the “badass factor” in computers lasts about 6 months i think, lol. again though, i think i’d like a badass render farm rather than one machine. the CGCookie example was pretty mad and $3000, so you could build a pretty damn astounding one for $6k never mind $9k.
I just bought a used HP z820: I would strongly advise for a cpu like xeon e5-2687w with faster Core speed.
about badass: I consider my z820 (which is from 2012) pretty frikkin badass. Current PC’s are 15-25% faster for 3x the price.
1min 52sec on centos 7
(3min 33sec on win 7)
That is with dual xeon e5-2640, 24 Cores running at 2.8Ghz (spec is 2.5GHz with 3GHz Turbo) .I intend to upgrade to e5-2687w eventually.
@RattleSnake:
GPU:If i were you i would dedicate one GPU to drive the Screens. Must not be a Titan X though. At least if you want to work while rendering on GPU.
Memory: Check the Manual for your Motherboard for Memory. There are some limitations respectively performance differences depending on how much you put in which Memory Slots.
Have you considered ECC/Registered Memory?
Power: I don’t think 1500Watt is enough… If your calculation is correct which i think it is you are at 1300Watt on CPU+GPU. I guess the Motherboard uses 100-150Watt and then you still got HDD, SSD.
And: I am not too much of a PC expert, but did some research recently since i did plan on building such a Workstation myself - although at Half your Price 
1min 52sec on centos 7…(3min 33sec on win 7)
Is that CPU or GPU render time?
Why does Centos7 render so much faster than Win7?
@RattleSnake:
GPU:If i were you i would dedicate one GPU to drive the Screens.
I built an desktop a few years ago, with a Zotac GTX580 for GPU rendering,
and Galaxy210 ($10 used) for the monitor…works great. 
(correction…BAI = $$/Render Time)
Hehe wouaw !
Quite animated here, thanks for your share every one.
I know Linux was faster than windows but… wouaw such a difference ! i will consider doing some tests Win/Cent OS 
You’re right 1500 watt is not enough if I use 100% CPU/GPU at the same time. That’s why I’m waiting to see the power consumption of PASCAL.
Haha well Concerning the dual E5-2696v3, I posted amazon links but I’m begining to order on e-bay (with a guy from UK) which is far less expensive (Moreover all the official sellers I found were out of Europe, and I don’t want to pay 700€ of customs duties haha).
***So finally I considered using the following worklow :
1/ Software part :
Blender = 3D modeling/UVs/Rigging/Skinning/Animation/Motion capture (using Perception Neuron)
Z brush = HD Sculpting (baking normals/Displace/Uvs sometimes)
Mari or Substance Painter (depending if UDIM is needed) => Painting
Houdini => FX (Fluids/Sands/Particules/Volumes/Physics…) + Renderer (mantra/renderman/Maxwell/Maybe Octane)
The only one I don’t know well is mister Houdini. I’m learning it since about 2 weeks and so far I really enjoy the logic behind it.
I will dedicate 2016 learning it.
Edit : by the way, I wait blender 2.8 and hope we will have good alembic support
***2/ Hardware part :
- Motherboard asus z10pe-d16 ws
- XEON E5-2696v3 X2
-
Ventirad Noctua NH-D15s (X2)
-
Graphic cards : 1 TitanX (for the moment). 1 Titan Pascal later.
Finally as my tools are more CPU oriented, I will definitely wait to see the benefits of buying multiple GPUs.
RAM Samsung M386A4G40DM0-CPB (X4) => 64Go per CPU
http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B00UBHS7VQ/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1642&creative=19458&creativeASIN=B00UBHS7VQ&linkCode=as2&tag=websitewebmat-21
Alim Corsair CP-9020057-EU 1500W
Hard drives :
1TO SSD + 7TO SATA 6Gb/s
Computer Tower : Cooler Master Cosmos 2
Cheers
@3dcal: All times are CPU. (As to why Win 7 is slower… Win 7 will probably become faster in future - it has to do with the Compiler in use. There might already be faster builds on Graphicall - i don’t really care - win 7 is my gaming OS.)
@Rattle-Snake: Be aware Houdini can only use 1 GPU at the Moment! I find Houdini quite good to work with - at least for the Tasks you have in mind for it. (Not sure about it’s rendering “stuff” - i personally would prefer using Blender for that - but thats not usable unless we get proper Alembic and probably OpenVDB implementation in Blender. (I personally don’t expect those features to appear in Blender too soon - given the fact they are around for a few years now and BF does not seem to care too much - despite it being de facto Industry standard - well at least in VFX.
Something to consider is that you need the Full Version of Houdini (4500$) to be able to Use other Renderers than the built in Manta - Indie Version is not enough… (afaik)
Bashi,
Thank you very mush for all theses useful infos !
Do you know if Win 10’s Compiler is a little bit faster ?
I could go for a dual boot with CentOS, but I read somewhere that drivers can be tricky to install on it.
If you tell me the difference is huge, I will go for CentOS (seems like to be a little faster than ubuntu too for this kind of computation)
Thanks for the Tip, I will do some tests but I think the 36 cores CPUs should be fine for simulations with Houdini (rather than using 1 GPU).
For the renderer in blender I totally agree with you as Cycles is getting better and better (Especially for SSS and fire on GPU soon).
But as you said perhaps we will have to wait a bunch of time for compatibility with OpenVDB and Alembic 
Yep I know :
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2907&Itemid=398
I tested renderman with blender and fell in love with it. Would be great to use it in Houdini (as it’s free for non commercial).
I have to decide if Mantra is good enough for what I want. It’s seems like it’s a very good/production ready renderer for characters and FX (maybe less for archi). Also the new principled shader pbr sounds simple and powerful…
Well I have to test a bunch of things to improve the final workflow
Bashi,
do you have a GPU time for the beamer on the HP z820?
@rattle-snake: I do not really know more about Windows performance - im not interested in Windows per se.
I’m pretty sure CentOS or any *nix OS (Unix/linux/Osx) is potentially and practically faster than any Windows… Just by how much and if its worth the extended hassle is another question. I personally would prefer a CentOS any day - at least as a dedicated Workstation OS. Maybe not so much if it were my daily/everyday/home OS.
I can not say too much about Driver issues - The only Thing i had to install was Nvidia Drivers - everything else worked out of the BOX. (But then again this might not be true for your System… idk.)
The places where i’ve seen Houdini GPU it acts more like a “helper” to CPU - so no decision CPU or GPU - but CPU or CPU+GPU
@3dcal
I honestly don’t understand your question - could you re-phrase that?
Hi bashi !
Once again thank you for answering me, your experience is really helpful.
This guy made a comparison for this huge simulation :
Win => More than 64 Go of ram
Linux => Only 34 Go of ram
In this thread, guys are telling Centos is the more stable (because it’s a clone of red hat distrib) :
So… i will definitly take time to configure Centos as my production OS.
And Win as my gaming OS !
Cheers,
Seb
CentOs is much more stable than other distros, but it’s because they are very careful about what gets into it. So it’s always a bit behind other distros. We use CentOs for servers here at work because of this, but I wouldn’t use it for a desktop. Something like Mint or Ubuntu would be better, unless you want to go bleeding edge, then Fedora is the one you want (or Arch).
Hi Grimm !
In my mind the linux distro would be only to launch and use blender/houdini.
All the rest of my tools (Z brush, Substance painter…) + games would stick into windows.
So maybe it’s not that a problem if Centos is a little bit “poor”.
But I have to test 
This might sound crazy, but you could save cash here, maybe buy 8 AMD AM1 systems and do a distributed bucket rendering setup. Those cpu’s and motherboards are very cheap and if I remember correctly the CPU architecture is based on the Jaguar architecture that hold a world record for one of the fastest super computers. Maybe some experimental Beowulf renderfarm cluster setup.
No worries, it will probably work fine. You will have to manually install the drivers for you video cards though, as I’m fairly certain that the CentOs repos will not have them. This will especially affect GPU rendering with Cycles or Octane if you are going that route. The only other thing I would worry about is that you might not be able to find the newer versions of other libraries or dependencies in CentOs that the apps you are running need.
CentOS works (very very) fine for Blender and Houdini. Nvidia Driver can be installed through Repo - I think it’s NUX that has Nvidia - then you can install easily via yum or yumex (gui for yum).
Those will not be the most update Drivers though - but you probably would not want to install the latest drivers on such a workstation anyway. (If you want to you can install them though - manually and downloaded from Nvidia site. Just be warned - there are several steps included you need to do - like disabling nouveau drivers… some editing of files and terminal stuff)
Just to be clear - I consider centOS as a system that you install, make workable (install your software, do your tweaks) and then leave it alone and use it. It certainly is not the easiest linux to work with though.
Mint or Arch Linux would be my second choice, after having tried (as virtual machines) a few Linux distros from suse to fedora…
Mint is currently installed on my machine (besides centOS and win7) - as the more “open/easier/everyday” linux.
@rattle-snake. I personally would want to avoid a dual-boot workflow where certain apps are win and others are linux… But that is also strongly depending on your workflow and in the case of Blender and Houdini not too much of a Problem (as far as i am concerned). I would install both Blender and Houdini on win as well in your case.
Thanks for your advise DerpGoose !
Unfortunately I don’t have enough space in my flat to put 8 AMD AM1 systems 
Plus : I already received the dual core xeon.
@Bashi :
I understand there will be a little bit of tweaking using CentOS. I know linux a little bit (used it during a training some years ago).
I will take time to install it correctly, it’s not really an issue.
But I will have a look to Mint also as I heard good things about it from several other topics.
I agree it’s not the best workflow to switch from a boot to another but… softwares like Zbrush don’t work with Linux (AFAIK).
I will certainly install houdini and blender on both Win/Linux yes.
I think for my case, renderman could be the base renderer as its production ready, free (somewhat), and works well on houdini and blender. Depending on the shot, either blender or Houdini could process the render.
And well since we have good news about Alembic, things are getting better ! 
here are some numbers to think about:
The pixel plow extimator does not work with an 18 core/32 thread system. So I maxed it out at 24 core and 48 threads and factored the difference into the clock speed. According to the estimator, this will get the same result.
So with a moderate power slider level of 4.0 you can expect to buy about 200K minutes (about half a year)-worth of render time using this machine from this render farm.
Now I am not saying anything one way or another you may very well be rendering that kind of time.
Thanks you for this interesting comparison shawn.kearney !
My machine will calculate a lot for sure. The other advantage is to have a great feedback anytime (physic simulations/Previews…) without needing to load a renderfarm.
And as I said, the cores are already ordered
ooooo! I did not read that!
One thing I really like about having a lots of cores is the ability to multitask. If I set up a simulation or render on 22 threads, I still have 2 threads left over for watching cat videos. Your machine will let you watch cat videos in HD!
I def. dig what you’re saying about responsiveness. Nothing sucks more than having to wait on Realflow to crash. 
BTW - what are you getting for a monitor? I really like my 2K Ultrawide, it allows me to see my timelines and dopesheets much more clearly.