Hello,

sometime in the near future I want to build myself a new computer on which I want to run Poser (currently Poser 9, maybe the 64-bit version later). Do you think an Intel Core i5 is a good choice for the processor? It has a built-in graphic, so do you think this is sufficient or would you recommend a separate graphic card?

And what are your experiences with SSDs? Any comments are welcome :-)

Thanks,

Kyraia

Can you provide more information on the reason for the new build. For example, are you looking for faster render times or to render larger scenes or is there a particular issue with your current build you are looking to resolve.

What is your reason for considering i5, and what are you comparing against, i3, i7 or AMD.

Im going to sound like a broken record to some that have read my posts on SSD's....they suck....I worked in a computer repair shop for a long time and SSD's were pretty much guaranteed to fail in a custom build within 6 months.  Folks want to use them as their virtual-memory-swap drive...the constant writing to the drive wears it out.

my build cost me about $600 to put together about 2 years ago....you should be able to put together something better than mine for about the same. Dont skimp on the power suplie

Attached is an Excel sheet listing the render speed of different PC configurations.

Please note that Ligthwave was used for the benchmarking not Poser. But the general concept is the same for both.

The faster the CPU and the more cores the lower is the render time.

EDIT: for some reason I can't upload the file (tried *.xls, *.txt, *.pdf). So here is the link to the post in the Lightwave forum where the sheet can be downloaded:

http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?133251-11-5-s-BenchmarkMarbles-lws-share-your-machine-s-render-time-here&p=1316809&viewfull=1#post1316809

V1.01_ Benchmarks.zip

For example I took out a very fast, a middle fast and a not so fast config out of the sheet:

Hour : Min | CPU                     | overclocked |   OS    |  RAM   |      PC Model

   0 : 34  | two Intel Xeon ES-2687W |     no      | Win7 64 |  32 Gb | Dell T7600

   1 : 15  | one Intel i7 3970X      |     no      | Win7 64 |  64 GB |   ?

   2 : 28  | one Intel i5 3570       |     no      | Win8 64 |   8 GB |   ?

You can see that an i5 might not be the best solution if you want speed (but of course it is a better solution with regard to your purse ;-) I am not sure if more RAM would speed up the i5 config. Unfortunately it was the only i5 example in the sheet, so I can't tell.

(side note: the test scene was made to stress the hardware and therefore is not optimized for good render times - this just in case somebody thinks a few marbles should render faster)

One more note: Some features in Poser are still not coded to utilize multi cores (the worst example I tried is the hair room; collusion calculation is using one thread only on my machine; the other 31 threads do nothing (tested in PPro 2012)). If you want to use those features, you not only need a CPU with as much cores as possible for rendering, you also need a CPU that is fast when only one core or thread is running (in the Intel world that normally means as high GHz as possible).

Regardng the integrated graphic unit:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5871/intel-core-i5-3470-review-hd-2500-graphics-tested/3

It is horribly slow in games and I would expect it to be slow in GL as well.

Regarding SSD:

My opinion is they are the best invention since sliced bread.

You can check all the benchmarks of HDDs and SSDs here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives-and-ssds,3.html

I use them at home and in different company's PCs. Models are:

3 x Crucial C300 (256GB), 1 x Crucial M4 (256GB), 1x Samsumg 830 (256GB), 1 x Samsung 840 (512 GB), 3 x Samsung 840 Pro (256 GB)

Some are used for years some are more new. They all are under heavy stress (even with sporadic full secure erase of empty space). So far not a single failure of any of them. Other collegues have Intel SSDs; also there was not a single failure so far.

Regarding Poser 32 Bit or Poser Pro 64 Bit:

This depends on what you plan to do with it. Main limitation of 32 Bit is that firefly cannot address more than about 3 GB. If your scene requires more than that, you either get a crash or render speed will decrese because of swapping.

In case you wonder if you ever get 3 GB scenes have a look in my next post.

I have a work in progress scene with an HDR panorama, high quality IDL settings and a lot of polygons. The room has 83731 and the two world spheres 3200 each (I am using two spheres because I want to test if I get better IDL by using one sphere to show the panorama image and the other one for IDL lighting; so its mainly a test of an IDL proxy concept).

As you can see firefly is already asking for far over 2 GB RAM. But there is no figure in the scene, no textures for the room and no furniture. So it could be that the final scene already needs more than 3 GB.

Tested in PPro 2014 (64 Bit).

my 2 cents:

1. do you go 32 or 64 bit OS?
   With 32 bit your user mem is limited to 3Gb (2Gb if you run Windows and don't adjust it). A scene plus each well dressed figure in it take about 500Mb in rendering so that puts a limit on your results - while as madno2 shows: there are exceptiong to this rule of thumb. Running Poser 9 or PoserPro 32 in a 64 bit OS presents you the same 3Gb limit. Only PoserPro 64 in a 64 bit OS takes the limits off. In that case, more physical RAM available prevents disk-swapping in very rich and crowded scenes.
   (I run win7-64 with 24Gb RAM)

2. do you render with Firefly or do you consider LuxRender or Octane?
   FireFly likes lost of CPU power but brings no videocard requirements, Octane requires a high-end nVidia (!) card with lots of CUDA's, LuxRender takes both videocard suppliers and mixes with CPU.
   (I run an overclocked i7-990 with 12 threads, and a basic nVidia 560. Will uprade to nVidia 780 or Titan for running Octane soon. Videocards are easier to upgrade later than CPU).

Note that LuxRender as well as Octane might take loads of RAM too while running.

1. SSD is typically a write-less-read-very-often device, and should NOT be used for temps etc. Do not defragment them either! I use my SSD for OS/Program Files and a Manuals cataloque (my 256Gb is only 40% utilized), my data is on a normal HD (6Tb in the casing, 12Tb external incl backup), so the SSD just speeds up program launches. As I run a say 1Tb Poser / Vue / ... Library, there is not much sense in assigning a SSD for that. Far too $$$
   I prefer loads of RAM (24Gb - my motherboard limit), and dedicate a portion of it (4Gb) to a RAM-disk which takes my temps - I reassigned the Windows TMP and TEMP settings - , and as a plus: it always comes up clean after reboot.

2. consider other programs you're running as well. Vue loves RAM but - except for xTreme - takes 8 threads max for rendering, and does not use GPU. Photoshop loves RAM too (and again: do not use your SSD for swamp/temp/workspace).

All the best.

madno - Very interesting reading!  Your conclusion agrees with other benchmarks I read for 3DSMax. Was surprised to see in the other benchmark memory speed did not have much of an impact, the reason given in the review was the on chip memory handling.

Have heard Win8 is better at handling multicore than Win7 so is faster.

The other thought is if the idea is to do other things on the PC whilst a render is taking place the hyper threading on the i7 would make it a better choice.

Obviously going for higher clock speeds will have the negative impact that more power is required so the system will need more cooling, generate more heat and noise, and cost more to run. The new Haswell boards require less power but will cost more.

 

Hi ironsoul,

interesting you found the same conclusion. Seems to me all the benchmarks with CPU based renderes come to the same result: "Cores and GHz".

Like aRtBee said its different with the GPU engines of course (there it is about CUDA cores, CUDA version, CUDA speed and the graphic card's on board RAM (for current version of Octane, the Nvidia CTX 580 3GB version seems to be the right choice).

Regarding the "SSD gets damaged if you write on it" discussion.

Here is a review of the Samsung 840 Pro including a comparison to the standard 840.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/05/samsung-840-pro-review-256gb/

The conclusion is, that if the system writes 10 GB of data each day (and the internal overhead extends that to a real 35 GB write to the storage cells) one can expect that:

• the standard Samsung 840 with TLC chips is fully dead after 19 years of use
• the Pro Samsung 840 with MLC chips is fully dead after 60 years of use.

If you like to read more about what it is all about; here is a good starting point:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

Regarding the question of swap file. I run SSDs everywhere and put enough RAM for the purpose of the PC (notebook has 8 GB; Workstation has 32 GB). Swapfile is completely off, so no unwanted writes to the SSD. aRtBee mentioned defragmentation. Luckily the Windows7 SP1 installer identified my SSDs correctly and switched off defragmentation automatically. But it is a good idea to crosscheck.

To some extent we can only guess by comparing one program with another, the most important aspect is compiler optimisation, its very easy to code a function one way which the compiler treats as  scaler and by changing the logic to move to vector without the programmers knowledge. We don't know Poser is coded and optimised (given Poser's developers experience I would expect the code to be efficient and make the best use of the instruction set for their particular logic).

Sorry, what I was saying above badly is could we try a similar benchmark to the lightwave work with Poser?

Why not?

I'll start a new thread about it.

Stay tuned.

madno2,

 

Some folks don't know enough about computers or don't care to to set up their SSD's the right way. This is where I'm coming from. There were plenty of builds that my shop did where the customer wanted an SSD for speed and was intending to use it for the swapfile. We would advise against using the drives the wrong way but the customers would not listen or understand and we would see them back with dead drives and lost data. As long as someone knows how to change their settings and maintain their computer the right way then fine go out and buy an SSD...but if you are the kind of person that dosn't know or care about how the coputer works, you shouldnt be messing with SSD's.

Hi ghostship2,

I know what you mean. As far as I know early SSD generations suffered from more or less experimental firmware, bad controllers, early stage of cell technology, non exitant garbage collection, etc.. Windows7 before SP1 did not recognize SSDs correctly and was not TRIM aware. It left defragmentation on which caused alot of unwanted writes etc. Windows XP did the partition alignment wrong, which made the SSDs slow (and in some cases HDDs as well) and so on and so on. I can imagine that the shop you worked for had to deal with complaints. I only wanted to point out, that the current state of the SSD technology and Windows improments gave us a situation where an avarage user could use an SSD without to frear that it will be dead after a short time (the better products even come with a software that does the Windows settings check automatically). Regarding the know how you mentioned, I guess the people here on Renderosity are a little tech addicted (hey, they got Poser to work). I also checked the Rendo homepage of the OP before I posted. There he writes that he is a computer administrator in his job. Because he directly asked about experiance with SSDs I answered that my and our companies one is very postive (while all SSDs we ever bought are still running, we had to replace two notebook HDDs because of head crash).

Hi

My two cents worth, don't get an SSD, use two regular hard drives and put all your data on the one that doesn't have Windows on it.

While a SSD will improve Windows performance it doesn't have a lot to do with running software that is video intensive, put the money into your video card.

I have 2 1 TB drives partitioned into 4 partitions.

Windows and software is on one partition, everything else is on the others.

Get a good video card, my suggestion an nVidia 6 series, or maybe the new 7 series (I have a 680, 4 gig card and I can generate 140 fps running Skyrim in Stereo 3D full HD with everything set to max).

Go with an i7 processor, over clocking optional.

Go with 64 bit and at least 16 Gb of ram, (I have 32).

I'd go with a Asus Z87 or Z87 Deluxe mother board.

Sound card it up to you, if the sound isn't really important use the onboard sound.

If you are overclocking go with Asetek liquid cooling, no maintance.

If you want to just buy a system go to Falcon Northwest, the best custom built computers.

For around $1,500 to $2,000 you can get a system that will blow everything away.

Or look at the components they use, and build it yourself.

Mike

Hi everyone,

thanks, that was very interesting.

I am planning to use Windows 8 (64 bit) on the new system since my current computer has XP (32 bit) and only 2 GB of RAM. Poser 9 needs a lot of time to start up and then I can't do much before it crashes or freezes.

I like XP a lot but it seems one can't stay with the old stuff forever :-(

 

Kyraia

Just to add my experience into the mix.  I use an SSD for my 'C' drive with Windows and Poser loaded onto that, other programs are installed onto a conventional hard drive.  My reasonsing behind this is the PC was built for Poser and it gets used everyday.  All temp folders for Windows, Web browsers and the like are remapped to a standard drive.  This gives me a fast launch of Windows and Poser, not essential, but I notice the difference when waiting for my old, non SSD rig to launch.  I have a second SSD, but this is an M drive version sat on the motherboard and is used to accelerate a standard hard drive holding my Poser content.

 

The system runs every day and at least four days a week (I work part time) it runs from dawn to dusk, often rendering while I use it for other things or, on long renders, while I get on with real life.  The system has been used in this way for about eighteen months without problems from either of the drives.