cassdog :
Ouch, ouch, OUCH.
Ok. I'm a pro (silly valley geek), but my wife is a student and we can't afford to spend 2 semesters of tuition on this thing. So, compromise will be the name of the game.
Modo is all about the CPU
Autodesk is now recommending CUDA cores
3Ds MAX 2012: "The integrated iray® rendering technology from mental images runs well on
CPU processing alone but can be accelerated by NVIDIA GPU CUDA technology."
You do bring up an interesting possibility by placing multiple boxes to work. (... a computer in every room & a chicken in every pot.) We've been swapping jobs between the C2Q and an i5 laptop just so we had one "design" workstation available while the other one was rendering. I could price out a pair of Phenom x6 1100 builds and see where that compares to the flagship Intel build. My only issue with that will be software licences. (Autodesk is picky about their activation codes.)
Also, I had looked at going dual socket earlier since both Xeon and Opteron scale well, but as this thread has cautioned the EEC memory got to be very expensive and it did end up at $3000~$6000 depending on what I popped in the sockets. (Ah, the power of dual hexa-cores would certainly bring down the render times, but my wife would have to drop out of school to afford it and that defeats the whole purpose.) I think I found 1 motherboard that took regular DDR3 if you only took it to 16GB, but you had to use EEC to get to 32GB.
I shall put on my thinking cap, re-think the requirements, and compare the cost of these options to the checkbook balance before I make my next move.
Woof
Well, well, well.
I run 8 cores, 16 threads but at 2.4GHz. - perhaps not allowing for OC via EVGA SR2 was short-sighted.
My 2GB 460GTX sees little use with my apps - I could have gone for the 1GB 560ti and saved a few bucks.
24GB of ECC DDR3 RAM cost $450ish. I now use half of that with 3 virtual linux machines and a 4GB RAM disk on top of Win7P.
As a bonus the MB takes it all as triple channel.
I think I missed out using the 15K SAS drive for boot instead of a nice SSD - time will tell.
****6 cores, 12 threads @ 3.4 - 4.0GHz sounds like a very good engine for your build.****
Your case should be roomy for the second card in SLI (but wait on that purchase until you can see a need).
I like that 850W PS.
SSD on the laptop as a sidegrade?
Go for the 24GB of RAM.
So since I am not rated as smart or savvy I went forum hopping for ya but mindsets and their biases
need confirmation of their base assumptions.
http://www.microfilmmaker.com/reviews/Issue63/Modo501.html
-As an added bonus, several render farms are now also offering services for modo users. That means if you develop a render that can overwhelm your system, it can be run very economically by an outside service. However, modo does have a very easy to set up render network that any user can deploy in a snap if they have some extra machines sitting around.
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=56823
-we fully intend to use network rendering, however, these questions focus on a fast workstation for local rendering (especially for doing master-node only pre-calculations for divvying up jobs to slave-nodes).
and:
Modo is super sexy smooth on the new system, and the GTX 570 makes a world of difference!
and:
have the nVidia GTX 580 3GB by Palit, it works great and runs cool - highly recommend it. Painting isn't any smoother then my last card on a 4K image imgetting 15-25 FPS (it goes up and down). It's a software(OpenGL) problem not a hardware problem imo.
or:
If I were to build a machine tomorrow, I'd do a Sandybridge 2600k and overclock it, Nvidia GTX 570, 8-16gb ram and the whole system would be $1200-1500. For $2k you can put in the luxuries like a SSD, GTX580 and awesome case.
elsewhere:
-The general advice is to build your own, and base it on a single socket Sandy Bridge CPU, stick with Nvidia graphics cards and you should have an excellent system for about $1500
elsewhere:
-My main workstation is a 6core 980x, but that's a $1000cpu. For my render nodes I built two 2600k intel machines with
biostar tp67e boards. These systems are overclocked to 4.5 stable. I retired the dual xeon I mentioned and a q6600.
elsewhere:
Please read that linked thread. DO NOT get into making multiple CPU motherboards. Eight core CPU's are on the way, and you don't want to be stuck with hardware that's difficult and expensive to upgrade.
bonus:
Well, I am beginning training in Houdini Master. It seems like the perfect companion for Modo in that it does all of that physics simulation stuff that Modo does not. What I don't know yet is if I will be ultimately rendering in Modo or in Mantra - and Houdini/Mantra does run on Linux.
Buying workstations - banged for a buck or two:
http://www.boxxtech.com/products/3DBOXX/8520.asp?prodid=8520
Basic Configuration
Dual Xeon (2.4GHz) CPUs
4GB DDR3 1333
NVIDIA Quadro 400
250GB SATA Hard Drive
20X DVD RW
Microsoft Windows 7 PRO
Starting Around:
$3,380
US and Canada Only
So, I hope this helps your choice path gel.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram