rendering Help with a 3D (CAD) Rendering/Occasional Gaming Powerhouse

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

Okay, first post ever here - here I go:

 

Location: NSW, Australia

Budget: <AUD$10,000, optimally wishing AUD$4000-7000

Purpose: 3D CAD rendering, high-performance AAA gaming (FPS, RTS, MMO, indie games etc)

OS': Windows 7 and/or Windows 10

Monitors: Initially 1, expandable to 2 in the future (1440p, 8-10 bit colour)

Peripherals: basic keyboard, high-precision mouse

Cooling: Water

OC: preferable

Other: Needs to be able to read/write off an apple time capsule, black/orange colour scheme, intel skylake processor, ≥32GB Ram, 6TB RAID 10

 

EDIT: Dual SLI gtx 980 ti's (ASUS Matrix) is ideal (best relative price to performance ratio as I've observed)

 

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/XbbjP6

 

I'd like to know if these parts are the best choices for what this build is trying to achieve (It needn't necessarily be able to render a huge view at 4K in 5 minutes or anything like that, it just needs to be able to do fairly high quality renders of buildings/rooms in a couple hours (ideally less than a day), and easily hold its own in high-performance gaming scenarios.

 

Thank you all in advance for any help/advice you may be able to provide!!

 

Also, let me know if this shouldn't be here, or if I've broken any forum rules or anything -- I'd rather not be banned

 

TL;DR:

 

I'm in the pre-planning stage of a skylake build which is primarily for 3D (CAD) rendering (Autodesk Revit, etc) for architectural/design plans, but also very capable of AAA gaming (RTS, FPS, 3rd Person strategy/shooters in the vein of Magicka, and games like LOTR:SOM etc) at mid-to-high settings, with 4K being a preference, but not a necessity, 1440p instead being ideal, and also being VR-ready. It should also be capable of running 1-2 displays (ideally at 1440p resolution with 8-10 bit colour). Overclocking is preferable for this build.

 

I also need to somehow interface it with an apple time capsule running as a file server/backup server so it is able to read/write to the capsule (backups for this machine need not be stored on the time capsule). It also needs an optical drive, as clients still often supply/expect CD's as part of their job package/specifications (archaic, I know)

 

It's going to be located in a 1st floor brick office with poor air conditioning and direct exposure to sunlight.

 

I'm located in Australia (close to Sydney) and there isn't really much of a budget as this is a business purchase, but under AUD$10,000 (~USD$7600) is very, very preferable, and in the AUD$4000-7000 (~USD$3000-5300) range is ideal.

 

I'm going for a black/orange colour scheme for this build, to match the colours of the company logo.

 

Watercooling is my goal for this build, but I'm open to starting off air-cooled and buying the parts needed for a custom loop over time (to match the colour scheme) to replace later if that's a better option.

 

A basic keyboard is all that's required, but a high-precision mouse is obviously desired for this build. It'll be running either Windows 7, Windows 10, or both (depending on software support).

 

The purpose of this build is to increase the rate at which we can provide realistic 3D rendering for clients in an industry where stereoscopic renderings are rapidly becoming more and more standard -- We currently virtualise windows 7 via Parallels Desktop on a 2012-era iMac, which is obviously a horrible solution (no hardware acceleration, split resources, etc) but until now it's all we've needed as it's been a very niche request. I know there are other, less expensive solutions, but this build also serves the purpose of high-performance gaming (the company is only a small, 3-man architectural firm [myself included] and in my spare time there's nothing stopping me spending my time gaming (I'm an unpaid employee [17yo] managing the tech side of my dad's business)

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

hmm

 

I may have gone overboard on the detail here

[Streetguru]

1 hour ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

 

Do you already have a 4k display?

 

also why aren't you going X99?

 

any are you doing this professionally? if so you'll probably want a workstation GPU

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

Just now, Streetguru said:

Do you already have a 4k display?

 

also why aren't you going X99?

 

any are you doing this professionally? if so you'll probably want a workstation GPU

Currently, I only have a spare 1080p display, but I'll be soon purchasing 2-3 displays, none of which will be 4K however

 

they'll be at max 1440p

 

I'm mainly going with Z170 because the asus rampage viii extreme/assembly is that chipset and comes in the right colour scheme for what I'm going for

 

and, in my experience, workstation GPU's are typically not worth the price for the frequency of use machines like this will get

 

I considered X99 briefly, but I am(was?) convinced that the 6770k would be enough for the typical workloads this machine would be handling.

 

Please correct me if i'm wrong, however!

[infamous_last]

What software?
This will dictate whether using gaming GPUs will be OK or not. 

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

Just now, infamous_last said:

What software?
This will dictate whether using gaming GPUs will be OK or not. 

Autodesk Revit 2015

[Streetguru]

9 minutes ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

Currently, I only have a spare 1080p display, but I'll be soon purchasing 2-3 displays, none of which will be 4K however

Well are you sure you need CUDA and not open CL?

 

Dual 980ti is probably going to be a completely waste given that gaming cards will work, but not be optimized for in most productivity software, and even a single 980ti is overkill for 1440p

 

also you should get WD red drives, and probably get a standard sata SSD over a PCI-e one

 

and the extra performance from X99 is easily going to be worth it

 

PCPartPicker part list: http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/CbsJvK
Price breakdown by merchant: http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/CbsJvK/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor  ($569.00 @ Storm Computers)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212X 82.9 CFM CPU Cooler  ($52.00 @ Umart)
Motherboard: ASRock X99 Extreme4/3.1 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard  ($345.40 @ Newegg Australia)
Memory: G.Skill Value Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($191.00 @ IJK)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($229.00 @ CPL Online)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Case: Deepcool TESSERACT BF ATX Mid Tower Case  ($49.99 @ Mwave Australia)
Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series 1050W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($259.00 @ IJK)
Total: $2387.39
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-14 19:06 AEDT+1100

[infamous_last]

10 minutes ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

Autodesk Revit 2015

Autodesk software is actually quite well optimised for Geforce cards, if your not building an workstation class desktop (Xeon, ECC RAM etc) then for this software Geforce cards are perfect.

Other packages such as Solidworks thrive with Quadro/Firepros (and suck with gamer cards).

 

That is why you build you pc around it's use, if you were doing sim work or matlab then workstation class hardware would be the way to go.

 

I wouldn't recommend for long term life of pc for go any less than 6 core, make sure you have at least 16gb of RAM and that storage is fast (sata SSD is good, PCIe or NVMe is better).

 

Make sure you have something separate planned for backups, please... for the love of god don't skim on your backup plans

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

23 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Well are you sure you need CUDA and not open CL?

 

Dual 980ti is probably going to be a completely waste given that gaming cards will work, but not be optimized for in most productivity software, and even a single 980ti is overkill for 1440p

 

also you should get WD red drives, and probably get a standard sata SSD over a PCI-e one

 

and the extra performance from X99 is easily going to be worth it

 

PCPartPicker part list: http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/CbsJvK
Price breakdown by merchant: http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/CbsJvK/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor  ($569.00 @ Storm Computers)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212X 82.9 CFM CPU Cooler  ($52.00 @ Umart)
Motherboard: ASRock X99 Extreme4/3.1 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard  ($345.40 @ Newegg Australia)
Memory: G.Skill Value Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($191.00 @ IJK)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($229.00 @ CPL Online)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($173.00 @ Centre Com)
Case: Deepcool TESSERACT BF ATX Mid Tower Case  ($49.99 @ Mwave Australia)
Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series 1050W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($259.00 @ IJK)
Total: $2387.39
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-14 19:06 AEDT+1100

The finicky thing with revit is that it doesn't actually properly utilise either CUDA or OpenCL at the moment, but autodesk recently did drop OpenGL support in revit in favour of DX11, which I figured would be better supported by the 980 ti.

 

The thing with this build is that it's supposed to be shown off to the clients implicitly when they're in for meetings (windowed side panel, they see the fancy computer making the image of their fancy building/fitout, they think we're a good choice for future jobs etc) so I figured the dual sli with the 980 ti's, while definitely being overkill, will look the best for the clientele. Also, there's been some noise about getting a large wall mounted 4K screen to display the renderings and floor plans to the clients, but I don't think that's going to happen for a while.

 

The SSD is going to be a boot drive for windows and some apps (revit, etc), whereas the HDD's are for long-term storage

 

Now that you say it, the nas drives probably are the better option hahah

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

My only issue with picking a different chipset is that I'm unsure as to how long X99 will remain a better option than its skylake counterparts, and I figure that having a newer chipset just opens me up to a longer window of support and updates for drivers and microcode and the like before I have to prowl github for unofficial solutions to problems 

 

[Streetguru]

50 minutes ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

Autodesk Revit 2015

"Revit uses OpenGL 1.3"
http://revitclinic.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/10/hardware-what.html

 

I don't think anyone optimizes for OpenGL too much

 

Also the only cards they recommend here anyways are workstation GPUs

 

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?siteID=123112&id=18844534&results=1&stype=graphic&product_group=2&release=2015&os=8192&manuf=all&opt=1

 

searching revit 2015 win7

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

"Revit uses OpenGL 1.3"
http://revitclinic.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/10/hardware-what.html

 

I don't think anyone optimizes for OpenGL too much

Oh?

 

I was under the impression that Openx support was recently dropped in favour of using microsoft's alternative for better hardware acceleration

 

I wonder where I read that tidbit of misinformation :l

[Streetguru]

6 minutes ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

Oh?

Also hang on, why are you buying $1300 980tis when they can be had for $1000 even in AUS?

 

and as far as dual GPUs go, you could always go for the bit better bang for your buck Fury(non X) cards

 

in some cases they even beat out stock 980tis when in crossfire, due to AMD's better scaling with resolution due to memory bandwidth and their dual GPU scaling

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2947547/components-graphics/amd-radeon-fury-crossfire-review-2-fast-2-furious.html

 

really though a single card is probably going to be fine, you could probably even get away with just a 390, and then you'd have 8gbs of VRAM, dunno if the extra VRAM is going to matter for your software though, should let you hold more textures.

 

 

the only workstation card I can ever find on that PC part picker is the W4100 which is a lower end one

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/part/amd-video-card-100505817

 

if you can find a W7100 it should cost the same as the Fury X/980ti and it comes with 8GBs of VRAM as well, you're probably going to want the workstation GPUs, though naturally you can't run games on them very well

[Streetguru]

20 minutes ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

My only issue with picking a different chipset is that I'm unsure as to how long X99 will remain a better option than its skylake counterparts, and I figure that having a newer chipset just opens me up to a longer window of support and updates for drivers and microcode and the like before I have to prowl github for unofficial solutions to problems 

 

X99 is the higher end platform, it's going to have different/better features compared to the consumer platform, usually just more PCI-e lanes and things like that.

 

also the motherboards are usually going to be of higher quality

 

may want to step up to this board if it's available

and if you want to impress customers, build a server room with rack mount cases, but don't actually put hardware, just put a lot of really loud fans and indicator LEDs so when you open the door it sounds like a lot is going on

 

 

and if you do get a 950 drive for whatever reason, you're probably going to want a heat sink with it, as they can run really hot

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

I picked the matrix asus cards mainly bc the orange colour scheme and I assumed asus' mobo would be slightly more pleased (read: stable) with graphics cards from the same manufacturer, no matter how slight the stability increase may be; and I went with matrix specifically because it seemed to have the best raw compute power w/ the factory overclock and all

 

I was hoping to stick with nvidia purely because there are some tasks in revit (and indesign, illustrator etc) that require CUDA cores for optimal functioning, etc, but I may be wrong again?

I haven't put as much time into researching AMD's alternatives, but I think I'll have to 

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

10 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

X99 is the higher end platform, it's going to have different/better features compared to the consumer platform, usually just more PCI-e lanes and things like that.

oooooooh

 

hmm

 

that throws somewhat of a spanner into the works

 

I'll have to see if there are enough lanes to support the hardware I'm trying to use

[Streetguru]

9 minutes ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

 

you're going to pay like $300 more per GPU, for an orange paint job and slightly more performance?  you could buy way more SSD storage with the money instead

The Firepro cards tend to cost less than the quadro counterparts

 

the board/GPU manufacturer isn't going to matter at all

if you're stuck with CUDA I suppose you're stuck, but you could easily get away with 980(non ti) cards


Z170 has 28 lanes I believe, you're probably going to max it out if you run 2 GPUs with a x4 PCI-e SSD, and the 5930K has 40 PCI-e lanes

[scottyseng]

1 hour ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

-snip-

Yeah, I would also recommend going to X99. The 5820K (Do note it has fewer PCIe lanes) or 5930K are really good CPUs. If you're working on Revit, you're definitely going to want a faster CPU. Revit uses the CPU for pretty much everything...All geometry is rendered by the CPU. I use a FirePro v7900 and the graphics aren't my bottleneck, it's my 2500K (OC'd to 4.6GHz). I have a 14 core Xeon (E5-2965v3) )in my NAS with the same FirePro v7900, and the speed difference is quite drastic. However, I just got done building and overclocking a 5820K based computer for my cousin, and I got it clocked to 4.5Ghz and it's not too far behind my 14 core Xeon there (Which is stuck at 2.2GHz). The 5820K pulls more power though (1.21vcore vs .089 on the Xeon).

 

I think you should be fine with the Nvidia consumer GPUs unless you're dealing with massive models (Though with Revit it matters less since it's more CPU biased). I personally bought a FirePro because I was getting weird graphical glitches with my Radeon GPU (HD 4850) in Revit (like walls that didn't exist, artifacts, roofs that didn't exist where they were supposed to). However, that was back in Revit 2008...These days Revit is pretty good. If you have Nvidia GPUs, you can utilize the Nvidia Raytracer renderer that they added in Revit 2016 (I didn't notice until I did a practice render a few weeks ago). The AMD FirePros have a better performance per dollar compared to the Quadros (Though Quadros have better drivers), but neither can touch consumer GPUs (I think you should only get workstation GPUs if you're using software that can use it correctly (3DS Max, AutoCAD, etc)).

 

Also, I see you have four WD Blue Drives there. Are you planning on having a RAID array? If so, you should change to using WD Red drives.

[༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽]

11 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I would also recommend going to X99. The 5820K (Do note it has fewer PCIe lanes) or 5930K are really good CPUs. If you're working on Revit, you're definitely going to want a faster CPU. Revit uses the CPU for pretty much everything...All geometry is rendered by the CPU. I use a FirePro v7900 and the graphics aren't my bottleneck, it's my 2500K (OC'd to 4.6GHz). I have a 14 core Xeon (E5-2965v3) )in my NAS with the same FirePro v7900, and the speed difference is quite drastic. However, I just got done building and overclocking a 5820K based computer for my cousin, and I got it clocked to 4.5Ghz and it's not too far behind my 14 core Xeon there (Which is stuck at 2.2GHz). The 5820K pulls more power though (1.21vcore vs .089 on the Xeon).

 

I think you should be fine with the Nvidia consumer GPUs unless you're dealing with massive models (Though with Revit it matters less since it's more CPU biased). I personally bought a FirePro because I was getting weird graphical glitches with my Radeon GPU (HD 4850) in Revit (like walls that didn't exist, artifacts, roofs that didn't exist where they were supposed to). However, that was back in Revit 2008...These days Revit is pretty good. If you have Nvidia GPUs, you can utilize the Nvidia Raytracer renderer that they added in Revit 2016 (I didn't notice until I did a practice render a few weeks ago). The AMD FirePros have a better performance per dollar compared to the Quadros (Though Quadros have better drivers), but neither can touch consumer GPUs (I think you should only get workstation GPUs if you're using software that can use it correctly (3DS Max, AutoCAD, etc)).

 

Also, I see you have four WD Blue Drives there. Are you planning on having a RAID array? If so, you should change to using WD Red drives.

Yeah, I've made the switch to red drives now

 

My revised build proposal (accommodating feedback from you guys:

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/vqgJvK

 

Is the 5960x justified for the extra performance? Or is it better to just go with the 1/2 price, 3/4 core 5820k?

[scottyseng]

7 hours ago, ༼ ຈ ل͜ ຈ༽ said:

Yeah, I've made the switch to red drives now

 

My revised build proposal (accommodating feedback from you guys:

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/vqgJvK

 

Is the 5960x justified for the extra performance? Or is it better to just go with the 1/2 price, 3/4 core 5820k?

Well, to me, no, I would go for the 5820K (If you don't need all of the PCI Lanes) or the 5930K (If you need more PCIe Lanes). You can't overclock the 5960X quite as high either.

 

Yeah, the build looks pretty good now though.

[nickl]

Just came across this thread, and I would like to point out that a GTX 980Ti might not have support for 10 or 12 bit color. You probably will need a workstation card for this. See this link.