Daz Ideal computer
bicc39
Posts: 589
Question:
Start with a few stipulations.
It must be Windows 7 ( any version).
Since I am a KeyShot Groupie, the CPU must be high.
Forgive my saying this, cost not a factor
What is the ideal machine for using DAZ with Iray. (Model, Ram, Graphics Card, all the other technical stuff)
Is there a machine premade that fits the bill?
Not an imaginary question, in the market
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Comments
http://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/cad-graphics-workstations/form-factors
you could go for something like that, then tailor then to additional rendering.
I would also think about how urgent it is; Intel are due to release a new processor very soon; so if you can wait, I would.
And why windows 7? Windows 8 is faster for some things, and will have access to an upgrade to DirectX, although windows 10 will get DirectX 12.
Is the most important aspect, rendering with IRAY? And Daz use of course?
Just want to be sure.
personally, I dislike windows 8 when it comes to complex task. Most of the older programs are incompatable with win 8. I ran the update assistancant and 9 programs were incompatable. So, I can see why he/she would not want to update.
I still occasionally use Paintshop Pro 7.
It works although it says it shouldn't.
Pretty amazing considering that version is about 15 years old.
Thank you all.
A small note, a few months ago spent over 2000 dollars on a computer I did not
really need at the time, so I could still get Windows7.
I would not use Windows 8 under any circumstances, not even if they gave me
the machine ( and this situation came up).
A workflow at the present time.
Use Maya 2014, Photoshop CS6, Zbrush with the Keyshot , Keyshot full version separate.
Daz is used to set up the figures, clothing maps, etc.
Generally everything then is sent to Keyshot for rendering. Keyshot depends on CPU for rendering (have 8).
Have been thinking more and more about "The Ultimate" Computer.
Fortunately do not need to animate.
Willing to spend what is necessary.
Because the new DAZ Iray is making use of HDRI of which I am a fan,
the requirements for perhaps its ultimate use is important.
Well, here's what I'm running -
ASUS X99-E WS motherboard - supports 4 dual-slot GPUs at PCI 3 X 16
Intel Core i7-5930K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.5GHz CPU
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold - 1200W Power supply
Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler (I prefer air cooling)
Memory modules (2 kits - 64 GB)
And a 512 GB SSD boot disk and an optical drive. The board supports 128 GB of EEC registered memory if you use a Xeon CPU I moved existing disk drives in for mass storage - 2 at 1 TB, 2 at 740 GB, and my old system boot drive, at 512 GB; backups go to two (alternating) 2 TB USB drives.
I have a GT 740SC to drive my monitors and am in the process of adding GTX 980 Tis as I can afford them. You will also want a case with lots of cooling that has support for 8 slots.
All up, with shipping, taxes, and Win7 OEM this ran me about $3200 without the main GPU cards.
Wow those are numbers.
The only one I can truly comprehend is the price, I expect to pay more.
Is there, out there, one that can be bought with what I need premade without the numbers.
In other words, I pay, they send, only small things to be added later.
Again money not that important.
Not computer ignorant, but not an engineer.
Not a gamer, no animation.
Thank you
my pc specs from piriform's Speccy, summary panel. It's not the best pc out there, but it is wicked fast and I have lots of storage, it's mainly movies and backups :)
Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD FX-6100 52 °C
Zambezi 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
MSI 970A-G46 (MS-7693) (CPU 1) 56 °C
Graphics
HP S2031 (1600x900@60Hz)
E2351 (1920x1080@60Hz)
2060W (1600x900@60Hz)
1023MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 (EVGA) 43 °C
Storage
931GB Western Digital WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B0 ATA Device (SATA) 41 °C
931GB Seagate ST31000528AS ATA Device (SATA) 35 °C
298GB Seagate ST3320418AS ATA Device (SATA) 33 °C
1863GB Seagate FA GoFlex Desk USB Device (USB (SATA))
1863GB Seagate BUP Slim BK USB Device (USB (SATA)) 33 °C
Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GH22LS30 ATA Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio
Processor
AMD FX-6100
Cores 6
Threads 6
Name AMD FX-6100
Code Name Zambezi
Package Socket AM3+ (942)
Technology 32nm
Specification AMD FX-6100 Six-Core Processor
It runs daz pretty quick, I know she's an older system but she still kicks tail. I want to upgrade my computer to be even faster. I'm not an amd fan but it was on sale and pretty fast. I used to have an amd video card but I upgraded it to use 3 monitors. Amazin, how quick my workflow is with 3 screens. I can run Daz, Hexagon, Blender photoshop and firefox without slowing dowm my machine. Unless I'm rendering or saving, Then it slows down ;)
Well, to be honest, about $180 of that price was for my local repair shop to put it all together for me. :-) I took in the case and a tote of all the additional parts in the original boxes. Two days later I picked up the system - they also did a 24-hour burn-in on the memory.
Many thanks for all your help, the quest continues, will update if successful
Fyi. If price is truly not a factor, and Iray is the preferred render engine.
VCA?
Visual Computing Appliance
http://www.nvidia.com/object/visual-computing-appliance.html
Do they work with Daz Studio? Or is that still in the works.
Ailenware Area 51
Intel® Core™ i7-5960X 4.0 GHz (8-cores, 20MB Cache)
32GB RAM DDR4 2.133 GHz RAM
24GB Video Ram via 3 GTX Titan Cards (3x8GB)
Win 7 64 bit
the rest of the options are stock (included with base price)
$7,508.98
Dell or not these have an excellent track record.
http://www.alienware.com/Landings/desktops.aspx
Hello, I have to also a question ...
worth a CAD workstation with 2 CPU as Xeon X5650 and graphics card like NVIDIA FX 2000?
I want to mainly DAZ and Photoshop work.
Rendering in 3Delight or LuxRender will take full advantage of your CPU(s) and your cores and threads, the X5650's were and still are very capable CPU's for this kind of work (in many ways they would be more efficient than a top-of-the-line i7 for rendering) but your GPU has 192 CUDA cores (not to be confused with CPU cores/threads), it will be slower than your CPU(s) for Iray and prone to failure due to it's limits (I own a similar card, it's useless and despite being up-to-date with drivers it black screens when I attempt to use it for the most basic of Iray renders)
I would max out that board with as much RAM as can has, Anything above 12 or 16GB would be ideal, anything past that is icing on the cake. Replacing your GPU would allow you to use Iray in a more speed efficient environment than what you currently will utilize. The latest compatible updated driver for your GPU that I saw was dated 06/06/2008, not a good sign.
as for Photoshop, older versions of PS will utilize your current card, I don't know about newer versions of PS. It probably will for smaller time consuming operations like blurs and the built in filters but 3rd party tools you'd need to contact the developers and see.
@StratDragon....
Thanks for the detailed answer.
If I replace only the graphics card, in a recent version of NVIDIA, my Sytem for Daz and PS well fed would need (are installed 12GB Ram).
What graphics card do you think would be recommended because in the middle price range?
The non Quadro cards are not optimized for Photoshop before CS6, but in practice I can't tell you what the befits or pitfalls are
http://international.download.nvidia.com/adobe/pdf/adobe-hardware-performance-white-paper.pdf
so What type of MOtherBOard and PSU do your currently have (Model/Wattage)? What OS are you running? What's your "middle price range?" , peeps is throwing down mad cheddar like Mr. Monopoly up in this thread so do you have a more sensible range?
Right now, I'm looking at a <$250.00 GTX 960, it has 4GB RAM and consumes less power than my GTS250 (which is Cuda enabled but useless with IRay), my issue is I have and older Mobo 12GB RAM and I'm topping it out on renders now with LuxRender and nothing else running (these are poly heavy jobs before I render, not any doing of Lux) so I don't know if 4GB cards is what I want or should I wait. On top of that the GTX actually has 3.5GB RAM+.5GB VRam for the OS, the 970 has 4GB RAM dedicated (AFAIK), and AMD has cards with 8GB RAM for $300 and up, Nvidia has nothing with that much RAM in that price range (AFAIK) so $1,000+ for a Titan 8GB or 12GB is not happening (I need a working Stratocaster as well, that takes precedence).
@StraDragon
Many thanks for your response .....
I realize it is not easy to assemble a sytem, which is well-balanced price and performance, and can also deal with the programs that you use.
But I have a clue and would lead to further my research.
Many Thanks.
It's a matter of aptitude, but its also a matter of mind over matter. Some can build a system without issue (or some minor ones and learn from our mistakes) some are terrified of the idea. I would not get under the hood of my car for years until a mechanic told me "you can build computers, that's far more complicated than a car engine" and as soon as I heard it from someone who I considered to be an knowledgeable person on the subject I decided I would try that. as well. I can't modify a transmission but I can now do some basic repairs and have saved myself a few $1,000.00 over the years but I needed someone who knew what they were doing to convince me my preconceived ideas about the internal combustion engine were as accurate as map makers who drew monsters where no one had yet to travel and tell what was really there.
Daz Studio and a number of other graphic applications are becoming increasingly friendly with more common components, meaning in the past if you ran high end graphics software you needed very specific hardware to enhance the features if you wished to do so. 10 years ago 4 GB RAM was a tremendous amount of RAM but it was also a limit to many of us (3GB+1 for the OS in Win XP and Vista 32 btw and you had to make a mod in the .ini file to do it) In many instances now 8GB is what most distributors put in their base line machines when the sell them, most motherboards will support 32GB or more RAM and it's no longer $1,000's to add it. A $250 video card now will blow the doors off of a $2500 video card from 3 years ago. CPU's on the other hand seem to be stagnating in comparison, the jumps in GHz's we saw 10 year ago have tickled in comparison to GPU gains. The availability of these cheaper and more powerful products and development from their manufactures for things (Nvidia's Iray for instance) has led to a small revolution for designers and modelers and many times an off the shelf gaming system can out perform a seriously high end workstation that was designed for a very specific task when more of a variety of software packages are added to the designers pipeline.
I'm enjoying my Alienware :D
Are you saying you want it or you currently have it. I sould like a great system. How much RAM does the GPU have?
I went there with my question to the CPU .... DAZ Pro can be possibly used brisk with more than 2 CPU systems. As an example, 2 x Xeon 56xx series.
the FX 2000 is a very old and outdated card even when compaired against other dinosuar cards. The rest of the system would be great but it's got less power than a gts 250 which I have, which is USELESS for Iray.
http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/index.php?gid=1363&gid2=186&compare=quadro-fx-2000-vs-geforce-gts-250
Agreed StarDragon, Iray needs at least CUDA core hardware version 2.0 or later (Even the 8600GT is only v1.0), and the CUDA driver needs to be 6.0 or later.
All the cards listed in 'Red' are No-Go for Iray.
oh that's an interesting build, I used PCPartPicker to see what is available in different countries , not a fan of coolmaster PSU, so changed it to a Seasonic, not sure one needs 1200watts, it's possible, too lazy to check.
Case, not easy finding one
Also included a CPU cooler
but this is what I came up with, I named the build after you so I know where I was influenced from namffuak
Looks good. I will say that the Noctua heatsink/fan combo handles heat quite well - I've had renders run at 100% cpu for 36 hours and maxed out at 56 degrees C. And 1200 watts is overkill now, but if I ever get four gpus in the box that would be 1000 watts not counting incedentals like cpu and disk drives. (And all the bleeping LEDs on the fans!
). I'm just glad that prices have come down so far over the years!
not something I would build , mainly was just making a link to PCPartPicker, but using your list.
picking a case was not an easy choice, but what sold me on the BLACKHAWK-ULTRA, is that it has the External bay.
Also while here just want to support the following quote. buy the parts and take it to a Computer builder, and the Price in that quote is about average with most places
I haven't built a computer for any thing more serious then something that is just used for WWW stuff, but I have found Gigabyte are the most Newbie friendly, well they were over a decade ago, MSI not a fan of, though they are good, just finding information easy, they lack, and ASUS, are easier, but almost as bad as MSI, difference is if you speak the tongue, ASUS is easy, though their support can be workout.
From me those are the only boards manufactures I would recommend, I'm not familiar enough with any the others.
I see a lot of good information here. I'm gamer minded, so I didn't want to just put together something I have no real knowledge what's needed, but after reading some of the replies, I could get closer to creating a build from scratch,
but if money wasn't a problem, I would just buy from http://www.falcon-nw.com/
the FX 6100 has a cpu benchmark of 5400 --- any time your looking for processors this is the place also has video card benchmarks
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
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I'm replacing my system ... 17-920 quad with a cpu bmark of about 5500 and 24g of ram
mainly because the board only has 6 mem slots and that cpu will only see 4g per slot
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the newer non server processors as best I can tell will only see 8g so even if you find a mobo with 8 slots you're stopping at 64.
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but a dual processor server board will have 8 slots per processor and since it's designed for Xeons they will see up to 64g per slot
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the mother board is at about $450 right now
the Xeon 2630 v3 has dropped to $660 --- and has a cpu bmark of 12,000
the board will function with one... so you dont' have to get the second one right away ... (would give benchmark number of 24,000)
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board is ddr4 and 4 16g sticks will cost about $600
16g are the most cost effective... they are twice the cost of 8s... so buying 8s doesn't make sense...
the 32s are about 1.5 times higher than a pair of 16s.. and the 64 are very pricey.
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even using 16s you can get to 128 per processor or 256 if you buy two processors
32s would give you 512 and 64s a TB....
is that the limit of the 920? I have a 920 with 12GB on a P6T (1st gen), I tried to add 48 GB 6x8GB and it wound not even post. 24GB is $180 from Corsair 6x4GB so if it's the CPU and not the mobo (by itself) I might pull the trigger on 24GB 'cus I've hit the ceiling with 12.
Lately I upgraded my home computer to an i7 5820K running on an MSI X99 series board, with a GTX960.
First Tip - Get a mother board that exceeds what your building, and they are realatively cheap. Do this because and for example you can leveage that more expensive chip later on when it gets cheaper.
Second tip - Put your Operating System on a devoted SSD - Sata 3 is fine - it will boot quickly and does not need to be a large SSD (128 GB)
Third tip - Put your Content in the fastest drive you want to afford. I'm using a PCI-e mini drive which is 256 GB - once again its not huge but my content is literally sitting on chips plugged right into the PCI, which allows huge transfer rates to processor and memory. I'm letting my CMS use this fast drive for the database also.
4th Tip - Put any more compact but important data such as custom characters you work with and would really hate to loose onto something like Google Drive or Dropbox such that they are also on a cloud.
My programs and image library (-Gimp etc-) then goes on a large rotating drive which also gets a mirror of my content put on it periodically as a local back up.
My budget is limited as my employment is only part time.. so I could not go twin GTX970 etc... Anyway the Haswell-E intel with a modern but not so high powered GTX960 of 4GB now ROCKS for Daz... Go more than one GPU if your waiting on a lot of renders, or choose a system that can take another in the future if needed. Also I didn't max it with much memory (4x4), stopped at 16 GB. However I did put in fast memory and choose a Mobo with 8 Dimms in case I want to expand it later.
Once I built this machine I realised that it was not renders that I used to wait on most of the time but scene loading - this rig has made it so easy to flit between scenes to grab something or check something.