How Fast Are You - Official Twilight Scene - Bauhaus Lamp

[bobbechk]

nice!
Can you list some of the specs of your machine so others can see what they may like to buy?
How much did the system cost? (without monitor, mouse, keyboard)

Sure, here's the detailed specs:

• CPU: Core i7-3930K 3.20GHz LGA2011 6-core, 12-threads(@ 4,2 Ghz)
  Cooler: Antec KÜHLER H2O 620 V4 - Liquid Cooling System (CPU temp reach 55 at this speed under heavy load)
  Motherboard: ASUS P9X79
  Memory: KINGSON HyperX 16GB 1600MHz DDR3
  Gfx: MSI N660 TF 2GD5/OC ATX VGA Card
  Drive1: Kingston 120GB SSD HyperX 3K Series
  Drive2 HDD Red 3TB 3.5 SATA 6GB/s 64MB
  PSU: CHIEFTEC PSU 750W 14CM ATX12 80+ CAB.MAN
  Windows 7

This cost me about 1900€, but I'm sure most of you guys can find the components cheaper then where I live.

[AWSH]

38s ...... and with 32 bit XP

Next week, I plan to update to Windows 8, 64 bit and 8GB RAM. It will be interesting to see what difference it makes.

[bobbechk]

38s ...... and with 32 bit XP

Next week, I plan to update to Windows 8, 64 bit and 8GB RAM. It will be interesting to see what difference it makes.

It will make a differance, but your still going to be stuck with the 32bit limitation built into Sketchup (dear santa...)

Your going to see a major improvement in multitasking during rendering or just using sketchup tho!

[JakeMM]

Here's my results from a Mid 2010 i7 (2.66 Ghz, 4gb Ram) Macbook Pro.

I feel this is lower than what I should be expecting?

The Macbook has a high res screen (1920 x 1200) and is currently also driving a 24" Monitor (1920 x 1080). Does this put an extra load on the CPU and so reduce render times, or is it just an extra load on the GPU?

[Fletch]

No, the GPU drives the display, and does not render in Twilight.
the i7 is the CPU, renders in Twilight, and should, if same as similar windows i7 circa 2010, render this scene at 40s or less. So, you may want to watch Temperatures while rendering, it may be deliberately ratcheting down if it's getting hot while rendering. That's a common problem with i7s (running hot).

[pdwyer]

Bought some bits and pieces online the other week to upgrade my system. Back in 2006 I tried out an AMD dual core when they were taking market share from Intel and it was great then later intel came back with it's 2 core duo chip and took the lead back. Looking around intel still looks like they have the best chips but "Best for the price" ?? not so sure. The AMD FX8350 8 core 4ghz was only about US160.

[Fletch]

31s is good.

[bobbechk]

Bought some bits and pieces online the other week to upgrade my system. Back in 2006 I tried out an AMD dual core when they were taking market share from Intel and it was great then later intel came back with it's 2 core duo chip and took the lead back. Looking around intel still looks like they have the best chips but "Best for the price" ?? not so sure. The AMD FX8350 8 core 4ghz was only about US160.

The AMD 8-cores and i7 mid range k-series (Since they overclock with great ease) are probably the best price/performance ratio available.

One big thing to note tho is that they are not comparable by looking at cores and clock-speed at all, partly due to actual performance and compatibility, but mainly due to the fact that intel uses hyperthreading.

For a rough comparison you can divide the numbers of cores on AMD with 2 (since intel runs 2 threads per core and they behave similarly to having double the cores)



Always check actual performance (there's a ton of benchmark sites available) and don't stare blindly at the big numbers
That said, your AMD-8 core is a great budget processor, 31s is really nice for that price-range!

[pdwyer]

Even better we can just run the "Official Twilight Scene - Bauhaus Lam"

I got 31sec with a cheap chip! I think I saw a 16sec with an intel but I wonder what it cost?

Then again, $500 buck is an expensive chip for some people and not others...

We should work out a ranking like 1/Sec/USD for the chip to get speed and price as an index, then my chip is 0.0001898 up from 0.0000571 on my last chip!

EDIT: Intel hyperthreading with twice the core count visible in task manager is not core for core twice as fast as an AMD core and never has been. An AMD oct will kick an intel quad with hypertheading to look like 8.

ie: I absolutely agree with "One big thing to note tho is that they are not comparable by looking at cores and clock-speed at all" The fundamental architecture is different and that's why I like this test as Twilight is probably the most intensive software I use that is multi threaded and this is a 'real' load not an artificial benchmark based on pure math. I think more than about 4-8 cores though, I'm looking more for power per core than more cores since some loads are single threaded. If AMD on the same architecture came out with a 16x2ghz I think that would be a step down and if they had a 4x8ghz that would be a step up as multi thread loads would be the same but single thread loads would be faster

[bobbechk]

Even better we can just run the "Official Twilight Scene - Bauhaus Lam"

I got 31sec with a cheap chip! I think I saw a 16sec with an intel but I wonder what it cost?

Then again, $500 buck is an expensive chip for some people and not others...

We should work out a ranking like 1/Sec/USD for the chip to get speed and price as an index, then my chip is 0.0001898 up from 0.0000571 on my last chip!

EDIT: Intel hyperthreading with twice the core count visible in task manager is not core for core twice as fast as an AMD core and never has been. An AMD oct will kick an intel quad with hypertheading to look like 8.

ie: I absolutely agree with "One big thing to note tho is that they are not comparable by looking at cores and clock-speed at all" The fundamental architecture is different and that's why I like this test as Twilight is probably the most intensive software I use that is multi threaded and this is a 'real' load not an artificial benchmark based on pure math. I think more than about 4-8 cores though, I'm looking more for power per core than more cores since some loads are single threaded. If AMD on the same architecture came out with a 16x2ghz I think that would be a step down and if they had a 4x8ghz that would be a step up as multi thread loads would be the same but single thread loads would be faster

I got the 16s I7-3930K (mind you OC @ 4,2 GhZ) its a 6-core and cost around the 500$ mark as you guessed, I was pretty surprised by its performance since it clocked on par with a "professional 8-core" Intel weighing in at 3x its cost

In a simple world you would just multiply the clock with the number of cores and come up with a number to compare, but in reality this is far to complex and involving so many hardware and software bottlenecks that its just not possible.
I agree with what you say that an hyper-threaded Intel core is or never has been "faster" then 2 AMD cores, but it is however more optimized and with current software and hardware works better then 2 AMD cores for most tasks.

At my home computer I'm running a 4-core i7 2600k @3,4 GhZ, and it clocked in on this test at something like 21s, while it does have a bit higher clock then the AMD its obvious that its 4 cores works better then 8 AMD cores

Here's a decent comparison of the 8-core and its contenders: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... Eight-Core
What this test tells me is that your 8-core AMD is amazing bang/$ and if anyone wants to build a cheap rendering computer/server sticking 2 of these into a 2-socket motherboard is going to give you the equivalent of my 500+$ rig at half the price!