Advice on i7 Workstation Spec - PRETTY PLEASE!

[designosaur]

Hi!

I was hoping for some advice on my proposed Intel workstation below.

I try to do my research but im not super hardware literate so I worry ill make sub optimal or just plain bad choices.

Im not tied to an i9 solution and am considering Threadripper and dual Xeon systems (W-2135?). But the aim is to find a simple and stable performance balance between single core (for creation) and multi thread (for testing and output). My needs fall 50/50 down this line.

The work I require this performance for is creating complex scenes and animations in 3DS Max and rendering them in Vray (for now) on the CPU.


The Spec:


Components I already own *..


*PSU: Corsair HX850

*SSD: WD 500GB Blue

*HDD: Seagate 1TB FireCuda

*GPU: EVGA GeForce 1070



Components to acquire.


CPU: i9 7960X (32 Thread) - £1500

MB: ASUS Core-X TUF X299 Mk2 - £200

RAM: (room to add more?) 2 x 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 - £330

SSD: (alternative to above) M.2 SATA WD 500GB Blue - £125

Cooling: Corsair H115i AIO 280mm - £130



Totals: £2285



I appreciate the 7960X Is an expensive processor. But, as mentioned above, the goal is for a balance between single and multi thread performance. The big i7s are quick but limited cores for rendering. the high core Xeons are brutes, but often lack the IPC to make working on projects a success. I also felt TR might fall down here as well.

I do use a separate render farm and plan to create another in the future as its showing its age. But for testing on big projects its often better to keep it locally and I still need the performance to actually create the projects.


My questions are essentially:

1: Is this a good idea or is there a better way?

2: Are there any alterations to particular components that would make it better for the same money or cheaper for the same performance?

3: ANY advice on cooling. I understand it can be an issue, though there will be no OC carried out.



Thank you in advance for reading any of this and any advice you might be able to offer!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would be wary of using the cheaper X299 boards as I suspect they are made more for the lower end CPUs on that platform and you need to have a quad channel memory set to make the most use of socket X299 and you have listed dual channel RAM. Also,I would assume faster RAM would help.

Edit!!

Also if you are using a render farm,why would you need to have so many cores in the first place??

Second Edit!!

I looked at this review which tested 3DS Max 2018 and V-Ray:

https://techgage.com/article/battle-...usiast-cpus/3/





https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...ocessors-1043/



Hardware.fr use the earlier 3DS Max 2017.



However,look at the difference between the 3DS Max 2017 and 2018 relative positions,I suspect the newer version might have better optimisations for AMD Ryzen.

Perhaps,maybe you should consider getting something like a Core i5 8600K or Core i7 8700K for the less threaded work??

I assume the design phase probably uses less threads??

Use something like Threadripper for the actually rendering??

That way you can have the best of both worlds??

I mean you could buy a Core i5 8600K,Threadripper 1950X and the motherboards for around the same cost as the Core i9 7960X alone:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...0mhz-gpu-95w-c
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/giga...-31-gen1-a-atx

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-...80w-cpu-retail
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus...sb-31-gen2-apl

That comes to just over £1500.

[designosaur]

Thanks Cat.

Multi thread wise it's true there's little to draw between the better i9s and TR but I'd seen quite a lot of benches showing the, relatively, weak single core performance in comparison.

But I guess you are right that I should choose between getting one, expensive, machine to be OK at doing it all and building a new system of kit with separate units for working and rendering which would excell at their seperate roles.

The new machine will likley make my existing farm obsolete, so I would need to start again anyway. Which is a bit daunting in terms of time spent figuring it all out and doing it properly (nas / servers etc). Currently I just have nodes from my workstation which means transferring all the data to run a 30 second render test is a long overhead.

Thanks again!

[Millennium]

I see that the 7960X boosts to around 3.6 on all cores, with adequate cooling and power capacity, and upto 4.2 to 4.4 on dual cores with Turbo Boost 2.0/3.0 respectively. Honestly these are good numbers.

However if you were looking at 1950X Threadripper you could probably budget a fair bit more to cooling and are likely to hit a 4.0ghz clock on all 16 cores, all the time. Now I understand you don't want to overclock generally but when the savings are so great, why not? It's been done, you'll need to spec for 3000mhz+ ryzen memory but it's doable, and it should be stable. Now it's up to you to decide if Ryzen/TR 4.0GHz will cover your lightly threaded IPC needs, it's pretty close to 4.2 intel but arguably 12% ish less, and if you could get that 7960X to turbo to 4.4 for 2 cores (probably needing a very expensive mobo and great cooling) you would be looking at significant performance improvements on a single thread, in the region again of 16% over the threadripper.

In your situation I would just settle for the 1950x, the prices these days are VERY good, and built the rest of the system around that "compromise"

That's just a suggestion

Take care

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks Cat.

Multi thread wise it's true there's little to draw between the better i9s and TR but I'd seen quite a lot of benches showing the, relatively, weak single core performance in comparison.

But I guess you are right that I should choose between getting one, expensive, machine to be OK at doing it all and building a new system of kit with separate units for working and rendering which would excell at their seperate roles.

The new machine will likley make my existing farm obsolete, so I would need to start again anyway. Which is a bit daunting in terms of time spent figuring it all out and doing it properly (nas / servers etc). Currently I just have nodes from my workstation which means transferring all the data to run a 30 second render test is a long overhead.

Thanks again!

From what I gather some of the design phase stuff will be more single threaded but rendering won't. However,its hard to say since many review sites don't use up to date benchmarks or proper testing,so you then have to go onto forums where it can be more hearsay that absolute facts. So are the bugs down to someone running an older version of the software on a new uarch CPU which it was not optimised for?? Maybe the new version has optimisations.

Since I am not an expert on the software myself,I can't say but its still worth considering.

Its why I suggested,you have a PC with good single core performance,and then have a multi-threaded monster for rendering just to cover both bases,especially since if you only have one PC,once you start a render its not going to be really usable for anything else,plus you have two modern PCs,so at least you have some back-up too.

Luckily for you,you are using CPU based rendering so I assume you could run the rendering PC remotely,ie,no need for a graphics card in normal operation??

[designosaur]

Thanks Guys.

Tempting though OC is, the problem i would likely suffer, on any chip, is that it would take a very great deal of time to do it, and at the end i would probably end up with a pretty shaky result. Of course that doesnt count the 1950 out in either a standalone machine or as part of a dedicated render box.

RE the mini render farm and separate workstation. Youre right that the render machine only needs the CPU, RAM enough to manage the file and id assume an SSD. No GPU. So it would be fairly bare bones. I just need to get my head around the best way to achieve this without suffering terrible time delays from transferring large files around. Especially when i only want to do frequent small renders most of the time (then one big one at the end).

Or maybe im inventing bottle necks where there are none! It is always tricky trying to apply the various benchmarks and all their possible inaccuracies to your own situation.

I guess this is why i as tempted towards having a workstation that could do a bit of both AS WELL as a render farm in the background. But then, i am essentially saying i want everything!

[designosaur]

So...

Having looked around a bit more and taken on some of the above advice. I feel i might be better off, for the workstation element, looking at an i7 8600k.

I appreciate in single core requirements its the same as the i5 8600k but for the small price difference the multi threading of the i7 makes all the difference. On large jobs, 3-4gb, the current (admittedly not brilliant) render node system wont pick up the file before the workstation has finished small test renders.

Which brings me to my question. Considering i want my new render node to become as useful as possible (even if for small tests it doesnt really help) is a 10gbps Ethernet connection one of the primary functions i should be looking for in a motherboard. Or would bottle necks elsewhere likely make this moot? (Or am i again misunderstanding the technology?!)

As before, id also want fast ram, only one GPU, M.2 drive and no OC.

Thanks again for any feedback.