2560x1600 with 2x supersampling. In 22 minutes it has reached 190spp. That is pretty freaking fast even in it's crippled state and this is with me copying crap loads of data onto the new machine in the background at the same time as well as browsing the net.

Unfortunately I have run into heaps of problems with mac indigo/blendigo just trying to get this test up and running. Paths are screwed; had to copy all textures into same folder as .igs and edit xml to even get started. Before that I also had to use the terminal to copy the exported scene from /tmp to my render folder (wtf? um how about returning things back to the old beldigo way of letting us choose the export path please ) as auto launching pops an error message claiming indigo is incapable of reading files of type "Indigo Scene Format"...o...k.... Which then loads fine if you manually open....which of course can't be done unless you move the exported scene out of the /tmp folder as it's inaccessible from the standard file dialog.

Once I have then replacement DIMM I will run some proper tests using one of the example scenes so people can have something to properly compare against.

By the way...I am sooooo happy I bought this thing. It is sweet like candy

(275spp in 33 minutes now)

Why not pull out two more dimms? That would get triple channel going again and I would think 6GB should be enough to "get by on".