I'm thinking my current PC is getting old and tired.  It's developing multiple issues including:

One monitor not working (not monitor but video card - likely)

Crashing on large renders in DS, Vue 8, Cararra (2000+ X 2000+ pixels).  Does not crash on non CPU intensive applications.  Doesn't crash as often when using Reality and the Lux render engine, rendering with the GPU.

I have a Win7 Home 64 bit based system with a AMD Phenom Quad core, 8GB RAM.  Video card is a Nvidia GeForce 9400GT. 

A sales rep at Fry's told me the Phenom is not powerful enough to handle the kinds of graphic intensive applications I'm trying to do, which are mostly still scenes.  Sometimes I render larger outputs 2000+ pixels for print applications.

I used to be a gamer and used AMD exclusively for many years but am now looking at switching to an i7.  What are your thoughts?

First off, never believe a sales rep, they will say anything to make a sale, LOL. I love going into a store and asking a rep questions to which I already know the answers, LOL.

Definitely get a high end CPU, will be good for rendering and gaming. Video card, doesn't have to be that great for rendering, but a good amount of memory is a plus. Your existing card is pretty low end, any of the GTX 400 series should do fine (GTX 480 is what I have).

AMD or Intel doesn't matter for rendering, only makes a difference for gaming. The latest AMD Phenom IIs are nice if you want to stick with AMD. For rendering, I would double your memory since you are 64 bit to 16 gig. a good MOBO is key, so some google searching to see what the best is once you decide which CPU you want.

I am on my 12th computer, built this one myself, but have used store ones also, had great experiences from ibuypower.com in the past, no issues, good prices.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the tips.  I'm monitoring and logging my CPU core temperatures and RAM usage right now during a long render to see if there are any anomolies before a crash.  So far so good.  I also found out one of my monitors is bad.  I may take it apart and see if any problem is obvious.

Your crashing on cpu intensive stuff probably has it's root issue in heat.  Crack the case open and make sure your cpu fan and heatsink are nice and free from dust and the other assorted crap that gets sucked into your computer.  That's just a short term fix though.  I have a phenom quad core too(9800gtx) that just plain doesn't cut it anymore.   The twin core in my wife's laptop renders faster than this thing.  So, I know how you feel with the whole issue. 

Quote - Your crashing on cpu intensive stuff probably has it's root issue in heat.  Crack the case open and make sure your cpu fan and heatsink are nice and free from dust and the other assorted crap that gets sucked into your computer.  That's just a short term fix though.  I have a phenom quad core too(9800gtx) that just plain doesn't cut it anymore.   The twin core in my wife's laptop renders faster than this thing.  So, I know how you feel with the whole issue. 

I have been monitoring the CPU temp during rendering and none of the cores gets above 51C.  Also since monitoring, I haven't seen a crash, including letting a render go for 23 hours.  I did notice during that render that my memory usage got up to about 97% early on.  I was wondering if DAZ Studio was allowing the system to run out of memory.

Regarding one of my monitors, I discovered that 2 of the capacitors in the power supply have popped.  I found replacement power supplies new on ebay for $21, so I ordered one.  If that fixes the problem, it will save me about $79

Drats! I had a nice, long list of goodies for you and tried to cap it off with a big smiley. Somehow that closed my window.

Quick recap: Get as much memory as you can. Those large rez renders eat memory, as does any amount of massive scene building you care to indure. The extra buffer space never hurts.

I'm an AMD backer myself since my first 350mhz screamer . For the money, you just can't beat them. Their FX 8 core series is top dog right now, though when I built my current rig, the 1090T Black was the fastest CPU. And I whole heartly vouch for watercooling if you're planning on doing the type of renders you spoke about. It's just silly not to get the extra protection for your components and have the peace of mind that you won't have a melt down. With my little office off the back of our house, it gets to around 92* when its 108 outside. With my little window unit blasting, it'll come down to 80 or so, but even with my rig on full load, the CPU has never eclipsed 38C.

On your video card, you'll definitely want to upgrade. I've always liked nvidia, which is also prime with all the GPU-rendering goodies if you go that route eventually. I specifically went with an Asus mobo with SLI to run two of the cheaper GTS450's which were equivalant to the GTX480, and cheaper still by about a c-note. Lux isn't quite there yet, but when they get that mode sorted out, I'll be glad of the extra horsepower.

Anyway, rambling on, you seem technically sorted from your above poke into the monitor. Next time you boot up, check your bios to see what your max temps are safeguarded at. If you're crashing and suspect it's heat, that would be my first check, as well as what Sharky mentioned about your fans. I clean my screens out/off once a month due to dog hair and whatnot that tracks through here. PC Probe can do it realtime as well if you have it.

Have fun with that build, and come visit us in the Reality thread in between!

These suggestions are also good for me since i also plan to buy a new PC

What about the integrated graphic GPU like Intel HD4000 i can see in the descrption of the new Ivy bridge for Z77 motherboard ? Is it mean we can forget to buy another graphic card video?

I use Poser,DazStudio. Vue d'esprit,Photoshop extended

Thanks

I haven't run an integrated video card in anything except my laptop, so for what it's worth, my advice is to at least get an entry-level video card that's fairly recent. Although the GTX 4xx series is still a great card and affordable for being two gens old. If you ever want to game or do serious GPU rendering, you're going to need a fast card with as many cores as you can afford. For nvidia, that's CUDA cores with 'Fermi Architecture' for the 400 series; I forgot what they called the newest version. Why this is important is for GPU rendering, which is truly the future of the industry. It's the closest thing that most of us will have to a real-time render farm.The card's max memory is also of consideration for this purpose. 2gb on-board ddr5 would be nice, but most are 1024mb or thereabouts.

Anyway, my .02.

you can get a radeon hd 7770 for 129 and it's a monster of a card.  not to mention that it's strong enough to pull off gpu renders and be worthwhile.. and still be flexible enough that you can use it for more than just 3d graphics.  all i could, personally find online were the 1gb versions but it does come in a 2gb version

Rendering is one of the few aspects that uses to advantage as many cores as you can get. Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition 3.30 GHz 6-Core Hyperthreading Processor would be the best possible but is ludricrously expensive and poor value for money. An i7-3770 at about £260 has 4 cores and 8 threads and is reasonable value if you have the money. An AMD FX-8150 8-Core CPU offers reasoble value for money.

You can get the same performance from an Intel 3930K, as the 3960k at almost half the price.

They are excellent overclockers and about the fastest desktop processor you can get.

I have three systems built around this platform...thoroughly recommend it.

S.K.

As far as processors go; since I primarily use LuxRender(or should say "only use luxrender"); I went to their wiki and to the benchmarking chart.  Then just started at the top for performance and went down the list until I got to a cpu I could actually afford on my full-time-student-with-a-wife-and-five-kids budget.  That landed me at the AMD Phenom II X6-1090T.  It's luxrender scores were pretty outstanding for the price and it's cheap enough I might be able to afford to rebuild the wife's puter too.  As far as vid card goes; luxrender seems to work better with amd cards specially since I do a lot of gpu rendering.  For the measely 129 pricetag, the HD7770 is a pretty darned good card; unless you have the cash to dish out for a mid to high level firepro card.

Attached Link: Octane, GPU-driven Renderer

**
**

don't forget that there is Octane, first renderer which uses the GPU, to some degree Lux is also using it. So get a good CUDA-capable nvidia GPU and you could benefit finaly from this high-end GPUs. To my knowledge no other renderers uses the GPU, do they?

I'm wondering since years why consumer gpus are almost only used for gaming. They could do much more than that. Not that much like nvidias Quadro or Tesla. In my opinion they're wasting potential power and performance.

Quote - Hello krickerd,

**
**

don't forget that there is Octane, first renderer which uses the GPU, to some degree Lux is also using it. So get a good CUDA-capable nvidia GPU and you could benefit finaly from this high-end GPUs. To my knowledge no other renderers uses the GPU, do they?

I'm wondering since years why consumer gpus are almost only used for gaming. They could do much more than that. Not that much like nvidias Quadro or Tesla. In my opinion they're wasting potential power and performance.

Thanks for the link.  Looks very impressive but not compatable with DS or Vue so not something I'm interested in right now.  It's difficult to keep up with technology.  Always something better coming out.

There's a few other GPU renderers out, two of which go for more than $5K per license. I forget what they are (strange names), though some of that was forgetting due to the price tag.

There is one other free option if you really want to play for free, which is Mach Studio Pro. Not sure what happened with it, but it was a very expensive program that went belly up not long ago. You'll have to break out your google-fu to find the legitmate download link, but it's out there to try if you're curious. I didn't bookmark it, but search and you'll find it.

I'll try to remember the other two names. I think one is maxwell (think! that is), and the other is a hybrid CPU+GPU. The web page was red and white if anyone else knows off hand.

Edit: Remembered another, Indigo. 600 euros last I checked, very similar to Lux and has GPU ability but not free

Just remembered this one, I think it was the strange name doo-dad: Kerkythea. Don't know much about it, but I remember reading some time ago it was open-source and again similar to Lux, being an unbiased and physically-based renderer.

Maxwell is CPU only.

There are many GPU rendering engines, Arion, Indigo, Cycles from Blender, VRay RT, Mental Ray Iray, etc.

Thanks fasttam and superboomturbo... :)

Quote - Maxwell is CPU only.

There are many GPU rendering engines, Arion, Indigo, Cycles from Blender, VRay RT, Mental Ray Iray, etc.

Ah, Arion was the red and white one I was thinking of! Thanks for the memory jog. 

Quote - Drats! I had a nice, long list of goodies for you and tried to cap it off with a big smiley. Somehow that closed my window.

Quick recap: Get as much memory as you can. Those large rez renders eat memory, as does any amount of massive scene building you care to indure. The extra buffer space never hurts.

I'm an AMD backer myself since my first 350mhz screamer . For the money, you just can't beat them. Their FX 8 core series is top dog right now, though when I built my current rig, the 1090T Black was the fastest CPU. And I whole heartly vouch for watercooling if you're planning on doing the type of renders you spoke about. It's just silly not to get the extra protection for your components and have the peace of mind that you won't have a melt down. With my little office off the back of our house, it gets to around 92* when its 108 outside. With my little window unit blasting, it'll come down to 80 or so, but even with my rig on full load, the CPU has never eclipsed 38C.

On your video card, you'll definitely want to upgrade. I've always liked nvidia, which is also prime with all the GPU-rendering goodies if you go that route eventually. I specifically went with an Asus mobo with SLI to run two of the cheaper GTS450's which were equivalant to the GTX480, and cheaper still by about a c-note. Lux isn't quite there yet, but when they get that mode sorted out, I'll be glad of the extra horsepower.

Anyway, rambling on, you seem technically sorted from your above poke into the monitor. Next time you boot up, check your bios to see what your max temps are safeguarded at. If you're crashing and suspect it's heat, that would be my first check, as well as what Sharky mentioned about your fans. I clean my screens out/off once a month due to dog hair and whatnot that tracks through here. PC Probe can do it realtime as well if you have it.

Have fun with that build, and come visit us in the Reality thread in between!

I'm adding to my official wishlist now.  How about 2  GeForce GTS 450 cards running in SLI with an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard and an AMD FX 8150 processor?  32GB RAM and a solid state drive with windows and maybe VUE and DS installed on it?

Quote - I'm adding to my official wishlist now.  How about 2  GeForce GTS 450 cards running in SLI with an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard and an AMD FX 8150 processor?  32GB RAM and a solid state drive with windows and maybe VUE and DS installed on it?

Sounds like a winner to me! Though out of curiosity, I wonder what the equivalent of the GTS450 is in the 600 series. Might run for the same price as those older gens and will obviously run faster (or at least more efficently) with the newest chipsets.

Add: One item of note if you're planning on doing lots of renders: Though those solid state HD's are fast, they haven't quite got a grasp on high capacity yet. The 10K rpm traditional hard drives are still very viable and a 2TB will hold lots and lots of render scene data files, content, etc. Not to mention they're quite cheap, compared to SSD's anyway.

Well, I've done it.  I put together my system Friday night, Saturday morning.  It's working pretty well.  I've run some comparitive tests in Vue 8 between my old PC and the new and the new is rendering between 2.5 to 3 times faster.  The only problem I'm having so far is that I can't render scenes in Lux with the GPU.  I get a runtime error.  I got those GTS 450 cards and have them in SLI mode.  I have the latest drivers so that's not the problem.  Lux renders just fine with the CPU.

Quote - Well, I've done it.  I put together my system Friday night, Saturday morning.  It's working pretty well.  I've run some comparitive tests in Vue 8 between my old PC and the new and the new is rendering between 2.5 to 3 times faster.  The only problem I'm having so far is that I can't render scenes in Lux with the GPU.  I get a runtime error.  I got those GTS 450 cards and have them in SLI mode.  I have the latest drivers so that's not the problem.  Lux renders just fine with the CPU.

Which version of Lux are you running? 1.0 RC1 did fine with GPU, RC2 was slightly better, RC3 crashed when loading the video cards. I haven't tried it with RC4 or Lux 1.0 that was released last week. 

When troubleshooting, sometimes it's easiest to start with a simple scene, such as a mesh light and a single prop. Also when building up from there, check Task Manager to see what Lux is spewing into memory. For non-hybrid (GPU only) you have to squeeze your scene into the RAM of the video card. Collect Textures comes into play here. 

There was also a bug in Lux where the OpenCL workgroup need be set to 64 within Reality. It's near the top on the far right of the output tab. 

I was about to boot up Studio, so I'll make a test scene for GPU and see what happens. Hope to see a nice image from you in the near future, and congrats on the new rig! 

I'll try changing the workgroup settings.  Right now I'm rendering a Vue scene.  I've done some test renders with some of the sample scenes that come with Vue 8.  My new rig renders 2.5 to over 3 times faster than the old one and without the crashing problem. :biggrin: