(way overdue) time for a new computer. Partially because still holding onto a 32-bit, 3meg limited Dell causes some new characters to freeze up and never finish rendering on firefly.

Question is... what's important - IN ORDER - and HOW much better is it? I, and maybe others, would love to know from the experts.

Meaning... i7 vs i5 might be $400 difference, but 10% rendering faster. Might not be worth it.

I read LOTS, even on these forums, and people sure differ in priorities and components.  I'd like to see a good (short) summary of required vs nice to have. For example, maybe you GOTTA have 8 meg memory to avoid swapping, but REALLY should have multiple cores to cut the render down to 60% time?

Clearly requirements and restrictions differ and must be identified, so, at least for me:

limits: <$1000 [I'm willing to build it!] (prefer 600) [anyone @2k or more likely already knows what to get and doesn't need the details to decide].

goals (in this space anyway): render hires poser/carrara comfortably without freezing or waiting TOO long.

specific questions: i7 vs i5 vs i3?  multiple cores important? quad vs duo?  8 vs 12 vs 16 gb memory?  Intel vs others?  memory speed important? cache?  SSD vs HD?  Ramdrive?   

Bonus: Places to purchase better than others? newegg? fry's (walkin)? dell?

Thanks!

I'm not an expert, and this is purely subjective. But all I can say is that for high res renders, my machine is not fast enough and sometimes comes close to using 90+% of memory. However, people with more patience might be totally happy with it. It runs the software just fine.

Specs in signature: it's an old i7 with 12GB of RAM no SSD.

I'm considering upgrading, so I'd be interested in this thread as well.

1. Number of physical cores; the more the better; Poser will use what you give it.  Note that an AMD FX chip has only one floating point core per each two integer cores (a six core FX xhip actually has only three FP cores), which hurts their performance in comparison to the Phenom II when looking at 3DS MAX benchmarks.

2. RAM; It's dirt cheap, so get at least 16GB.

Everything else is incremental...

I dunno...I have a quad AMD Phenom, 6 gigs of ram and Poser Pro 2012 runs just fine for me. shrug

Laurie

I have I7 860 only 8 GB - two years old. Not a bad machine and cheap now.

Using this test:http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2732765&page=3#message_3899733

I get 27 seconds.

This is 7 minutes.

N

not sure, I have two I-7's, one 3.01 ghz, the other 3.4 ghz.  Both have 12 gigs memory, the older, 1tb HD, the other 2tb.  Both Win7, for what that's worth.  The small difference between the speeds isn't noticeable, too little to  make much difference.  Memory, probably not the worst to go extra for.  Graphics card, not sure how much difference that makes, both of these came with pretty high end cards, okay, high end of the middle bracket.  No problems with either, and I've loaded it down with multiple figures more than once.  The only thing I've found that will bog it is using a tree generated with PovTree, two of them make Poser very slow, three will usually put an end to the foolishness. (Meaning locked up so tight the only thing that will work is the reset button.)  Processor speed, I can't compare Intel vs AMD, I have AMD in other computers,  but nowhere near the speed of the two I actually use. 

Probably processor speed first, and as much memory as you can afford.

D.

as W&W said theres really no excuse nowadays not to get 16 gigs of RAM. ive seen decent 16GB kits as low as $70.

buy the processor you can afford.  for rendering and multitasking, number of cores are more important than core speed. the older AMD Phenom II X6s still offer a tremendous bang for your buck in a pure work machine. ive seen 1090Ts on Newegg for as low as ~$100 now. I have one overclocked to 4ghz and its a workhorse. just make sure you get a good power supply and preferably a 125W TDP board with 8-phase power (or if not, then at least an ASUS board that has overcurrent protection). get MOSFET coolers if your board doesnt come with them. stay the hell away from MSI and all budget boards when building with the Phenom X4s and X6s.

graphics card is not really important for Poser and can be upgraded later on. yes, someone will come and point out that it makes a difference in the workspace preview. yeah, you can turn up more of the bells and whistles in the workspace, but in the end its pretty meaningless. i can work just as well on my old machine with a 7600GT as i can on my new one with a GTX 580 -- at a fraction of the cost and power consumption.

64-bit OS is also a must.

a quality power supply is also a must. DO NOT cheap out on a power supply. you should be getting a quality unit from Seasonic, PC Power & Cooling, Enermax or Antec.  Corsair is also OK, but i no longer buy them because i have two that have really annoying capacitor whine even at only 50% of their rated load.

so in summary, id recommend a quality PSU, 16GB DDR3 kit, mid-range ASUS AM3 board paired with a Phenom II X6, Windows 7 64-bit and either use onboard video or get an entry level graphics card. you can easily build this for under $500 and itll be hard to beat for a budget work machine.

Quote - I have I7 860 only 8 GB - two years old. Not a bad machine and cheap now.

Using this test:http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2732765&page=3#message_3899733

I get 27 seconds.

I've got a laptop with an i5 2450m with 6GB - fairly new and it renders the scene from the thread BB pointed to in 45 seconds in PP2012. Even though it's a mobile version of the CPU, it still gives you an idea of what is slower or faster.

I don't think the render difference between an i7 and i5 is only seconds. This is a fairly simple scene and the i7 is almost twice as fast, imagine what will happen with more complex scenes, with reflections and transparancies....... the i7 will be a lot faster.

The only thing you have to keep in mind is your software, not every software will support all of the cores. I've got an 3D movie application which I'm using a lot that only has single core support. It's the reason I bought the i5 and not an AMD. One AMD core is a lot slower then a single i5 core. The AMD's are slower in rendering anyway, the i5 & i7's are much faster then the A4 & A6. The AMD's are cheaper, but you're going to loose preformance. Perhaps Laurie can render the same scene and give the time as well.

This is a decent computer for the money.

Some quick choices I made from newegg.

cpu: AMD FX 8150 $199

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-970A-UD3 AM3+ $109

Memory: Kingston HyperX 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 $104

Power Supply: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX650 V2 650W ATX12V $89

Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb $119

Video Card: EVGA 01G-P3-1556-KR GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Fermi) FPB 1GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card $134

Case:COOLER MASTER RC-692-KKN2 CM690 II $99

Roughly $800.

Quote - a quality power supply is also a must. DO NOT cheap out on a power supply. you should be getting a quality unit from Seasonic, PC Power & Cooling, Enermax or Antec.  Corsair is also OK, but i no longer buy them because i have two that have really annoying capacitor whine even at only 50% of their rated load.

Okay, I'm no expert but I did talk to one about this once.  For your PSUs, which brand you pick partially should be determined by how clean your power is for where the PC will be.  Enermax is good if you have clean power I heard.  Some others will be more reliable if your power is dirty.  Also get one with a good surge response time: it could limit the damage the rest of your PC takes if something happens.

Quote - I have I7 860 only 8 GB - two years old. Not a bad machine and cheap now.

Using this test:http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2732765&page=3#message_3899733

I get 27 seconds.

This is 7 minutes.

Step into my office so we can discuss all that went into rendering that car.  very nice.  Is there a post that shows all the settings that were used to render that?

My entire game plan for buying new computers is to get one that will be able to handle the majority of the graphic intense gaming requirements.  I learned early on that doing this easily gives my computer a 10 year life span provided that nothing breaks.  I had my last computer so long that the heat sink literally fell off chip.  I replaced that computer with a refurbished computer that someone had custom made which was faster than the new store models that were out.  I got a really good deal because it was refurbished.

If you buy a computer too cheap then you may find yourself buying another within a couple of years. Whatever you do make sure the processor is fairly up to date and not a 32 bit.

You need an i7 with hyper-threading. Forget about non-hyperthreaded. You need the threads for rendering.

Lots of RAM. I recently saw a RAM sale for $170 for 32 GB, but that might not be possible in a $1000 PC. But definitely get 16 GB. (Some people think RAM doesn't matter for rendering per se, but that's actually not true: SM themselves will tell you that with more RAM you can render with bigger buckets = faster render times.)

GPU: Here's something to think about. Poser has much improved preview quality, but only if your video card can handle it. Is it possible that for some situations, you wouldn't even need to render if you had your preview settings maxed? If you might face those sorts of situations regularly... getting a good GPU may be worth it.

For my next box, I plan on i7/equivalent + 32GB RAM + SSD and a decent mid-quality ($180-210) GPU. But you can't really do that with $1000, at least not today.

I don't see that  hyperthreading would make much of a difference for Poser rendering.  When rendering, my non-hyperthreaded Phenom II maxes out all of the cores at 100% for the duration of the render; (It actually gets the CPU hotter than the Intel Burn Test.)  If it had hyperthreading, they would still all be maxed out at 100%. 

Of course, hyperthreading can speed up other tasks and programs aren't aren't as CPU intensive,  but I don''t see how it would make a big difference in Poser.  Does anyone have any numbers?

I rendered the scene that BB linked to above, and I got surprising results when increasing the bucket size above the 64 used in the scene (times with textures loaded in PP2012):

Size     Time Seconds

64          38.1

256        39.6

1024      40.5

With a 1024 bucket size, total RAM usage was a bit over 4GB; I have 16, so no issue there.

This is a simple scene with no scattering, raytracing nor IDL, so perhaps larger buckets would increase performance in more complex scenes...

EDIT regarding RAM capacity in a sub-$1k machine, many ASROCK MBs will accomodate 32GB; mine will(although I'm only using 16).  I built it last fall for $760, including Windows 7 Pro....

Bucket size versus speed is not a staight line. There is an increase up to a point, then there is a decrease.

The equation is mostly quadratic - similar to an upside down parabola.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3678486&ebot_calc_page#message_3678486

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2849125&page=12#message_3935169

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3528956&ebot_calc_page#message_3528956

Am I right in thinking the big bottleneck, when rendering will be disk I/O?

I got this notion from a bit of advice Stewar gave me in a thread a while back... where he told me to make sure I had texture filtering on, in order to maximize texture caching.

EDIT: Yup... in one of those threads BB just linked to... xpost.

Applying that, along with some heuristics BB explained regarding min shading rate to number of threads ratios, certainly seems to have made a world of difference to my render times.

Avoiding that disk I/O bottleneck means upping the memory, relative to processor, to reduce swapping... or reducing the max thread count in line with available memory... as I understand it.

I have a quad core i7 with 16GB RAM (as this is max officially supported on an imac currently). 32GB would serve me much better...

Although to be honest I already have to stay lower than the max available number of threads now, to avoid meltdown... or what I fear will be meltdown. That and open all the windows and allow some of the Scottish climate to compensate for the heat build up :lol:

An SSD would have helped me significantly I reckon, in addition to this, on the basis that disk I/O is, apparently, a point of bottleneck.

But I just couldn't justify the extra cost of that... least not in the mac, for a hobby machine.

2GB Graphics card in the imac has made a huge difference in terms of responsiveness, for actually working within the Poser UI, in OpenGL preview mode.

Obvously you have massively more choice going the PC route... and less horrendous pricing... although there really is no substitute for good quality parts I would say... and avoid any false economy wherever you can!

You can probably build a much better piece of PC hardware than my imac, for about half the money, I'd guess... without resorting to using cheap parts.

The bottom line for me is that I just like working within OS X a lot more for CG... and for no real objective reason... maybe just that I develop and support apps, primarily on and for MS Windows, all day at work and want a break from it... the mac casing is a slick bit of furniture of course too.

Sure, if SM brought out a Linux version of Firefly and QM (and I doubt they will, anytime soon) that'd be great, I reckon. I could cope with using Linux outside work...

Cheers

Yeah, I meant that the big render bottleneck would potentially be disk I/O... if the other factors of memory versus processor are not as they should be...

...the issue of texture caching aside slightly... although the ability to do this depends on memory too, I guess.

with 16gb of RAM, switching my memory to unganged mode has sped up rendertimes in Poser.  youll want to benchmark it yourself on your own system to be sure though.

If you want fast, forget Intel I's and anything from AMD that doesn't start with an O.

Depending on how much you want to spend you can build an extremly fast render machine. You get what you pay for, but you do not have to buy it all at once like you do with a desktop.

Going above 24 cores can get rather expensive with Xeons real quick, Opterons are more resonable on price above 12 cores at the lower clock speeds. 12, 24, or 32 slower server cores vs 4, 8, or 12 fast desktop cores?  No comparison if more than 2 or 4 cores are active... Clock speed is not the end all. 4 desktop cores at 4ghtz is not faster than 8 server cores at 2ghtz when using all the cores. Desktop chips clock back a lot when all cores are active, some server chips never clock back no matter how many cores are crunching.

Here are 2 examples of entry level workstation setups that fit in an ATX style case.

Intel route

Xeon E5645 Westmere (x2) : ~1100 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117256

Motherboard : ~260 :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131378

AMD route

AMD Opteron 6234 (x2) : ~800 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113030

Motherboard: ~400 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151213

You also will need all the other stuff, heat sinks, a case big enough for the board, memory, etc...

Note that I priced it out with 2 cpus, you can add one later and stay close to what your budget is now with either setup.

The benefit of building a machine like these is that it will not be outdated 2 years from now. It probably wont be in 5 or 10 either.

Desktop motherboards are usually not upgradable anywhere near to the extent that a server board is. Server boards are getting to the point that they are cheaper than some desktop boards that will never crunch numbers anywhere near as fast as a server board can, when you plug that second cpu and a few memory modules in.

Quote - I don't see that  hyperthreading would make much of a difference for Poser rendering.  When rendering, my non-hyperthreaded Phenom II maxes out all of the cores at 100% for the duration of the render; (It actually gets the CPU hotter than the Intel Burn Test.)  If it had hyperthreading, they would still all be maxed out at 100%. 

 

Of course, hyperthreading can speed up other tasks and programs aren't aren't as CPU intensive,  but I don''t see how it would make a big difference in Poser.  Does anyone have any numbers?

I rendered the scene that BB linked to above, and I got surprising results when increasing the bucket size above the 64 used in the scene (times with textures loaded in PP2012):

Size     Time Seconds

64          38.1

256        39.6

1024      40.5

With a 1024 bucket size, total RAM usage was a bit over 4GB; I have 16, so no issue there.

This is a simple scene with no scattering, raytracing nor IDL, so perhaps larger buckets would increase performance in more complex scenes...

 

EDIT regarding RAM capacity in a sub-$1k machine, many ASROCK MBs will accomodate 32GB; mine will(although I'm only using 16).  I built it last fall for $760, including Windows 7 Pro....

Back to the topic.......

Looking at the numbers, hyperthreading does make a difference. I render the scene with a mobile cpu with 2 physical cores and 4 threads. You render the scene with a 4 core or 6 core desktop CPU (not sure how many cores you do have). Your desktop cpu is only 7 seconds faster. Imagine what would happen if you buy a new i7 with 4 cores or more and hyperthreading, it will outpreform your machine easily, as BB's older i7 has already shown.

My 2 core i5 is almost as fast as your  4 or 6 core AMD Phenom II, so it's safe to say that the asker should buy an i7 if he wants the fastest machine available and not fall for the AMD's lower prices. Spent a little more and he will get a lot more preformance.

Quote - My 2 core i5 is almost as fast as your  4 or 6 core AMD Phenom II, so it's safe to say that the asker should buy an i7 if he wants the fastest machine available and not fall for the AMD's lower prices. Spent a little more and he will get a lot more preformance.

True indeed that the Intels are faster on a per core basis.  However, when I built my system last Fall, the price difference between a six-core Phenom II and an I7 was well over $400; the price/performance curve just wasn't in favour of the Intel chip for me as a hobbyist.  The price difference today at New Egg is still $420 between the 8 core FX and the 6-core I7; one could build a pretty decent second machine for that.  However, prices have come down a lot since on the I5 quad cores...

How fast does your rig render using 4 threads vs 2?

The answer to amd being slower than intel. Overclock. The new chips overclock like crazy.:-)

Don't just look at 6 core Intels... the top of the line i7 4 core with hyperthreading is right around $300, and has far better performance than any of AMD's consumer CPUs. Which is why AMD had to drop Bulldozer pricing thru the floor; top of the line = around $200. But I would still be willing to spend the extra $100-120 for an i7 2600k or 3770 (right now on Newegg, 2600k is $290; 3770k is $340, with good options in between).

HOWEVER.. the OP is very price conscious and prefers to spend $600 total, in which case grabbing a top end Bulldozer may be good value.

A thread for a sub $800 pc.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1289862/looking-to-build-a-new-sub-800-pc

(1) Get as many cores as you can afford

(2) I hardly ever hit the wall on ram (16Gig ) but 24 would be safe

(3)  good video card with at least a gig of ram 2 would be a lot better for large scenes.

(4) Go for a bigger power supply at least 850 or bigger as hardware is taking more and more power

(5) last but not least get a big case so your parts have plenty of room to cool off and lots of low speed fans

(6) really last this time, a couple gig hard drive or two 1 gig and set up a raid for faster read write, preferably 7200 so they are not so loud.

Then print an alien ware sticker and staple it to the side of your case so the gamers are impressed. :-)

Tom

Quote - How fast does your rig render using 4 threads vs 2?

I'll check that for you in a minute, it's an interesting question.

I've done a test scene, a toon scene with an roman arena, 2 gladiators and some public and soldiers, 13 figures in total.

1 thread: 3min17secs

2 threads: 2min11secs

3 threads: 1min51secs

4 threads: 1min41secs

As you can see from the numbers, the extra threads to make a difference, if they're not used in rendering, they're kept free for other stuff and influence the preformance.

With the test scene BB pointed to, 2 thread render the scene in 59secs and 4 threads in 45secs. More threads do make a difference.

Interesting; it looks like there must be about 25% slack cycles that it is taking advantage of.

Thanx for running those numbers, aeilkema...

You're welcome.

Quote - I've done a test scene, a toon scene with an roman arena, 2 gladiators and some public and soldiers, 13 figures in total.

 

1 thread: 3min17secs

2 threads: 2min11secs

3 threads: 1min51secs

4 threads: 1min41secs

 

As you can see from the numbers, the extra threads to make a difference, if they're not used in rendering, they're kept free for other stuff and influence the preformance.

With the test scene BB pointed to, 2 thread render the scene in 59secs and 4 threads in 45secs. More threads do make a difference.

Only as long as the processor can handle that many threads. Anything above that does nothing.

For me poser crashes if I go beyond the number of threads I do have.

If I give my AMD Phenon II more threads than than the number of cores it renders slower...

Just. Wow. Appreciate ALL the responses. Will shop soon (<1 month) with all the info. Thanks everyone!

Have fun shopping! I bought a new laptop a couple of months back and I think I enjoyed shopping more then using it...... now I've got no excuse not to render, so I must work (-;