High-End personal Workstation Guidance

Page 9 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar


As per your description (and "Team Quadro's") ... It sounds like "All systems are NOMINAL". (as per design-spec). ...

Play with whatever you have to play with ... Drag your daughter out to see TRON and get some SUSHI ... and/or ...

Dnld PRIME95 and tinker with DRAM Voltage Settings, these next 44 hours.


= ?? =
 


Nothing THAT cryptic ...

... I was just "saying" that, rather than making a haplessly-fortuitous decision ... That you had, RATHER Fallen down the elevator shaft (i.e. You DINT make the correct decision ... You DID "fall down the shaft") ... BUT ... There was SO MUCH TRASH, at the bottom of the shaft, that it "WORKED TO YOUR FAVOR" ... i.e. You have such a big pile of "junk", (including all the parts you have and all the gyrations WE have been thru), in your house &mind, at this point, that the FIASCO (mistake), is working to your desired ends.


Obscure, I know, but it (the reference link) was on pretty short notice, and on YOUR terms.


 


Ok, ok, I get it now. But did you even notice he was carrying a gun?
 


Ugh. I'm getting tired of this. I don't have a life anymore. I'm not getting anything done and I'm going around in circles with this.

This stuff is for kids who don't have anything better to do with their life. I've got a family and 4 other children who wouldn't mind some attention from me. Not to mention a wife. And a JOB.

**************************************

Ok, pity party's over. I think I'll give it until she leaves to go back to school. That's somewhere around New Year's day. At that time, whatever it is. it is. I think what I need to do is stop doing, and start reading. I'm relying on what I used to know and what I used to do, which has produced only a certain level of mediocrity. So much has changed now. We used to do this stuff with a few jumpers, remember? It's a new world. Give me a little time to try to figure out what's going on.

I don't have Internet at home at the moment. I'll probably be here 'till noon pst. After that, if you don't hear from me, Merry Christmas. I'll have to come down here Christmas day to use the high-speed connection to load up her apps. I'll let you know how it went asap. Thanks again for all your help. It may not be perfect yet, but thanks to you all the right stuff is there. We'll get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q37xJtuQ24w
 
Merry Christmas, Old Man!

You have done a fantastic job!

Yeah ... I have one great kid who DRIVES and a copesetic ex ... and, life is good.

And Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah, to Puff, and all you lurkers, out there.
 


Hope you don't mind that I openned your present early, Puff!

Really good article ... cleared up a few things and definitely enhanced my understanding of the landscape ....
... I would LOVE to see a similar article, written by ACAD, Adobe, and some of the more popular professional GL developers. Way cool!

LONG LIVE OpenGL !!

 
Hey thanks guys. I wish you all a Merry Christmas too. I'm still all over this thread... fyi (just trying to get some things straight with my research) and highly anticipating the outcome of the GPU saga Illy's having.

I started another thread about SSD vs HDD as scratch disks... not sure if you guys are interested but take a look if so [http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/264964-32-scratch-disk-life-span]

Thanks for the article Illy. Super useful. A take on this history would be great no doubt. I also read gaming cards read polygon (faster processing), while graphics cards ray trace (more precise). This might be a major difference... sorry the link is lost in the millions i've surfed in the last few days.

LONG LIVE OpenGL!!!
 
shoot should i abandon ship on Nvidia now and work towards an ATI build? This sounds like another 3 months of research... ey yey yey...

MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone.
 



JMO ... ATi should never have entered your mind ...

... The only decision is between Quadro or GTX/FERMI ... Period (definitely, positively, indubitably ! )

... No ... I ain't gonna waste any of my time going thru my reasons ... call it "organic precedent".

 
I hope everybody had a great Christmas!

Well, we drove down to the shop (high speed internet), downloaded and installed are her apps. BUT she forgot her data files at home. SO we're kinda dead-in-the-water today. She IS amazed at how fast everything loads and installs (thanks Alvin for the SSD c: drive)

So I guess it's gonna be tomorrow (Monday) before we know which GPU it'll end up with.

The Adobe Premiere forum guys think the world of the GTX 580. There is a good benchmark for that www.PPBM5.com. However, I didn't realize she doesn't use, need, or have Adobe Premiere, so I can't run that benchmark.

I'll report back here when we're done with testing on the only thing that really matters: the 3ds Max 2011 rendering of her project file.

 


And, a most excellent 2011, to Yuhz All !

I hope she has some concept of what a radical build this is.

This rig is gonna rip her projects a "new one".

Here old notebook can still be used to prop the window open, tho.

.
 


I'm testing as we speak. She's already blown away by how fast stuff loads. We started 3ds Max and I was thinking, man this is taking a long time to load. It took almost a whole minute! But when it finished she told me on her notebook it takes about 10 minutes to load 3ds Max. Wow.

Rotating the image in the view port was impressive to her also. And it's not just HER notebook that has problems. Her notebook wouldn't even open this. She told me every time she needed to re-render (this was last year's project) she would have to borrow somebody else's desktop, which must have been a pain. But even on the other people's computers, she told me you had to be very careful and delicate or else it would crash. With this machine, it all moves very fluidly.

The GTX 580 is up first. I'm currently rendering the thing using two different cameras (using a vastly reduced size. Full size took 8 hours last year. I'll try full size later). Camera 4 takes 5 minutes 39 seconds. Camera 3 takes 15m 18s. I'm trying to be methodical by restarting the machine afresh for each render and repeating each one three times.

When I get all 6 renders done, I'll remove the drivers and install the Quadro. When that's all done, I'll report back here.

This is pretty exciting now. I'm REALLY hoping one card will be significantly faster than the other.




 
As a grand finale, if you have the time and gumption, you might add the GTX back into the 2nd (X8) slot, at the very end ... Supposedly, they will combine all their cores and GDDR, for CUDA and, I think, some other functions, as well.
 
I second Alvin's request. I got some serious anxiety going on here Illy. Thanks for doing these tests... it's going to be super helpful to many people.
 
Is there any way to log resource utilization?

How is your stability ?

Is your RAM clocking at the rated speed and CAS ??

Did you boost the RAM voltage?


Just a few questions, don't stress over answering them.

 


System stability is perfect, not a single problem, BUT I did set the RAM timings back to AUTO and they did go back to 9-9-9-20something.

I know I can up the ram voltage (by a few hundredths at a time, don't worry, I remember). Should I do that first, or should I change the BIOS to reduce the memory multiplier to compensate for upping the BCLOCK?

And I have NO IDEA how to implement two video cards in the same system. You need to instruct me on how to load the drivers.

OK, I'll give you a preview on what's going on here now. First, the rendering times appear to be almost exactly the same. Perhaps it is mostly CPU dependent? Just a guess. Second, the two cards appear to be RADICALLY different in other aspects, with each have a huge advantage AND and a HUGE disadvantage compared to the other card.

I need a little more time, I may be wrong about that. I need to go back to the other card and do a rendered image save, I forgot to do that, so I can compare the two images side by side.

Let me know on the memory and two cards in one box trick. I'll do it.
 
As far as the dual GPU config, ... Log into nVidia's official driver/dnlds page and do an "auto-scan" (option 2 or 3, I think) ... see what it decides you have/need.

Whatever card is in the first slot will likely dominate ... that should be the Quadro ... with the GTX in the next blue/long slot ... With the quadro drivers installed, and the quadro in the primary GPU slot ... go to nVidia and do the auto-scan ... it will tell you what to do.


DRAM : Can't say about the RAM multipliers, but that should be a "no-brainer" for the techs, over on the OC forum ... As I said (in no uncertain terms), I ain't no OC guru, but I can advise, with authority, on air cooling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr1ntmQwMXQ

 
Illy, you can only get the GPU to render if you get the V-Ray 2.0 for 3dsMAX. It's a very good render engine. you might be able to trial download it. The program will render whatever is being worked on in real time in another window so you can work and see the changes immediately... it's pretty AWESOME!
 


Ah. I suppose that explains it.

I just rendered camera 4 at 6,000 X 4,500 and it only took 6m 28s. Apparently, this took several hours before! I am now rendering it at 8,000 x 6,000 because she said that's the biggest she would ever use. It's clearly only going to take minutes, NOT HOURS like before.

How is that possible? Is that possible? Maybe I'm doing something wrong - she's not here to help me now.

One thing that IS going to take hours is this testing. And I just answered the phone and found out I'm in really big trouble for not being home. I could stay up all night doing this, which I could probably get away with if I was home, but I'm at my work where the high speed internet is. (Which I just realized I don't really need for what I'm doing).

Oops, it just finished: 11m 02s. That is 8,000 x 6,000 with 5,361 "objects", whatever those are. Does that mean anything to you, Puff?

By the way, Alvin, the 7-7-7-20 timings only saved 2 seconds off the 5:39 render.

OK, gotta go now. I'll get here early and resume. It still too early to say for sure, but I think I was wrong about there being significant differences between the two cards. Hopefully, I'll be able to say for sure tomorrow.
 
*************************************************************
Illy, you can only get the GPU to render if you get the V-Ray 2.0 for 3dsMAX.
*************************************************************

Whuddle-yuh-bet the V-Ray cuts the 11 minute render down to 3 minutes ??


Good call, Puff!




 


Um... It costs over a thousand dollars.
 

yeah, that's the problem. I wish there was a trial app. I haven't been able to find on though.
 



. . . TALK TO THE HAND . . .






That's OK, tho ... Y'all can grind a nice batch of espresso and chat about PRIORITIES !!! (LoL!) ...





[:bilbat:7] (COULD NOT RESIST !! ) [:bilbat:7]


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dgxzItaQzw&feature=related






 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom