haven’t bought it yet.
for work i doubt i’ll have a problem with gpu rendering memory… for personal projects it could happen though. i’m doing what i can to cover all my bases as best i can though.
i didn’t really want to go with watercooling either but intel apparently suggests it for the 140w processors. that said i found a build someone put together on pc part picker using the same processor and air cooler i picked out (it was a Noctua nh-u12s) with pretty good temps so that put me at ease about not going with a watercooler.
still doing fine tuning on the list and research about some parts.
i’d really like to know about cuda performance on pcie 3.0 x16 vs 2.0 x 16 in things other than games… not really having much luck there aside from someone who was searching for the same thing who based on pcie 3.0 specs and two forum posts around the net that seemed to point them towards saying it would be helpful if you were sending a whole lot of data passes to/from the card at a time. (more of a number of shipments rather than how big the shipments are thing)
being as i’m pretty much just an end user i don’t really know how helpful that will be for cycles gpu rendering because i don’t really know about how it sends/receives data while rendering.
i did end up putting a 250GB SSD on there rather than a 120.
it doesn’t actually seem like there’s much of a difference in price for the new intel cpu vs one that i can use ddr3 with. a 6 core is gonna cost me about the same price regardless of if i get the new one or not unless i get the cheaper new one which drops the price about $200 which would make it easily the best priced intel 6 core cpu. (and with only slightly less performance than the one i’ve currently got picked out)
motherboard will also run about the same cost as with a new intel.
the cheapest listed quad channel ddr3-1600 ram kit is only about $20 cheaper than the ddr4-2133 quad channel kit i’ve picked out (which was the cheapest but well rated) and $40 less than the cheapest ddr4-2400 quad kit all in all it’s actually seems coming out to be pretty close to the same price. either way, with the newer stuff i figure that i probably have a better chance at easier upgrades due to future price drops and new tech than not.
Don’t know if I should start a new thread on this or not, sorry if I should.
I also am in the market for a new Windows PC, for Blender and some gaming. Budget is flexible, but perhaps in the range of what’s being talked about here. I built my last PC myself, 5 years ago, from parts but it was hard to get working and gradually has developed reliability problems, so I think I’d prefer something prebuilt this time, understanding that it will cost me more.
Anyone got a favorite prebuilt computer model/source? Was thinking I’d want something like a 4 or 6 core Intel i7; at least 2TB hard drive; maybe an SSD; at least 16GB memory; and something like NVidia 970. Quiet would be a plus.
My GUESS is that the throughput won’t be an issue with cuda like it would be for games. Unless maybe if you’re doing animations and it adds up over time? mib2berlin would probably know.
i think the game thing was mostly limited by how fast it could produce frames and the cards couldn’t make them fast enough to need anything but just slightly more than what pci-e 2.0 x8 provided. which may be what you meant as throughput being an issue but i don’t really know how it would add up over time with animations since i’m pretty sure cycles is only going to be sending data through for the tile it’s working on at the time.
that being the case and how cuda use output differs from game use output i’m probably gonna choose to err on the side of caution and go with the pricier cpu that enables greater pci-e bandwidth… though actual performance would certainly be more determined by how many individual data packages it’s sending through the pci-e lanes at a time…
that said i did see someone go with 3.0 because apparently it should benefit their needs in photoshop’s openCL/cuda enabled features (i think that was mostly filters and such on giant sized canvases) but i think that’s dealing each pixel individually which is a calculation that i’m sure can be done very quickly and i’m not quite sure how cycles handles the data it’s sending.
the gaming performance comparisons i looked at were all over a year old at best. most being a few years but at least one as far back as 2010. so none of them were very current.
My apologies DaedalJS, I was tired and kinda blurred something else I was looking at with the parts you are talking about. Taking a better look at the options with a clear mind, you are correct that the newest architecture of i7’s is the same price as the ones it replaces, and while the improvements are minor it does give future upgradeability so that is what I would choose also. Just keep in mind that with the newest types of CPU, mobo & RAM there may be software/driver glitches until full support is provided.
And the Noctua NH-U12S is a good CPU cooler, I have the older version of that in a gaming system, and in my workstation the NH-U14S is keeping an i5-4670 at near-idle temps. Go to the Noctua site and check the TDP chart (products>select the cooler you mentioned>FAQ>bottom question gives the link), it shows what each of their coolers can handle.
no need to apologize. i thought there’d be a bigger difference too and started looking at options to check the price difference just to be pleasantly surprised.
ah thanks for the tip about the tdp chart. it shows i’m good even with a low overclock. if in the future i do end up overclocking i’m sure i’ll probably end up upgrading the cooler but i’m hoping this one will fit in the case i picked with the side panel fan still attached. (other reviews with slightly larger noctua coolers i’ve read have stated that they just barely don’t fit with the fan there (they estimated the larger cooler didn’t fit by less than 10mm) so i shouldn’t have to remove the fan and if i do a slim fan as a replacement should do the trick. worse comes to worse that’s just two more fans for elsewhere in the case.