$10,000 budget on a PC.

So, I am new to Blender. Learned Maya while going to school in animation. It is very similar. My boss just gave me a $10,000 budget on a PC. Not including a monitor or any PC accessories. Have those already. I was thinking 3 Titan Z, and a XEON E5-2650 v3. Anyone have any other ideas? I am new to Gpu rendering. My current workstation is a newer Quadro. It does okay, but the graphics card is crashing due to it only having 2GB of memory. The 12GB on the Titans should be plenty correct? I understand having three does not help as far as memory. But it should render pretty fast right? My animations are not too complex and only about 19 seconds at 24 fps. Any help from some experienced Blenderers would be nice. Thanks in advance! Just looking for what you all would do to make the best $10,000 Blender PC. I want to make sure it is a good investment.

Hi, keep in mind the dual cards share it´s memory.
You have 6 GB for Cycles, if you don´t need more for your scenes the Z is the fastest single slot card on earth.
E5-2650 is very good, look for very good cooling and a good power supply.
One user in Octane forum build a system for about 10000$ with very good results.
When I find I can post link here.

Cheers, mib

Hi, here is the link to the user thread of Octane forums, he build with 4 Titan Z so it is about 12000$.

Cheers, mib

Thanks for the help @mib2berlin! Question isn’t the Titan X better than the Z, or am I confused? Thanks again.

Hi, Titan Z is a dual GPU card, Titan X is a single GPU card.
If you compare one GPU from the Z with Titan X the Titan X is faster but if you run both cores of the Z the Z is much faster.
The only limit of the Z is memory, it shares the 12 GB, you have only 6 GB for Cyles.
The single Titan X can use it´s 12 GB full for Cycles.

Octane benchmark:

http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?sort_by=avg&filter=&singleGPU=1

CHeers, mib

Oh okay. Thanks! One last thing, and only because you have helped someone else with this issue. :slight_smile: If and when you have the time, I would appreciate any help with this. Totally new to Blender, and thought I had it figured out for the most part. Than I went to render and got the whole black screen deal. When I Shft+Z, the preview window renders fine. But if I F12, or click the render or animation button, nothing but black screens. I read through some forums checking lighting, and clip distances… nothing yet has lead me to my resolution. All of the meshes in my scene are all on the same layer, and the camera check box is checked under each objects “ray visibility” tab. I don’t really understand normals, but would that be the problem if I can see them fine in my window when doing a render preview? I am having issues uploading the file to this response. I am using a Quadro K2100M, Windows 7 Pro x64, and Blender 2.74. Thanks for any help.

Found out what was causing my problem. Under the render settings the two boxes under “Post Processing” were checked. Both “Compositing”, and “Sequencer”. I found that it will do the whole black screen thing when “Compositing” is checked. What are the Compositing, and Sequencer boxes for anyway? Thanks again for all the help Mib! You are awesome!

Hey,

The compositor lets you post-process the render output through a series of nodes (check the node editor and switch it to compositing).
If compositing is enabled but no nodes are setup, then the output from the compositing stage will be a blank frame.

Similar with the sequencer, it’s used to combine different footage/audio into a final video, and it is evaluated ‘last’, so if you have the sequencer processing some files, that takes priority over the render and compositor.

Alan

I would look into a renderPRO from Boxx as an addon to your workstation…
http://www.boxxtech.com/products/rendering-and-simulation/renderpro

Evidently you work for Pixar’s parent company. Dream ‘R’ Us. Or, you sampled some good herb and woke up on a couch somewhere thinking a ten thousand dollar computer was in your world.

What studio has a ten thousand dollar computer for a workstation. I would love to see the site and pictures I might add. We all sling a little shit on the forum here. Many times without realizing it until months later. But, you have taken that to a whole new level.

Two thoughts here. Request my address and FedEx me some of that bud or seek out that same couch and see if somehow it might… Regardless, I’m not buying this shit.

Hi theoldghost, use my link from post 3, this user get 12000$ from his company for a system.
This is not rare in Octane forums, these are professionals. :yes:
To be more cynical, most Blender user are hobby user and don´t spend money for anything.

Cheers, mib

Wouldn’t it be much more cost and speed efficient to set up, lets say 5 PCs, each 2000$ ?

If your not looking for super water cooled awesomness, and don’t mind a bit of noise then why not get a build done similar to this (below). It has a x99 CPU (40 PCIe Lanes) 32GB DDR4, 1.5TB of SSD’s and 4 NVidia Titan X’s :slight_smile: That’s a lovely 12GB per GPU that will last you quite a while :slight_smile:

Costs $10500 approx. AUD, which would come to around $8000 USD at the moment?? Can upgrade the CPU to the i7 5930K if you want, add more SSD’s or change the case quite easily :slight_smile:


@zeealpal

Nice! What would you recommend on a $3,000 budget?

That really depends on the aim of the build, but here is an upgradeable GPU focused build, comes to about 2.8K USD


Its core focus is on the GPU with VRAM, if you wanted more speed, you could drop the Titan X for two 980’s. I value the 12GB VRAM more than the pure render speed, hence why 1 GPU and add another later is my preferred option.

The eventual aim of that build would be to drop another Titan X in in the future, the PSU will handle 2 GPU’s and OC’ing the CPU fine.

Has a decent 32GB RAM, which won’t be needing upgrading, and the 256GB SSD could easily be upgraded to 512GB to round it closer to US $3K.

Alan

i know this may sound really crazy, but if you have the time to learn how to set up and configure, why not try building a cluster render-er (personal render farm)?

basically, instead of getting 4 titan X(s) get 8 gtx 980 (but memory is smaller)
it’s almost gonna double it (well… more like 1.8X the speed of 4X titan X)

the problem is, you’ll need alot of extra efforts (+ some hardware) to put them together
but the thing is, not much people do this, because you need to buy extra hardware, and you can’t the hardware in normal situations (as in, you’ll be only using CPU, and you’ll send a job request to the GPUs and they’ll do the work (so no real time computation, but it’s much more faster)