Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Looking for good spec for strong graphics machine for a small architectural office.
Primarily using Rhino with Maxwell. Here is what I am thinking...

Processor: Dual Six Core XEON (E5-2630 2.2 GHz 15M 7.2 GT/s, Turbo)
Graphics Card: 2.0GB AMD FirePro V7900 4 Monitor 4 DP
Memory: 32GB DDR3 RD|MM Memory 1600MHz ECC (4x8GB DIMMs)
Hard Drive Config: C1 SATA 3.5inch 1-2 Hard Drives
Boot Drive: 2TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive
2nd Drive: 2TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive

Too much? Too little? Any other comments?
Any reason for a Flash drive?

I am looking at Dell machines as they are easy to supply/support with my preferred vendor.

Thanks for your help.

dsr wrote: Too much?

I think this is not possible for a rendering workstation...

dsr wrote: Any reason for a Flash drive?

Speed?


The problem is that the single core performance of the E5-2630 is very low at 2,3GHz with 2,8GHz Turbo clock rate.
On the long run in maxwell it will be ok but for any single threaded operation it is much slower than an i7 3930K (3,2GHz/3,8GHz Turbo) or i7 3770K (3,5GHz/ 3,9GHz Turbo)
Maybe you should take a look at the Benchwell scores (but be careful and compare the results... there are many faulty entries)
http://www.maxwellrender.com/index.php/benchwell

I would take a nvidia card but i don't know what is the better choice for Rhino.



...why is this in Rhino plugin support?!?

Thanks, numerobis.

Perhaps this is posted in the wrong area, but I was seeking advice from those using Rhino w/Maxwell.
Basically you are saying that the processor speed is the most important thing. I guess that the memory is only a factor if you have too little?

Why the Nvidia recommendation vs. other? Based mainly on your good experience? Any min. spec on NVidia card?

Just some thoughts...

If your goal is a dual-Xeon machine, a possible compromise may be to begin by populating only one of the sockets with an E5-1660, with the intention being to upgrade to dual chips next year, when the E5 Xeons move from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge. The E5-1660 is a 3.3/3.9GHz single-socket-only LGA 2011 hexacore Xeon, which should theoretically have performance similar to a stock-clocked i7 3930K. This is assuming that dual-Xeons is the goal, with the choice of E5-2630 being to keep costs reasonable, given the premium currently attached to any of the 8-core and/or higher-frequency E5-2600 series chips. If dual-Xeon is not a core requirement, then you may do best by building a single-chip i7 3930K machine, as numerobis suggests. I tend to prefer that over i7 3770K, since as previously mentioned, where LGA 1155 will be superseded by a new socket with Haswell, LGA 2011 is supposed to see Ivy Bridge chips next year, with perhaps 8 cores (it is reported that Ivy Bridge Xeons may have up to 12).

As for drives, I have been running SSDs for a few years now, and the advisability of using them at least for the system drive cannot be understated, in my opinion. Due to the price points vs. capacity of SSDs, what I currently do is to buy two at half the capacity I am after and run them together in RAID 0, for even quicker performance. Using two RAID 0 Intel 320 drives, Rhino 5 x64 startup on my machine (currently a couple-years-old i7 970 @ the stock 3.2GHz) is about 4 seconds. Using Intel 520s, I expect to reduce that figure to something like 2.5s. Another example of what the SSDs do: when booting my machine, more time is spent in BIOS than in Windows startup; in total, it's less than 10s from pushing the power button, to the Windows login. Drive speed is not an inconsequential factor for Maxwell either, since MXI files are so large, and are written at each SL.

For graphics, I use a Quadro 2000, which is a little small at 1GB, but which has been entirely usable, and has very nice AA. Some people have recently been having AA problems in Rhino with the ATI cards, while others have reported poor performance with Quadros. Still, for what it's worth, I am in the process of putting together a new machine, and will probably use a Quadro 4000 (I like the 2000, and can't justify the price of the 5000 or K5000). If you are only using Rhino, you can get away with using a GeForce instead; you can't do that with some other applications, like SolidWorks, which disable various functionality, unless you are running an "approved" card like a Quadro or FirePro. Here is one person who reports using a GTX 680 with Rhino, and another using a GTX 660 Ti (he is using it because the AA on his ATI 7950 was bad).

I'd like to chime in on that interesting topic in the hope I can optimize my next configurations as well.

CPU: I think this is mostly about budget. I tend to go for the fastest possibilty, the dual E5-2687W (8cores with 3.1 Ghz). I once calculated that I would pay twice as much for that machine as for a very strong i7-machine. But on the other side it has almost twice the speed in maxwell, while beeing a bit slower on single-core tasks. Since I like to launch a lot of test-renders I do prefer one stronger machine to several slower ones, especially since maxwell network render is not very reliable. I also think that having to possiblity to get a faster image in maxwell helps me to improve the image faster which leads to a better quality - that's why I chose this high-priced strategy.

RAM: As you wrote, RAM only is a factor if it is not enough. I think 32GB is enough and it can easily be upgraded if necessary.

HDD/SSD: I would definitely go for an SSD as boot drive. I have a 256 GB Samsung SSD 830 and a normal HDD as a second drive for my Data. The SSD really helps a lot for launching programs and Windows just feels a lot faster with it. But I never tried Jeremy's path of going for two a bit cheaper SSD on RAID 0. Maybe it will get you even more of a speed boost but is a bit trickier with the setup and the risk of losing your data to hard drive crash is bigger (even though SSDs are very reliable). I use my second drive for the Maxwell Temp-Files, even though it is a bit slower, but my first one just fills up way too fast.

GPU: That's my hardest part since I did not find much information on this topic. This also is my biggest concern since complex rhino scenes run so slowly that it is not fun to work anymore and you lose a lot of time and patience. I once invested in an expensive Quattro4000 a while ago, but I didn't notice much of a difference at all! That's why I decided not to go for any "professional" cards anymore, since they are much more expensive than equally strong cards. Not long ago I picked a GTX680 with 4GB which is running good, but still is getting very slow in complex scenes. Later on I read somewhere that ATI was a bit better in OpenGL (which Rhino is using I think) but I'm not even sure if that is correct. But I chose the a bit cheaper HD7950 with 3GB for the next machine I needed and it really is a bit faster (but only slightly).
I'd really would like to try a very strong "professional" card to see if it has any benefits, but the costs are just too high if there isn't much improvement
I'm somehow not even sure if the graphics card really plays that huge of a role, since a benchmark tool only measured a GPU usage of 30% while working with a complex rhino scene. That would mean, that rhino cannot use the whole capacity of the card. Would this even be possible?

I hope I could help with any inputs and I'm still hoping to find a solution for less problems with complex scenes.
Cheers,
Christoph

Thanks JDHill and kami for the advice.

In consideration of your comments, (and my budget) I have revised the spec (and found a more flexible supplier).

Please let me know if you see any problems:

CPU: Intel Core i7 3930 32nm 3.2 GHz 12 MB LGA 2011 CPU
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7 I3 I5 I7 DDR3 2011 ATX Motherboard for Intel
Cooling: Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 for LGA CPU Cooler
HD1: 240 GB Intel 335 Series SATA III 2.5" Flash SSD
HD 2: WD 2 TB WD2002FAEX 7200 rpm 64MB Buffer S-ATAII HDD
RAM: 2x Skill 16GB (2x8) DDR3 1600 mHz F3-12800CL 10D-16GBXL Memory
Video: PNY Quadro 4000 PCI-e High End Range Video Card

Thanks.

Best,
David

Looks good to me!
I would go for a Samsung 830 256GB but maybe the intel is good too - not sure about the sandforce chip, but intel seems to have better firmwares so maybe it's ok.

Why do you take 2x16GB? Probably no problem, but why don't you take a 4x8GB kit?

I'm not sure about the quadro 4000. It's quite old already, based on Geforce 400 series from 2010. But maybe it's ok.

Especially depending on where you're coming from, that could prove to be a pretty fun machine. I agree with numerobis on the memory -- memory being labeled as quad-channel may or may not be marketing hype, but regardless, the matching 4x8 kit costs about fifteen dollars less than two 2x8 kits.

A side note about the grapics card. In my experience it's not the card that slows Rhino for large or complex scenes. You can get away with old or small cards easily.
I've seen Rhino's viewport slow/stall with not even 10% of the GPU in use while CPU load started to rise with scene complexity. This is with the HW acceleartion option active.

Don't know about the professional OpenGL cards though.

Ha_Loe et al,

That last note reminded me that, while our main machine will have a Quadro 4000, I was considering to use Quadro 2000 cards for our other machines. These will also have modeling (and rendering tasks), but not quite as 'heavy'. The reason for the Quadro 2000 is that it is the best card available at the price point and without a long lead time for delivery in my particular location (abroad).

I hope this is not a big mistake.

Thanks.

Ha_Loe
That is exactly what I experienced. I'm a bit frustrated by that fact, since a speed boost would really be good, even though rhino5 is already much faster than rhino4 especially with a lot of curves. What is the reason for that cap then? The CPU? Or rhino itself?

DSR
What I would also suggest (if it is of any interest to you) is to try to create a machine which is running as silent as possible. I think it really makes working much more convenient!

kami wrote: That is exactly what I experienced. I'm a bit frustrated by that fact, since a speed boost would really be good, even though rhino5 is already much faster than rhino4 especially with a lot of curves. What is the reason for that cap then? The CPU? Or rhino itself?

I don't know what exactly the Rhino graphics engine does but it gets me frustrated all the time. My rig is hard to max out with current games and panning/zooming shouldn't require more than the update of camera parameters, still Rhino drops to single figure frame rates.

I really can't imagine how OpenGL optimization should be able to improve on this behaviour. It's next to impossible to find any comparison between FirePro vs. Radeon or Quadro vs. GT to justify the price difference. So if anyone could comment on that...