CAD / Rendering workstation - PSU / Case / fan advice

[wyvernwood]

Hi,

I'm putting an order together in the next few days for a homebuilt CAD / Rendering workstation.

It will primarily be running AutoCAD, Revitt, 3dMax, Afterworks etc.

My main query is over the case / CPU fan / Case fan.

I'm aiming at an i7 3930k - probably with a Noctua NH-D14 - which looks pretty big.

Is there a particular case that I should be looking at both to suit the size of the D14, and to maximise cooling ?

Also - any advice on case cooling will be appreciated.


The overall spec I've narrowed it down to is (apart from GPU which I'm still looking at):

CPU Intel i7 3930k 3.20 GHZ
Motherboard ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA 2011
Memory 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 QuadCore Corsair vengeance 1866MHz
Graphics Card EVGA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB GDDR5 (will most probably downgrade this to 580 or 7970)
HD1: SanDisk SSD SATA III 2.5" 128GB
HD2: 1TB Western Digital SATA Caviar Black 64MB cache
DVD/CD RW DVD/CD RW - SATA
Case ATX Full Tower ?
PSU Corsair TX 650W V2 ATX2.31 80Bronze Power Supply
CPU fan Noctua NH-D14 *2011* Dual Radiator CPU Cooler
Case Fan ?
OS Win 7 Pro 64bit or Win 8 64bit


Many thanks

 

[wyvernwood]

Thanks,

I found this one that I quite like the look of (nice and simple lines)

Fractal]http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cases/cases/fd-ca-def-r3-usb3-bl.html]Fractal Design R3[/url]

I assume that should be large enough for the DH14 ?

 

[austing]

Hi,

I'm putting an order together in the next few days for a homebuilt CAD / Rendering workstation.

It will primarily be running AutoCAD, Revitt, 3dMax, Afterworks etc.

My main query is over the case / CPU fan / Case fan.

I'm aiming at an i7 3930k - probably with a Noctua NH-D14 - which looks pretty big.

Is there a particular case that I should be looking at both to suit the size of the D14, and to maximise cooling ?

Also - any advice on case cooling will be appreciated.


The overall spec I've narrowed it down to is (apart from GPU which I'm still looking at):

CPU Intel i7 3930k 3.20 GHZ
Motherboard ASUS P9X79 PRO LGA 2011
Memory 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 QuadCore Corsair vengeance 1866MHz
Graphics Card EVGA GeForce GTX 680 2048MB GDDR5 (will most probably downgrade this to 580 or 7970)
HD1: SanDisk SSD SATA III 2.5" 128GB
HD2: 1TB Western Digital SATA Caviar Black 64MB cache
DVD/CD RW DVD/CD RW - SATA
Case ATX Full Tower ?
PSU Corsair TX 650W V2 ATX2.31 80Bronze Power Supply
CPU fan Noctua NH-D14 *2011* Dual Radiator CPU Cooler
Case Fan ?
OS Win 7 Pro 64bit or Win 8 64bit


Many thanks

If you're doing CAD why dont you use an Xeon with Hyperthreading and a Quadro workstation card? Both really boost CAD preformance.

 

[wyvernwood]

If you're doing CAD why dont you use an Xeon with Hyperthreading and a Quadro workstation card? Both really boost CAD preformance.

In a word, cost.

Quadros start at about £700 for a reasonable one (although still low in the range). I'm also holding off on putting too much ££ into GPU as I would like to experiment with iRay for 3dsMax - which really needs the CUDA cores and GPU memory to hold the scene. The Quadros in my range simply don't have enough RAM. For the moment, I'm going to put in a £200-300 GPU.

Most of my rendering at present is Mental ray - which is CPU intensive, I'll have another look at the benchmarks on the CPUS.

A lot of my budget is going on software - it's the biggest part of the system cost - and although it makes sense to go for as good a machine as I can, my hardware budget is limited at this time (max £2000 - preferred £1500)

 

[austing]

In a word, cost.

Quadros start at about £700 for a reasonable one (although still low in the range). I'm also holding off on putting too much ££ into GPU as I would like to experiment with iRay for 3dsMax - which really needs the CUDA cores and GPU memory to hold the scene. The Quadros in my range simply don't have enough RAM. For the moment, I'm going to put in a £200-300 GPU.

Most of my rendering at present is Mental ray - which is CPU intensive, I'll have another look at the benchmarks on the CPUS.

A lot of my budget is going on software - it's the biggest part of the system cost - and although it makes sense to go for as good a machine as I can, my hardware budget is limited at this time (max £2000 - preferred £1500)

Yea, software is stupid expensive.

Check and see if the programs you plan on using take advantage of Hyperthreading, if they do, try for a processor that supports it.

 

[wyvernwood]

Been looking at Revit specs - it seems from quick 10 mins research (will do more reading into this) that the Xeon's do not necessarily deliver quicker performance overall with Revit (many functions are linear).

Will read up on 3dsMax - it is possible that it will get more from Xeons.

Most of the forums I've been looking at seem to target the i7-3930k / LGA2011 with 64GB capacity as the sweet spot (with a slight skew to performance rather than value, which could well nudge it back to an i7-3820k). It may be that that is because the CAD advice people are more familiar with i7 than the Xeons though.

 

[austing]

Been looking at Revit specs - it seems from quick 10 mins research (will do more reading into this) that the Xeon's do not necessarily deliver quicker performance overall with Revit (many functions are linear).

Will read up on 3dsMax - it is possible that it will get more from Xeons.

Most of the forums I've been looking at seem to target the i7-3930k / LGA2011 with 64GB capacity as the sweet spot (with a slight skew to performance rather than value, which could well nudge it back to an i7-3820k). It may be that that is because the CAD advice people are more familiar with i7 than the Xeons though.

Yea, my uncle runs the CAD operation for the window company hes employed, and they all use i7's, I think because unless your using the high end 8 core Xeons, the preformance increase is negligable