New rendering machine

[alexinfla]

Getting ready to build a new CAD/Rendering machine.  I currently have a Xion w5590 chip that was given to me.  I'm looking to build around it.  Any recommendations?

Additional chip?

Ram?

Video Card?

Thanks!

Alex

[Peter Milner]

Rendering speed is mainly determined by the number and speed of cores (8 cores will render twice as fast as 4 cores).

RAM will help with navigating round a large model 6-8Gb should be fine for most things unless you want to open and run several large models at the same time.

Graphics card doesn't make much difference to anything.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Graphics card doesn't make much difference to anything.

But will help with quake or unreal tournament while the rendering is going on, or if movies is your thing good show. Clarity of image rendered and the ability for your PC to display at very high resolution helps too.

[alexinfla]

Thank you Peter!!!  Very much appreciated.  PS I admire your work!

Regards,

Alex

[alexinfla]

Paul,  is there any benefit to having two chips?  Not sure if the second chip is utilized until the first one is used fully.

Is it true that adding a second CPU will render drawings twice as fast when compared to a single i7 CPU? I'm trying to decide between a dual CPU work station or a single 3rd generation i7.

Thanks in advance!

[Peter Milner]

The more cores, the better.

Doubling the number of cores will virtually double the speed of the rendering.

An i7 is already a quad core and with multi-threading your getting effectively eight processors.

The next step up would be to go for a multi-core xeon, either a dual 4-core, dual 6-core or a dual 8-core giving you 16, 24 or 32 processors.

The speed of the processors will also have a direct effect on the rendering speed.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Hyper-threading, actually.  I wouldn't count the "virtual" cores caused by hyperthreading in your calculation.  However we do benefit from hyperthreading to the tune of 10% or so as far as I can tell.