Building a workstation for home, need input
polycounter lvl 13
My current system is going on 4 years old (dual core 2.4 ghz AMD, EN7800 GTX in SLI, 2gb ram) and it's finally struggling hard to keep up.
I'm pricing a new system and I'm trying to stretch my money the best I can. I'm trying to strike a balance between buying enough performance that the system has a good lifespan, and not paying a premium for the brand-sparkly-new Bestest, Fastest, Just-came-out-est hardware that's only a hair faster than the stuff from a month ago that's $300 cheaper.
I'm not too familiar with the Quadro cards since I've never used them (even at my studio gigs), so if anybody can give some input on whether they'd be a better choice cost/performance-wise for a home art dev rig, I'd really appreciate it. (I'm primarily a Max / Photoshop / zbrush user, some Maya, and stuff like UDK)
I'm not planning on building this myself. I've had my fun building systems. Can't afford to have stuff burn out on me and have to replace it right now, so I'm going to pay the extra cost of buying it from a builder, especially since they offer a fantastic warranty and pre-sale stress testing. The company is very good, it was started by a guy my wife knew in UW Husky Marching Band and his company is very well respected in this area (he builds for Microsoft, Bungie, Paul Allen's companies, various Seattle studios)
Here's what I'm looking at currently (sorry about the messy cut-and-paste)
Motherboard: Asus P7P55D-E Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7 QUAD CORE 860 2.8GHz 8MB 95W (Socket 1156 45nm)
Ram: Kingston 8GB DDR3-1333 (4x2GB)
Video Card: 2 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1280MB, SLI
Hard Drive, primary: Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB SATA 6 Gb/s
Hard Drive, secondary: Western Digital Caviar Green 2.0TB
Power Supply: Corsair HX 1000W Power Supply Edit
CPU Cooling: Gelid Tranquillo
Any suggestions? I don't have my heart set on one type of hardware in particular, and I'm not especially loyal to AMD vs Intel or ATI vs nVidia, so whatever gives me the best, longest-lifespan performance per dollar is what I'll go with.
I'm pricing a new system and I'm trying to stretch my money the best I can. I'm trying to strike a balance between buying enough performance that the system has a good lifespan, and not paying a premium for the brand-sparkly-new Bestest, Fastest, Just-came-out-est hardware that's only a hair faster than the stuff from a month ago that's $300 cheaper.
I'm not too familiar with the Quadro cards since I've never used them (even at my studio gigs), so if anybody can give some input on whether they'd be a better choice cost/performance-wise for a home art dev rig, I'd really appreciate it. (I'm primarily a Max / Photoshop / zbrush user, some Maya, and stuff like UDK)
I'm not planning on building this myself. I've had my fun building systems. Can't afford to have stuff burn out on me and have to replace it right now, so I'm going to pay the extra cost of buying it from a builder, especially since they offer a fantastic warranty and pre-sale stress testing. The company is very good, it was started by a guy my wife knew in UW Husky Marching Band and his company is very well respected in this area (he builds for Microsoft, Bungie, Paul Allen's companies, various Seattle studios)
Here's what I'm looking at currently (sorry about the messy cut-and-paste)
Motherboard: Asus P7P55D-E Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7 QUAD CORE 860 2.8GHz 8MB 95W (Socket 1156 45nm)
Ram: Kingston 8GB DDR3-1333 (4x2GB)
Video Card: 2 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1280MB, SLI
Hard Drive, primary: Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB SATA 6 Gb/s
Hard Drive, secondary: Western Digital Caviar Green 2.0TB
Power Supply: Corsair HX 1000W Power Supply Edit
CPU Cooling: Gelid Tranquillo
Any suggestions? I don't have my heart set on one type of hardware in particular, and I'm not especially loyal to AMD vs Intel or ATI vs nVidia, so whatever gives me the best, longest-lifespan performance per dollar is what I'll go with.
Replies
Don't get SLI, too much of a hassle and not worth the performance, unless your going for 3 monitors or something. I'd probably just get a GeForce GTX 465, would rather leave my options open to upgrade later than spend $650 on graphics cards now.
I'm running a dual monitor setup, one 23.6" widescreen and a secondary 19" 4:3.
Is SLI really not that much of a performance gain these days? The SLI setup with my 7800s is pretty much the only thing that's kept them in the game this long, so I figured that performance advantage would help extend the performance lifespan of this system as well. Are the newer gen GPUs different enough that that's no longer the case?
I think a strong CPU / Ram combo is your main concern, You can fiddle around with mid range to enthusiast for video cards.
SLI is a waste in my opinion. That money would be better put into the biggest SSD drive you can find.
I ran duel monitors and SLI for about 2 years, not worth it. SLI only works on a single monitor when in full screen mode and only really kicks in with apps that are specifically designed to take advantage. Apps like Max, Maya, Mudbox, Zbrush, MotionBuilder, they aren't written to make use of SLI so the boosts in performance are pretty small. Mix the small boost with a disabled 2nd monitor and its a deal breaker for me.
I built a system not that long ago, I got some really good suggestions and I kept it under $1,600, including tax and shipping.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72705
The card I have now is middle of the road/low end card and it plays all of my games at max settings and gives me a steady 5-15fps when animating in max. that might sound low but considering I have cloth sims, morph targets, skin morphs and a mountain of keyframes, all running in a Hardware rendering viewport it would easily kill other systems. If I'm just modeling or working on textures it stays above 100, even when I'm building a low poly around a sculpt.
So... if its not for apps that build games, and not for the games themselves... what good is it?
I stand enlightened!
Much appreciated, Vig! (et al)
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1136448&postcount=50
More than $250 for less than 250 gigs just seems really steep. Are we talking just "nice, noticeable performance increase", or full blown "Oh-dear-God-hang-on-to-something-what-have-I-unleashed"?
[ame]
Score another victory for SSD.
Polycount needs to add signatures, just for that quote.
SSD it is. Would 80 gig be enough, or would 128 be enough of an improvement to make it worthwhile?
It actually would be better for two drives than one because the data write/read will be shared between them. So combined they would have a longer life than one SSD of a larger size. Plus of course being much faster since being Stripped.
So like 2 30 or 40 gig SSDs.
[ame]
Stripping SSD drives... are you trying to make the guys house implode? I actually really like this idea.
Hahaha I was trying to find that video, awesome.
OMG SSD YES
At home on my workstation I have a 4x 30gb SSD stripe (got them for $100 each off ebay), with a traditional platter drive for backup (more reliable) storage. The SSD stripe makes for INSANE performance with a multi core processor - as an example I can click my 3ds max icon, and max is open and ready to go before I can click the photoshop icon right next to it (under 2 second load time) - example 2 is I can install UDK from the downloaded installer in under 2 mins. Its just bonkers
Quadro cards are very very nice for 3d, but if your focus is games Id just go for 2 upper range game cards. I have quadro 3500's in all my machines at work, and they are great for modeling but they have random issues with DirectX and Open GL at times - Maybe the new ones are better about that, but for the price of 1 quadro card you can buy 1 REALLY nice game card and a bunch of extra ram instead.
Just my 2 cents - hope it helps
It never pays off to go with ultra-high end stuff, the price curve is just too steep.
You can buy a $1500 machine every two years, or a $3000 machine every three.
[edit] Oh i see, you're going pre-built. I dont know man, is it worth $1000 to you to not have to replace a hard drive or ram stick or something yourself? Seems pretty steep. I would be interested to see what price they're quoting you, and what it would take to build it yourself, if its only a $1-200 i can see the appeal, past that, dunno....
and you saw the dude? OMG that's what we call a FREAK. Use just one cheap SSD and tell how good are for those expensive prices. Don't let them to sell you what they want.
As example, one SSD Corsair 32 GB, perfomance = 195 reading / 70 MB/s writing (nothing special, and 32 gb...). And it's the cheapest one, 100+ euros + 18% of taxes + 12 euros of shippment.
If we want "real perfomance", a SSD with more than 200mb of writing... SSD corsair 120GB = 340 euro.
For much less money, 80 euro, we can buy a HDD of 1,5TB and we can get a good perfomance of more than 100 mb (writing) depending of the model. We get more GBs, a good perfomance and the price is cheap.
Actual games are more than 4-12GB, and between apps, SO, and games... with a small ssd we will need to uninstall something when it takes.
These charts are old but you can make an idea with actual HDDs. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/h2benchw-3.12-Avg-Write-Throughput,1013.html
If you want to test your drives, try hd tach or hd tune.
I personally don't care a shit if my apps loads a few seconds faster. i own 2 WD caviar Black 1TB, and they offer a great perfomance. I think that the money is better wasted in good modules of Ram, a mid-range videocard, a good cpu, and not much more. A computer should be less than 700 euros (less than 700 dollars aswell because in computers, 1=1$, and maybe less because you guys have cheaper prices in USA).
Buying a good chassis for the pc is a good option. When we want to upgrade, it's just to change cpu, and mobo and GPU if needed. http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/product.php?product_id=2810
Talking about Quadros, they are very good for work, in Max are very good, but if you want something good for gaming, you will need to pay a lot if you want Quadro. If you are not going to play a lot, mid-range quadros are good for work. There's no color working with a gamer videocard when you reach the limit of 2 million of polygons.
In Ebay we can find resellers offering OEM DELL quadros for good prices. I own a Quadro 3500 and a 5500 i bought in ebay per less than 400 euro, both dx9 and quite old now, and i don't change them
You can buy the more expensive Gamer card, that you won't get a good perfomance in Max. Quadros are something very serious, but for game art, the best is to buy a gamer card. So forget the quadros if you are not going to work with scenes with more than 20 millions of polygons or solid objects of more than 10 millions of tris.
I don't recommend to buy the high-end product of the highest, something mid-range and cheap is enough for what we need. With High-end, we waste a great amount of money in a computer we don't use at its 100%.
With 3000$ you could buy a real workstation with Xeons, server memories, and Quadro, but like computers get old very soon, it's not recommended unless if you work in something that needs the hardware and will compensate the waste of money with your earnings.