Hello folks,

Some of you might remember I've been talking about getting a new system for an absolute age and a half. Well, it's now on order (again) and, this time, it should all actually arrive.

So, with that looming, I'm wondering if someone could take a look at my specs and let me know if there's anything that stands out as being relatively limiting. I am aware that the GPU isn't the best abd will be looking to upgrade that in the near future (suggestions would be appreciated too, thank you!).

Basically, I'm going to be pushing Poser to the max, hopefully, with exceptionally high resolution renders, lots of IDL, SSS, refractions, reflections... you name it. I'm also keen to start animating properly and trying out soft body physics. Is there anything about my specs that would limit any feature of PP2014, that you can see?

Thank you kindly for taking the time to read through.

Glen.

Specs:

INTEL Core i7 4770K OC 4.2Ghz, ASUS Z87-K, 16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 Crucial Ballistix Sport Memory & ThermalTake Contac21 Cooler OVERCLOCKED Bundle. Gigabyte NVIDIA GTX660 2GB DDR5 PCI-E Graphics Card.

Looks good to me. My processor is not quite as fast as yours though the setup is very similar and I run Vue 2014 with huge ecosystems quite effortlessly. I also use IDL with Poser without any issues. So you should be fine for PP2014.

hi, I guess Poser Firefly itself will be the limit :-)

As you said, your GPU will be the bottleneck to crank out the max out of Octane or Reality/Luxrender. For those: nVidia is a must for Octane, the more CUDA's the better, if you have more cards the cuda's add up but the memory runs parallel so the card with the least amount sets the upper limit.

I choose a dual 770 OC/4Gb as the best price performance, only TITAN is better but more expensive. When those cards fire up, so does the sound level. Hence, next time I'll go for fluid-cooling instead. Or a netgear PCI expander (mucho $$$, so I'll have to crack the stock exchange first).

have fun

Thankyou Justmel, that's highly encouraging!

aRtBee: That's interesting about noise levels, because what I haven't mentioned (this is hardly the place really) is that I'll be using this for all of my digitally creative endeavours, which means it'll be my DAW too, where I'll utilise the services of my mixer, monitors and condenser mic to record music, vocals and foley sounds. Perhaps there's a gadget or gizmo out there that will allow me to switch between a high spec but noisy GPU and a low spec but peaceful and mild-mannered GPU on the fly? This has interested me and it's something I'll look into, thanks! :)

P.S. What's a cuda? >.>

cuda = nvidia processing unit. The more the better the faster. Your GTX660 does have 960 of them (my GTX770's do have 1536 each). It's in their specs.

switching / noise reduction: multiple ways possible:

a) the noise only kicks in when the GPU reaches 70*C or up, thats after say 10 mins rendering at 100% (Octane, or LuxRender in GPU mode). In normal use, they're extremely quite. So way one: don't apply large scale GPU rendering when recording sound.

b) put the GPU('s) either in a netgear PCI extender, or in a separate low-end PC (Octane will support network rendering pretty soon). So way two: put the GPU engine somewhere else. Downside: $$$$

c) way three: have a quite low-end and a (noisy) high-end card in your system. You can swich on/off the high-end card at runtime. Downside: I'm afraid this will fully load the low-end card, and low-end does not mean: not noisy. Usually the high-end ones are the quitest, even at full load. And: the lowest amount of VRAM sets the limit for all. So, not recommended.

d) way four: use fluid-cooling instead of air-cooling, especially on the video-cards. This will be my choice, next time.

happy rendering.

Thanks very much aRtBee! :)