help me build a workstation ...please

[opentarget]

Hi I need some help from any of the tech wizards here. Im building a graphics workstation for the purpose of 3d/2d animation and vfx, I was going to purchase a machine from monarchcomputers.com but when I went to buy I found that they don’t ship to Ireland.

 

I was wondering if you guys know any similar site that builds computers for the European market I really need to get this machine asap as my system is dying a death with the work im getting in at the moment….(and I cant afford a box or alienware workstation)

 

If you could recommend any components I would be over the moon. I need help specifically with processors and graphics cards. I have about €3500 to spend in total but would be willing to go up a few hundred for quality.

 

Thanks.

[AshMat]

If you're jsut using it for graphics making etc, then i would probably recommend a mac.

[opentarget]

Thanks for the reply

I cant use an apple I have photoshop softimage 3dsmax adobe premier and flash all licensed for use on a windows based pc and im nit even sure if max and softimage are published on apple platform at all

[pedrocasilva]

Thanks for the reply

I cant use an apple I have photoshop softimage 3dsmax adobe premier and flash all licensed for use on a windows based pc and im nit even sure if max and softimage are published on apple platform at all

I'll try to help you, but tell me... are you aiming to buy it in pieces; like 2 xeons/opterons, a motherboard, and a nvidia Quadro/Ati Fire and assemble it yourself at home?

 

Or are you going for a aldready built device (pre-built or custom built) that ships to Ireland?

[Colin]

Abit AW8D LGA775 - £150

 

Intel Pentium D 805 Dual Core 2 x 2.66 GHz - £81

 

Corsair 1GB DDR2 533MHz - £59 each

 

Gainwood 7900GTX 512MB - £320

 

Seagate 200GB Hard Drive (x 2 if you really need it) - £53 each

 

20in Viewsonic Monitor - £285

 

Total - £1009 (with 2GB of ram)

 

 

That is a kick arse system for just over a grand. Alot of people don't know about the Pentium D 805's little secret. With certain motherboards it can be overclocked to about 3.6GHz per core on just air, and Tom's Hardware have had it up to 4.1GHz per core aswell in their tests. This chip overclocked even beats the AMD FX chips on bench marks.

 

**Tom's Hardware article on it**

 

Then later on change the chip over to a Conroe when they come down in price a little later on.

[Jon]

Abit AW8D LGA775 - £150

 

Intel Pentium D 805 Dual Core 2 x 2.66 GHz - £81

 

Corsair 1GB DDR2 533MHz - £59 each

 

Gainwood 7900GTX 512MB - £320

 

Seagate 200GB Hard Drive (x 2 if you really need it) - £53 each

 

20in Viewsonic Monitor - £285

 

Total - £1009 (with 2GB of ram)

 

 

That is a kick arse system for just over a grand. Alot of people don't know about the Pentium D 805's little secret. With certain motherboards it can be overclocked to about 3.6GHz per core on just air, and Tom's Hardware have had it up to 4.1GHz per core aswell in their tests. This chip overclocked even beats the AMD FX chips on bench marks.

 

**Tom's Hardware article on it**

 

Then later on change the chip over to a Conroe when they come down in price a little later on.

 

Its good for the price, but even overclocked it isnt amazing, plus it uses a shit load of power, you need at least a 600 watt to have it stable.

[pedrocasilva]

He wants a 3D workstation for 3D modeling, for 3500€ (£2390) he could get a better system; at least a AMD 64 AM2 and a ATi FireGL V7350.

 

FireGL 7350 are expensive but they are worth every penny for 3D modeling, it's a pure graphics card... they often sacrifice some shader units just to fit in more RAW poligons.

[DCK]

Wait a month or so for the Core 2. That should kick butt and eat any Pentium D or Athlon 64 alive.

 

With that budget you can get two Core 2's, 4 gigs of RAM, a professional graphics card (that means no mainstream GeForce but a Quadro) and get a decent small work monitor and a bigger monitor to see what it looks like in big.

 

As for specific chips: go for the Core 2 Extreme (2.8 GHz I believe) if you want a single CPU or take a dual Core 2 at 2.6 GHz if you want to have two. If you put a Pentium 4 cooler on those you can easily push them far beyond 3 GHz.

The nVidia Quadro FX 1500 should be a very decent GPU, and if you can spare the money you could go for the FX 3500 but that one goes over 1000 euros.

[pedrocasilva]

Wait a month or so for the Core 2. That should kick butt and eat any Pentium D or Athlon 64 alive.

 

With that budget you can get two Core 2's, 4 gigs of RAM, a professional graphics card (that means no mainstream GeForce but a Quadro) and get a decent small work monitor and a bigger monitor to see what it looks like in big.

 

As for specific chips: go for the Core 2 Extreme (2.8 GHz I believe) if you want a single CPU or take a dual Core 2 at 2.6 GHz if you want to have two. If you put a Pentium 4 cooler on those you can easily push them far beyond 3 GHz.

The nVidia Quadro FX 1500 should be a very decent GPU, and if you can spare the money you could go for the FX 3500 but that one goes over 1000 euros.

nah, it still lacks real 64 bits implementation. so in reality it can only address 4 GB of memory without tricks, AMD is a better choice in that... as it can adress 64 GB at once...

 

Not to mention that in a few years in time it'll could be a advantage to run software in 64 bits Operating systems, and that will feel like a upgrade (as high as 20% speed increase) on AMD 64 chips.

 

Apart from that... it kinda ties with AMD 64 FX latest chips from what I heard... sure it might overclock higher, but no one overclocks a workstation, they just want stability.

 

Pentium Extreme Edition is not worth it, even at 2,8 GHz it's only marginally better (at best) than a much cheaper cpu.

 

As for graphics cards, I find ATi's high end professional cards better at this time. the equivalent to Quadro FX 3500 (ATi FireGL 7200) can go for as low as $700 (256 MB with 42 GB/s bandwidth).

 

Oficial compartion charts:

-> http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html

 

-> http://www.ati.com/products/workstation/fireglmatrix.html

[Jon]

I don't know where you heard it but, the Athlon FX chips dont tie with Conroe, they are severely beaten.

[DCK]

Exactly; the Core 2's have shown much more speed. Even with a possible advantage in 64-bit, it's still until AMD new line of chips in 2008 until Intel will be beaten again. The different design philosophies Intel and AMD have applied (Intel: make 32-bit chip with 64-bit compability, AMD: make 64-bit chip 32-bit compability) doesn't mean that Intel has used a performance lacking workaround in their Core 2s, especially not with 64-bit Windows Vista coming up.

 

The Core 2 is the choice for the next year.

[pedrocasilva]

I don't know where you heard it but, the Athlon FX chips dont tie with Conroe, they are severely beaten.

I looked up for benchmarks and you're right it's overall faster, still it's not the worst, nor the best, but still a great cpu.

 

Conroe still has no real 64 bits implementation; that could slow him down later. still AMD will have problems in responding/stealing the crown since Intel could easily do a 3,33 GHz Conroe now if she needed.

 

-> http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=8

-> http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-shootout_3.html

 

Generaly between a E6400 and a E6600.

 

New pricing of AMD products from 27th July:

AMD is gonna adjust their prices due to conroe next friday.

 

Conroe prices:

Core 2 Extreme X6800..$999

Core 2 Duo E6700........$530

Core 2 Duo E6600........$316

Core 2 Duo E6400........$224

Core 2 Duo E6300........$183

 

In the end it's all up to price versus quality here, and the "top" conroe is not cheap at all ($999) I'd easily choose a dual core Opteron over a conroe if the price was right (with a dual cpu board I could always add another one afterwards)

 

still I'm not informed about Opteron price, but last year AMD sold a couple of single core ones cheap for the regular consumer (and then backed out afraid of making them too cheap), also... there's a cheap Xeon low budget line coming:

 

Intel badge engineering at its finest

DailyTech has received a roadmap outlining Intel’s entry-level single processor workstation and server plans. Intel will be pushing two platforms this time around: Kyloway and Kaylo.

 

Intel’s Wyloway workstation platform is based around the Intel 975X Express chipset. Intel also positions the 975X Express as a premium chipset for its consumer platform. Wyloway will accommodate Intel Core 2 Duo E6000 series, Pentium D 900 series and upcoming Kentsfield quad core processors.

 

Intel is expected to launch a Conroe-based Xeon 3000 series processor lineup in September. Four Xeon 3000 series models will be released—the Xeon 3070, 3060, 3050 and 3040. Xeon 3000 series will be clocked at 2.66, 2.40, 2.13 and 1.86 GHz respectively. The new Xeons will use the same Socket T (LGA775) as current Core 2 Duo Conroe and Pentium D processors and operate on a 1066 MHz front-side bus. Cache sizes will vary on the Xeon 3000 series with the Xeon 3070 and 3060 having 4MB of shared L2 cache while the Xeon 3050 and 3040 will have 2MB of shared L2 cache. All Xeon 3000 series processors will support Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT), Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T) and Execute Disable Bit technologies. Hyper-Threading will not be supported on Intel Xeon 3000 series processors.

 

Pricing for Intel Xeon 3000 series will be $530, $316, $224 and $188 for models 3070, 3060, 3050 and 3040 respectively. Xeon 3000 series processors are expected to launch in September.

 

Supporting the Intel Xeon 3000 series of processors will be a new platform dubbed Kaylo. Kaylo is based around the upcoming Mukilteo 2 and Mukilteo 2P chipsets. Mukilteo 2 and Mukilteo 2P have been named Intel 3000 and 3010 respectively. Intel is positioning the Kaylo platform for entry-level single processor servers. Current documents show Kaylo will support Pentium D 900 series in addition to Xeon 3000 series processors. There’s no mention of support for the recently released Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors though. Not much information is available on the Intel 3000 and 3010 aside from its existence.

Source: http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=3381

 

AMD will have to respond... with cheap Opterons

[Colin]

To be honest, as you're a 3d/animation guy you should know better as to what hardware you require and what's what. Or you would know of certain CG forums to ask these questions at. Peoples responses here though should help you quite abit (or confuse you even more). :wink:

[opentarget]

To be honest, as you're a 3d/animation guy you should know better as to what hardware you require and what's what. Or you would know of certain CG forums to ask these questions at. Peoples responses here though should help you quite abit (or confuse you even more). :wink:

 

ye i should know more about hardware but i am a 2d animater at heart and only picked up on 3d when it was forced down my neck at my last job! but now i love it but all the years as a 2d artist took tole on my tech knowledge.

im thinking on the lines of opteron based workstation with a firegl card 4 gigs of ram and if as you said amd drops its cpu prices as a responce to core 2 i will be very happy is that info confirmed? (also i didnt get a hell of a lot of help from cgtalk)

[Colin]

ye i should know more about hardware but i am a 2d animater at heart and only picked up on 3d when it was forced down my neck at my last job! but now i love it but all the years as a 2d artist took tole on my tech knowledge.

im thinking on the lines of opteron based workstation with a firegl card 4 gigs of ram and if as you said amd drops its cpu prices as a responce to core 2 i will be very happy is that info confirmed? (also i didnt get a hell of a lot of help from cgtalk)

Well by the sounds of it, cash isn't a worry for you..........which is ideal when you're needing a really powerful rig. Having 4GB worth of ram would increase your render times a hell of alot (although I think XP can only register 3GB of it, with 64bit Windows being able to use over 8GB or something).

 

What's your primary 3D program that you're using? As I just hear people being more pleased with the Quadro's over ATI's FireGL cards.

 

And CGtalks response to you asking for some answers kind of shocks me, as usually people don't mind helping people with hardware problems.............but they've proberly just got sick of people asking over and over again now.

[pedrocasilva]

im thinking on the lines of opteron based workstation with a firegl card 4 gigs of ram and if as you said amd drops its cpu prices as a responce to core 2 i will be very happy is that info confirmed? (also i didnt get a hell of a lot of help from cgtalk)

Seems like a good choice to me...

 

As for the AMD price drops, yes it's confirmed and will officially take effect on the 27th of this month, the price alterations are in that table I posted, but nothing was said about the Opterons as of yet.

Well by the sounds of it, cash isn't a worry for you..........which is ideal when you're needing a really powerful rig. Having 4GB worth of ram would increase your render times a hell of alot (although I think XP can only register 3GB of it, with 64bit Windows being able to use over 8GB or something).

Windows XP 32-bit version can support 4 GB... Windows XP 64 bits can support as many as 128 GB, but there are no boards supporting that ammount as of yet; the maximum I've seen is 32 GB of RAM.

 

-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition

 

What's your primary 3D program that you're using? As I just hear people being more pleased with the Quadro's over ATI's FireGL cards.

That's part of the past, mainly because Nvidia has a big tradition with OpenGL tasks, while Geforce FX 5xxx was kinda terrible in regular games, it was very strong at two things... Quake 3 and DOOM 3, games that used OpenGL as a base.

 

ATi was never that strong at that, because they didn't do cards with RAW OpenGL in mind.

 

You don't use DirectX in Maya and 3D Studio Max, nor you need shaders that much, shaders are needed in real-time 3D to "cover-up" the lack of poligons, but on a 3D modeling program ehat you need is beast-like OpenGL habilities and RAW poligons, those are two things ATi never really beaten Nvidia in the past...

 

But with FireGL 7200/7300/7350 they are really whipping the floor with nvidia, why? because their previous chips were not a standalone solution for 3D rendering, thus they had the same achiles heel... On these new models we have a machine made from the ground for RAW Poligons and OpenGL, they even sacrificed the shader units to 16 (X1900 has 48) because they are not needed in this range, and managed to put in more juice of what really matters... that's a real good card I might add (a turning point for ATi).

[Colin]

The thing is the Quadro's are usually more reliable over the FireGL cards with artifacting in the viewports. I'm not going to get into a real tech discussion like you have above, as people just get confussed and it's too much effort, but currently the majority of people opt for the Nvidia option with regards to workstation cards.

[pedrocasilva]

The thing is the Quadro's are usually more reliable over the FireGL cards with artifacting in the viewports. I'm not going to get into a real tech discussion like you have above, as people just get confussed and it's too much effort, but currently the majority of people opt for the Nvidia option with regards to workstation cards.

I don't have that conception as I study design and have lots of friends who are 3D workstation techies; I've noticed all they talk about now is FireGL's... (they don't have the cash to buy them, though)

 

Never heard of FireGL with artifacts though, but adding my two cents; I believe that shoud be a myth, just like Xeon still sells a whole load more than AMD Opteron for the high range, even if AMD Opteron still has the crown (there's no Xeon out with Conroe generation core, yet), it's better, yet there's a reasonable reason why people won't change, "if it's not broken dont fix it", so why should they move over to opteron if intel never let them bad in reliability? changing is always a risk.

 

There's been all sort of fame over the Opteron's not being reliable, overheating and all... and if you ask me that has no basis.

 

Those who gave problems might have been some early models, or had the cooler misplaced or something, Nvidia had problems like that in the past too, I'm remembering Geforce 6 for example (and I have one).

[opentarget]

This is the system I am considering unfortunately my budget wont cover a quadro or fire gl so i have to make do with a high-end gaming card for the time being but i will replace it the next time i have extra cash. Let me know what you think....

 

Case: SILVERSTONE TJ06 Black CASE (NO PSU)

Cooling: LiquoCool Antarctic (CPU+Chipset or CPU+1xVGA or 2xVGA)

PSU: FSP Epsilon 700W Retail PSU

Motherboard: Tyan Tempest i5000PX Dual XEON 771 1333MHz

CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon 5140 (2.33Ghz 1333FSB 4Mb) Passive

CPU Cooling: 2 x Stock Heatsink with fan

Memory: 2 x 1024Mb DDRII 677MHz CL5 ECC Fully Buffered (Kingston)

Hard Drive: 2 x 200Gb WD Caviar SE 7200 8mb Cache SATA II

Storage HD: 320Gb Barracuda 7200.10 16mb Cache SATA2 NCQ

Graphics: Sapphire ATI X1900XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO

Optical Drive: Sony CDRW DVD Combo 52x32x52x16 OEM Black

Optical Drive 2: NEC 4570A 16x dual layer DVDRW black

 

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 OEM

Warranty: Premium 2 Year RTB Warranty and Lifetime Support

[pedrocasilva]

This is the system I am considering unfortunately my budget wont cover a quadro or fire gl so i have to make do with a high-end gaming card for the time being but i will replace it the next time i have extra cash. Let me know what you think....

 

Case: SILVERSTONE TJ06 Black CASE (NO PSU)

Cooling: LiquoCool Antarctic (CPU+Chipset or CPU+1xVGA or 2xVGA)

PSU: FSP Epsilon 700W Retail PSU

Motherboard: Tyan Tempest i5000PX Dual XEON 771 1333MHz

CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon 5140 (2.33Ghz 1333FSB 4Mb) Passive

CPU Cooling: 2 x Stock Heatsink with fan

Memory: 2 x 1024Mb DDRII 677MHz CL5 ECC Fully Buffered (Kingston)

Hard Drive: 2 x 200Gb WD Caviar SE 7200 8mb Cache SATA II

Storage HD: 320Gb Barracuda 7200.10 16mb Cache SATA2 NCQ

Graphics: Sapphire ATI X1900XT 512MB GDDR3 AVIVO

Optical Drive: Sony CDRW DVD Combo 52x32x52x16 OEM Black

Optical Drive 2: NEC 4570A 16x dual layer DVDRW black

 

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 OEM

Warranty: Premium 2 Year RTB Warranty and Lifetime Support

how much money do you have? if you can spend 3500€ like you said as a target... you could get much better than that.

 

anyway... I'd easily give up on a Xeon/Opteron and go after a better graphics card be it NVIDIA in SLI (very good for OpenGL and such anyway) or FireGL.

 

One year ago we didn't even had dual cores, that's theoretically two CPU's already, what you need is RAM

 

also bare in mind that you can get another Xeon afterwards; Dell made that deal a while ago:

 

-> http://www.theinquirer.net/Default.aspx?article=20137

 

I think it still works that way... anyway... go for a Nvidia SLI or FireGL 7200 256 MB; even if you have a tight budget. I wouldn't choose a high end ATi for that task.

 

As for the 2 hard drives and one Storage Hd? what are you aiming for?

 

Raid 0 (basically mirrowing the same data on one disc for a second equal one to avoid losses) or Raid 1 (joining the two discs into one making it theorectically faster) which one will be the scratch disc? the 2 hard drives?

 

 

I'm doing the math here... for a Opteron the 1,8 GHz model costs less than 400€ each so make it ~800€

 

Motherboard... the cheapest socket 940 without AGP8x and PCI-E instead is... 551 euros here. ouch...

 

-> http://www.tyan.com/products/html/opteron.html

 

The nForce Professional ones. (PCI-E is very important)

 

800+550=1350€

 

Xeon... forget about it, I can't possibly do a estimative for prices judging for their OEM retail prices...

 

anyway... dual opteron's 1,8 GHz plus the RAM... 2 GB +/- 200€=1550

 

+ a FireGL 7200...

 

you might have to import:

-> http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__ATI_FireGL_V7200_256_MB_PCIE,__19309362/search=7200+firegl

 

you might be able to get one of these here in europe from catalog, but considering you don't; add-in postage costs and VAT and let's consider a middle range price from the highest to the lowest, so... $750+15% VAT?=862,5=683€+ postage fee

 

still for EU stuff there shouldn't be extra fee's on the customs other than the VAT for imported computer hardware. (you can import a laptop in those conditions as long as it doesn't break the 10 Kg mark, at least in here).

 

1550+683€=2233€

 

now add in enclosure, PSU (if not included) and those periphericals, optical and storage drives, I think you can make it lower than the 3500€ barrier, then just tweak what you think you need most if you want to...

 

I never gave the lowest prices I was able to find in the estimative I made, still the prices I didn't give link to are to portuguese stores so they won't ship it there, but they are a indication of catalog prices practiced in europe, so it shouldn't vary that much, just search for a store who can order those.

 

I didn't do a Xeon alternative basically because I can't their OEM prices are simply impossible to work with.

[opentarget]

Thanks for that reply it helps a lot! Can I ask what kind of system would you build if the budget wasn’t €3500 but more like €6000? As this system is being purchased through my company and I will be claming the tax back so my budget has exploded!

[pedrocasilva]

Thanks for that reply it helps a lot! Can I ask what kind of system would you build if the budget wasn’t €3500 but more like €6000? As this system is being purchased through my company and I will be claming the tax back so my budget has exploded!

I could bump up the cpu specs a little and; if you consider you need/want it... you might buy a quad opteron board instead and toss in 2 more CPU's. that makes it 8 cores, so tecnically 8 cpu's.

 

I just remembered though... Windows XP pro only supports 2 cpu's, and a dual core system already amounts to that to the system... for 2 dual cores (4 cpu's) you need Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition... and Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition for 8 cpus (4 dual cores).

 

aww... these 2 Operating Systems in particular are so expensive. ~300€ for the standard one... and ~500€ for the Enterprise one.

 

For graphics I'd personally get a FireGL 7300/7350 (512 and 1 GB RAM respectively) instead of the 256 MB FireGL 7200 model. Again... I might consider two nvidia gaming high-end cards in SLI too. but not Quadro (the 3500 one is too expensive even with just 256 MB).

 

For RAM... 4 GB of RAM will come in handy, I mean... I have 2 GB for photoshop and I actually need more.

 

Hard drives... If you need a dedicated scratch disc in the programs you'll be using... buy one 15.000 rpm Western Digital Raptor with 36GB or 74 GB (or possibly twin ones and put them in RAID 1), these drives sacrifice GB capacity for pure speed, for Virtual RAM (used a lot in photoshop there's nothing better than having one of these discs empty and set as a scratch disc. (then again I don't really know how 3D rendering programs work; if they need them).

 

Here's a review:

-> http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead/

 

For storage and OS instalation I believe a normal disc with lots of space is enough. Or more than one if you really need GB storage.

 

said that... the first system I mentioned is already a unreachable dream for me apart from more MHz I'm just throwing in the best things possible in the market now. (and thus, more expensive).

[opentarget]

Ill take everything you said into account before I buy. I need this workstation for work mainly but I would also like for it to be a games machine (all work and no play…..and all that) do you thinks intels Woodcrest xeons will be ok for this? And what about graphics? Do the pro graphics cards perform well as gaming cards or will they fall on there ass?

[pedrocasilva]

Ill take everything you said into account before I buy. I need this workstation for work mainly but I would also like for it to be a games machine (all work and no play…..and all that) do you thinks intels Woodcrest xeons will be ok for this? And what about graphics? Do the pro graphics cards perform well as gaming cards or will they fall on there ass?

intel woodcrest will be completly awesome, if you wait, they seem to be going at them to a lower pricetag than opteron (finally, a Xeon for the normal OEM consumer) but these cheap Xeons are scheduled to appear in september, if you can wait for them... there will be a no brainer on what CPU/platform to opt for.

 

The 2,40 GHz model in particular, is only slightly above the ~300€ per CPU mark and it has the cache of the more expensive model...

 

As for games... any of the graphics card suggested can run them, but... the best performance in that should come from two nvidia high-end gaming cards in SLI. Fire GL models should be the ones falling more over their ass, since ATi sacrificed some shader units to fit in more juice.

[opentarget]

I am ordering my system on Monday so can you recommend a workstation maker that I should go to? im not going to build it myself as my budget is as much as i need, so i would rather have a system with a warrantee. also the gpu i picked is the ATI FireGL V7350 it will hammer the crap out of any content creation package i us with it. but as a gaming card will it hold up and play games like C&c 3/ oblivion /quake wars?