Processor for baking

theSixtyEight

Hi guys, I wanna ask you, which processor to choose. (I got budget around 200€ , however I would wanna stick as low as possible)
so my candidates are
INTEL i5-2500 k (4 cores, 3.3 Ghz, 95W(high price)
AMD FX-6300 (6 cores, 3.5Ghz, 95W(great price!))
AMD FX8320 (8 cores, 3.5GHZ, 125W)
AMD FX8350 (8 cores, 4GHZ, 125W)

Is 3600 better to buy rather than 2500? or can u send me some link with benchmarks within baking maps in max or some raytraaced rendering? thanks

RyRyB

Personally, I'd stick with Intel. Reviews comparing those chips are pretty common, so I'd do your research. The 3rd link is particularly interesting.

FX8350 Review
CPU Heirarchy Chart
Anandtech FX Series Review

EarthQuake

Baking or other high cpu intensive activities are really simple to benchmark, its just pure cpu speed. Just check this list: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

3770K - 9,654
8350 - 9,308
8520 - 8,209
2500K - 6,494
6300 - 6,068

Mio

xeon e3 1230 V2

quite cheap...performance = i7 2600

oXYnary

Paul68Rageous wrote: »

Hi guys, I wanna ask you, which processor to choose. (I got budget around 200€ , however I would wanna stick as low as possible)
so my candidates are
INTEL i5-2500 k (4 cores, 3.3 Ghz, 95W(high price)
AMD FX-6300 (6 cores, 3.5Ghz, 95W(great price!))
AMD FX8320 (8 cores, 3.5GHZ, 125W)
AMD FX8350 (8 cores, 4GHZ, 125W)

Is 3600 better to buy rather than 2500? or can u send me some link with benchmarks within baking maps in max or some raytraaced rendering? thanks

You might also consider the additional costs with the 100+ watt cpus. More expensive power supplies, more heat dissipation needed, and finally... larger electrical bill.

If you can somehow make it happen, an I7. Hyperthreading does help with rendering.

Andreas

Yeah save up for a bit and get an i7 3rd gen. As oxy stated an i5 is better for gaming than 3D, i7's have multithreading so are far superior for baking and rendering.

JamesWild

Andreas wrote: »

Yeah save up for a bit and get an i7 3rd gen. As oxy stated an i5 is better for gaming than 3D, i7's have multithreading so are far superior for baking and rendering.

I'd just like to make a distinction between multithreading and hyperthreading here.

When programming, a thread is a seperate section of the same program running at the same time, so I might have four threads running the code that fills in a scanline for a renderer, each taking a scanline and filling it in until the frame is done.

Any processor can multithread, even a single core, which is handled by the OS handing control back and forth giving the illusion of simultaneous multitasking.

With multicore, each core can run a separate thread at the same time. (probably program, but I've never looked into this to know)

Intel's hyperthreading basically has the CPU cores say they are two each. A big bottleneck in any system is how fast data can be pulled in from RAM (which is why good cache is important) so the hyperthreading system looks at the two tasks the core has assigned, and if one task is ready (all of the necessary data is in cache) it performs that task instead of waiting for the data to be available.

This means Intel's hyperthreading CPUs will function better in heavily multithreaded environments and 3D with its complex scenes spanning hundreds of megabytes and (relatively) massive matrices and vectors that flood the CPU cache.

So yeah, hyperthreading is good, but I wouldn't argue it's a dealbreaker. Anyone got any hard statistics for baking specifically? I personally think more cache would probably go a long way comparatively.

theSixtyEight

Thanks guys, I decided for i2500, however its results in rendering benchmarks are slighly lower (around -10%) but its probably more stable and saves up elecrticity bills

JamesWild

Stable? Aren't almost all CPUs stable? (with rare exceptions)

Regardless I imagine going above quad would have strongly diminished returns, even in an embarrassingly parallel environment like rendering because the bottleneck is the RAM/motherboard. Even though I'm an AMD guy, I have to agree on the i2500 for this reason combined with its hyperthreading.

HardBaller

if you are going for the i5 why not the 3570l instead of the 2500? lower power use but does more calculation etc. at the same voltages. that's why i got the 3570K to tbh. you get more for the same power. only oc'ing is limited to 4.8/5.0ghz because of the heat but that's it.