Potential New System Poser.

[Hornet3d]

I am not sure this is the right place for this so I am happy to have it moved if needs be. I chose this forum as I am only using Poser which a major factor for this post.

OK, so it looks like I may be able to finally upgrade my computer system sometime this year. It is a while before I will will have enough cash but at least there is light at the end of the tunnel. I want to do some research beforehand as this system will need to last me a few years. So a couple of questions before I go looking.

Processor - Should I look at a 6 or eight core i7 with hyperthreading of is it worth looking at the 12-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X CPU with SMT.

I am now using Poser 11 with Superfly with this in mind do I benefit from using a pro graphics card like a Nvidia Quadro P1000 with 640 cores? If so is it worth paying the extra for and 8Gig card over a 4gig? Alternatively should I save a bundle and just go for a good gaming card?

 

[seachnasaigh]

For rendering power, I'd get a workstation/server motherboard with dual CPU sockets (1366). Only Xeon processors will run in parallel, so you'd need to get a pair of Xeons. You can outrun one of my old Xeons if you get an expensive new processor, but you'd have a hard time outrunning two old Xeons.

A lot of workstation motherboards are E-ATX size, so I'd only consider tower cases which accept E-ATX. If you insist on only a single processor, I'd probably try the Ryzen or Threadripper.
Consider a refurb/used professional workstation with dual Xeon processors. Huge bang for your buck.

My workstations all have big Quadros (except TinkerBell's Titan Z). For GPU, the GeForce series (1080Ti, e.g.) will now preview superbly plus they can be used to GPU render in Superfly and Octane. If you want to GPU render via Reality/Lux, then get an ATI/Radeon GPU.

Also consider keeping your current machine and employing it as a render slave (if you have P11Pro).

 

[Hornet3d]

For rendering power, I'd get a workstation/server motherboard with dual CPU sockets (1366). Only Xeon processors will run in parallel, so you'd need to get a pair of Xeons. You can outrun one of my old Xeons if you get an expensive new processor, but you'd have a hard time outrunning two old Xeons.

View attachment 35905

A lot of workstation motherboards are E-ATX size, so I'd only consider tower cases which accept E-ATX. If you insist on only a single processor, I'd probably try the Ryzen or Threadripper.
Consider a refurb/used professional workstation with dual Xeon processors. Huge bang for your buck.

My workstations all have big Quadros (except TinkerBell's Titan Z). For GPU, the GeForce series (1080Ti, e.g.) will now preview superbly plus they can be used to GPU render in Superfly and Octane. If you want to GPU render via Reality/Lux, then get an ATI/Radeon GPU.

Also consider keeping your current machine and employing it as a render slave (if you have P11Pro).

Thank you for the information. I have built numerous systems in the past but, like a lot of things, I am getting a little old and tend to pay someone else to build things (and repair my car). On the other hand I have always like the idea of a system with a pair of Xeon processors at the heart so I will have the look at the ones you have listed and see what is about.

I intend keeping the system I have and as I do have Poser 11 Pro so the render slave is an option. The system does still work quite well but it has a tendency to crash without warning which can be frustrating. I did think that the auto feature in Poser 11 would be a help but sadly it also seems to make Poser freeze on my system, which rather defeats the object.

 

[seachnasaigh]

If searching eBay for a refurb workstation with dual CPUs, use a search term such as "2x X5650" or "T7500 2x X5690".

The T5500 is the smaller Dell midtower chassis. Hewlett-Packard's midtower was the z600 and the full-sized tower was the z800. The HPs will be more expensive.

If you start with a bare motherboard with dual 1366 sockets (and you live in the US), I have a couple of dozen X5650 Xeons on my shelf and will send you a pair.
SuperMicro's X8DTi-F series motherboards are E-ATX with dual 1366 sockets; they're still available (Newegg, Amazon, eBay).

 

[Hornet3d]

If searching eBay for a refurb workstation with dual CPUs, use a search term such as "2x X5650" or "T7500 2x X5690".

The T5500 is the smaller Dell midtower chassis. Hewlett-Packard's midtower was the z600 and the full-sized tower was the z800. The HPs will be more expensive.

If you start with a bare motherboard with dual 1366 sockets (and you live in the US), I have a couple of dozen X5650 Xeons on my shelf and will send you a pair.
SuperMicro's X8DTi-F series motherboards are E-ATX with dual 1366 sockets; they're still available (Newegg, Amazon, eBay).

Thank you for your very generous offer, sadly I am in the UK which complicates matters in that the supply of Xeons are much reduced and therefore more expensive than appears to be the case in the US. I will have a look at eBay but my luck with buying from there has been mixed.

On the plus side I have found a site advertising refurb HP z600 and z800 that you can configure but the option of graphic cards is limited. Am I right in assuming if you have a couple of Xeons doing the number crunching that the graphic card is less important, at least where Poser is concerned.

Thanks again for your offer it was so good of you to offer.

 

[seachnasaigh]

I've only used TinkerBell's Titan Z GPU for a few render tests. With two HyperThreaded hex-core Xeons, you don't need GPU rendering, and you have *all* of the system's RAM available for complex scenes. Further, sending renders to Queue is CPU-only. Tink has dual X5690 Xeons (24 render threads @ 3.46GHz).

Regarding eBay, look for the large-scale enterprise gear dealers, the guys with "60 units available" and such. Those guys know what they're doing and are reliable, in my experience. You should be able to narrow your search results to UK only on eBay - I have both a "US only" and a "North America only" button, as well as a "worldwide" button on my eBay page here.

Still, if you get a bare motherboard, we could try mailing a pair of processors. But I don't know if the nasty customs officer will shortstop it.

 

[Kivuli]

What is your current system like? More details will help tailor recommendations, based on what you have now.

What CPU do you have, and how much RAM?

What is your current monitor resolution/setup? 1 Monitor? 2? 3?
This may have a small bearing on what video card to get.

What content are you working with, and how many figures do you usually load in a scene at once? This will effect how much RAM you use/need.

Also, there are some processes in Poser that are still not multi-threaded very well. This means that they do not effectively use multiple processor cores, and instead only run on 1 or 2 cores. These processes will care more about the overall frequency, or turbo speed of the processor.
A few processes like this include cloth simulation and preview engine renders/video exports.

If you are mostly doing still renders, the above about the processes is not as important, as those mostly have an effect when doing videos/animations.

I have 2 systems with dual xeon 5670 v2, (10 cores, 20 threads per CPU, 20 Cores, 40 Threads per system), and 32GB of RAM that I use as remote render nodes with Poser 11 Pro.

My main machine has an Intel 5960x i7 with 8 cores and 16 threads. It also has 32 GB of RAM.

If you want, I can try to run some tests on one or both of those machines to give you an idea of render times. Maybe we can find a way to transfer a scene file that you have to me, so I can run it. Let me know if that sounds like something you would like to try.

Feel free to ask me any other questions you have, and I will try to answer them.

Kiv

 

[Hornet3d]

Thank you for the reply Kivuli.

My present system is getting old now and is as follows

Intel Core i7 3770K, socket 1155
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP5-TH, Intel Z77 Motherboard
32GB (4x8GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CO CPU.
Fractal Design Define R4 Titanium Case
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
140mm Fractal Design 1000rpm Case Fans (5)
850W Seasonic X-Series SS-850KM, PSU

The CPU is has 4 cores with hyperthreading giving 8 threads.

The case and large fans were chosen as I have the system very close to me and therefore noise could be a problem. The system I have is close to whisper quiet and the noise is not an issue. I run a two monitor system and all of my art is still renders. I do get the odd out of memory warning and checking system in performance the memory is indeed all in use. That said I can live with the restriction as there are ways around it.

All of my renders in the last few months have been rendered in superfly with an average render time of around six hours. This is not an issue as I am not a vendor so while time is important the limitation on renders would be my imagination rather than reaching system limits.

The other factor these days is that I have really reached the point where I just want to use a computer rather than work on the computer itself. I did build the last system but having worked in a computer shop building computers on a regular basis I can't say the prospect of building another one is exciting to any degree. My first thought was to use a company where I can choose the basic system and customise it. I have seen examples of their work and it looks good and they get good reviews in the 3D artists magazines.

One final thought this is purely a hobby to me and thus difficult to justify vast amounts of money but a sort of windfall is likely in the coming months hence the interest now. For this reason though I am looking at a stable system that will give a few years of service. This is one reason why I did not overclock my present system preferring stability and longevity over squeezing the last few drops of performance from a system (well at least that was the theory).

So there is the system, the background and thoughts on a new system but I am open to ideas from anyone.

Thanks again for taking the trouble to respond.

 

[Bonnie2001]

.....All of my renders in the last few months have been rendered in superfly with an average render time of around six hours.....

Wow, six hours! I say forget about buying a new computer and buy Octane Render instead and render in six minutes instead of hours!

 

[Hornet3d]

Wow, six hours! I say forget about buying a new computer and buy Octane Render instead and render in six minutes instead of hours!

Well that is an idea but software tends to go out of date faster than hardware and I have to learn a new system. Six hours is actually OK as I just let it render overnight. Two things about the system I have one is can power down for no reason, no blue screen just a restart. I have run a number of tests and they all pass but I am reluctant to spend money on a system that is so old anyway. The other problem is the graphics card and I would like to try using project dog waffle/artist 11 with GPU which is a no go with what I have.

 

[Hornet3d]

I have woken up this thread as, hopefully, after some unexpected delays, I may be soon in the position to finally upgrade my system. With this in mind I am doing some window shopping but I really can't decide the best way forward.

I use Poser with superfly almost all the time so with that is mind is it worth me looking at a dual Xeon setup, if so is the choice of graphics card important. While on the subject of graphic cards am I right in thinking that buying a Nvidia Quadro card be wasting money in that Poser will not use it's full potential. Along the same lines if I were to go for a single CPU such as a AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X , which would be the best choice of card a 8Gb Nvidia Quadro P4000 or a 11Gb EXGA GTX 1080ti. The only reason I am choosing these as they are options for configuring a system that has many of the other parts I am looking for, so any other suggestions would be very welcomed.

 

[Hornet3d]

Another possible route that I might explore is switching to Octane, if so I think a Nvidia Quadro might be a better choice but does that mean I can save a little money on the processor and put that towards buying Octane.

 

[Kivuli]

Hi,

If you are considering Octane, I would recommend the 1080ti over the Quadro P4000. First, it is considerably faster, and second, it has more video Ram, giving you more space to store textures.

As for Quadros running better than Geforce cards... I have only run Octane with Geforce cards. See below for more info though.

*** I have no affiliation with OTOY or Octane. These are just my thoughts and opinions. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Just giving advice. ***

Here is a snipped graph of the Octane Bench from the Octane website. This allows you to get a relative comparison of how fast different graphics cards will process Octane scenes.

This graph is filtered to show only single GPU results. This should give you a rough idea of how much faster or slower a given card might be compared to another one. This is just a score given to each card based on how fast each card completes renders - not a time in seconds or anything.



OTOY • OctaneBench

OTOY • OctaneBench Results

If you have a graphics card, you can download the bench and run it on your computer to see how it runs for comparison as well.

Notice that the 1080ti is very near the top - in fact, it sits above the Quadro P6000 - a $5,000 graphics card that has more CUDA cores than the 1080ti - 3840 to the 1080ti's 3584.

Octane really doesn't care about the special sauce that Quadro's bring - certified drivers and error correction and double precision. Octane really only cares about how fast a card can do the calculations it wants.

Yes, the 3rd fastest card in the list is a Quadro - but that is a $7,000 dollar card. A 1080ti is only about 25% slower - and is about 1/10 the price.

The 2 Tesla cards at the top don't even have video outputs and are designed solely to be compute GPU's for supercomputers.

There is a demo of Octane you can download from the website to try.

Also, they offer a monthly subscription to Octane for $20 a month, so if you don't feel like dropping several hundred dollars on something you're not sure you will use, that may be an option as well. You would choose the Poser Plugin on this page.

OTOY • OctaneRender

Hope this information is helpful. Feel free to ask for clarification or if you have further questions.

Kiv

 

[Bonnie2001]

If you are considering Octane, I would recommend the 1080ti over the Quadro P4000. First, it is considerably faster, and second, it has more video Ram, giving you more space to store textures.

I agree. The extra RAM is important for scenes that have a lot of textures. Octane can otherwise refuse to render if there isn't enough RAM to handle oodles of textures.

 

[Hornet3d]

Hi,

If you are considering Octane, I would recommend the 1080ti over the Quadro P4000. First, it is considerably faster, and second, it has more video Ram, giving you more space to store textures.

As for Quadros running better than Geforce cards... I have only run Octane with Geforce cards. See below for more info though.

*** I have no affiliation with OTOY or Octane. These are just my thoughts and opinions. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Just giving advice. ***

Here is a snipped graph of the Octane Bench from the Octane website. This allows you to get a relative comparison of how fast different graphics cards will process Octane scenes.

This graph is filtered to show only single GPU results. This should give you a rough idea of how much faster or slower a given card might be compared to another one. This is just a score given to each card based on how fast each card completes renders - not a time in seconds or anything.

View attachment 40870

OTOY • OctaneBench

OTOY • OctaneBench Results

If you have a graphics card, you can download the bench and run it on your computer to see how it runs for comparison as well.

Notice that the 1080ti is very near the top - in fact, it sits above the Quadro P6000 - a $5,000 graphics card that has more CUDA cores than the 1080ti - 3840 to the 1080ti's 3584.

Octane really doesn't care about the special sauce that Quadro's bring - certified drivers and error correction and double precision. Octane really only cares about how fast a card can do the calculations it wants.

Yes, the 3rd fastest card in the list is a Quadro - but that is a $7,000 dollar card. A 1080ti is only about 25% slower - and is about 1/10 the price.

The 2 Tesla cards at the top don't even have video outputs and are designed solely to be compute GPU's for supercomputers.

There is a demo of Octane you can download from the website to try.

Also, they offer a monthly subscription to Octane for $20 a month, so if you don't feel like dropping several hundred dollars on something you're not sure you will use, that may be an option as well. You would choose the Poser Plugin on this page.

OTOY • OctaneRender

Hope this information is helpful. Feel free to ask for clarification or if you have further questions.

Kiv

Thank you for the information, the listings are very interesting particularly as they do not relate to time, which will vary on different systems, but a comparison of each card. That firms up my choice of card now all I need to do is build the system around it.

 

[Hornet3d]

I agree. The extra RAM is important for scenes that have a lot of textures. Octane can otherwise refuse to render if there isn't enough RAM to handle oodles of textures.

Thanks for that, I guessed RAM would be important but I did not realise that Octane might refuse to render, that suggests I still need some CPU cores for some scenes.

 

[Hornet3d]

So after almost ten years looks like my final works pension is now sorted so I have decided to bite the bullet and order the new system I have been on about for a while now. I wanted to go for a pair of Xeon CPUs but I cannot afford, or justify, the price of them new and I am now at a point in my life where I do not want to build and debug computers so used CPUs were not an option. So the decision was to go for a Threadipper 1920X with 12 cores and SMT giving me 24 cores, 64G of memory and a 11Gb 1080 TI graphics card. A PCIe SSD will handle the OS with a further 500Gb SSd and two 2TB conventional spinners for storage. The only downside is I had to relent and accept Windows 10. System takes about 5 days to build as it includes a 24hr soak test and shipment so fingers crossed I should still have it by the end of the week.

Of course, nice as it is to have a new system the downside is I need to get all my software installed and activated, my back up systems implemented which I have to admit I am not looking forward to but nice cross to bear I guess. Does look as though I will not be posting any renders for a few weeks.

 

[Dreamer]

@Hornet3d I hope you dont mind me pinching your thread for a second, and yay for you getting a new system too by the way.
Any how I have just been given a computer by family, its a all in one so right off its not stellar still considering the specs at the following link do you guys think its worth me looking into up grading what I can to add it to the art studio or just leave it as a house hold PC?
Thanks.
HP Pavilion TouchSmart 20-f230 All-in-One Desktop PC Product Specifications | HP® Customer Support

 

[Miss B]

So the decision was to go for a Threadipper 1920X with 12 cores and SMT giving me 24 cores, 64G of memory and a 11Gb 1080 TI graphics card. A PCIe SSD will handle the OS with a further 500Gb SSd and two 2TB conventional spinners for storage.

So where did you order from? IOW, is it a specific brand, or did you hire someone to build it for you?

 

[Hornet3d]

@Hornet3d I hope you dont mind me pinching your thread for a second, and yay for you getting a new system too by the way.
Any how I have just been given a computer by family, its a all in one so right off its not stellar still considering the specs at the following link do you guys think its worth me looking into up grading what I can to add it to the art studio or just leave it as a house hold PC?
Thanks.
HP Pavilion TouchSmart 20-f230 All-in-One Desktop PC Product Specifications | HP® Customer Support

Why should I mind about you posting on the thread, it is all about systems and choices. I have a very limited experience the all in ones while I was working in the computer shop, those that I did worked well but the upgrade path was normally non existent or on the rear occasions possible expensive. I think I would use it as household PC.