What manufacturer PC are you running?

[notareal]

i think you could build this setup for about 2 grand but im not sure, a quality case is needed if you want it to be quiet ( and to look nice ) the bad thing about less sound is that it usually means less air cooling, A quiet case usually is meant for a water cooled system, the case i have is a Cosmos S by coolermaster and is built Very quiet and still on air cooling but is very expensive.

Solo has water cooled - likes it. I know others with liquid cooled, they like it. It's silent. If you machine is near you, you may like it quiet. Liquid cooled should mean = easy to overclock.

It is a bit tricky to find a good balance, overclocking requires good cooling, but that does cost. Water cooling is great, but I would not recommend it for some that is building a own system for the first time. There are some good "traditional" coolers like Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120 Revision C, that are virtually silent. So investing to SSD and to a good air cooling, with moderate overclocking, might give you a generally smoother running system than only water cooling, with the same cost.
At the work we been rather happy with HP and DELL workstations, there has been no particular need for BOXX or similar. No OC naturally, but generally stable systems. We use own system images, so there is no extra junk (that usually slow down), that is often present with HP/DELL/you name it pre-installed systems.

[marvins_dad]

Thanks Fletch for that well put together response! and notareal for verification.

I spent the entire weekend on TomsHardware, CG Architect and google researching and what you say really helps solidify my weekends research.

First - we are a Dell office - 98% of our machines are from Dell, so purchasing is really easy and the Precision workstations work pretty good for Revit and AutoCAD. I am currently running a Box workstation, it's a Dual Opteron dual core - so 4 cores total...but am working in 32 bit so that is a bit of the drag. I haven't been overwhelmed with the Boxx system since day 1...figured it was going to blow my previous machine away...but it really didn't. Was a little more stable, but never got the performance out of it that I thought I would.

I did read on the Tom's Hardware site that Cyberpower was a great value machine...meaning, it didn't win any of the benchmark tests, but it held in the higher middle of the group...but it was a fraction of the cost of the machines that were being compared with it...holding it's own with $5k-7k machines.

Thanks for the link that Vosko posted about a company that overclocks and uses SSD's. That is basically what my research lead to from this weekend.
http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/37163-nee ... storm.html
The owner of CG Architect has a facinating thread about his current build and the SSD issue was brought up - which I had never heard that argument before...very educational thread!

I also ran across a thread about SU and really opened my eyes to faster the processor the better for rendering and for SU since it really only relies on 1-core...which I hadn't heard that before....
http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/37578-hel ... thers.html

BrianKitts
Sketchup does not support multi-threading (doesn't support hyperthreading either), so it can only utilize one processor (core) for processor intensive work such as the import exporting that you are attempting. Which means in a dual core you could hit 50% (100 divided by 2), but in a dual quad you won't top 12.5% (100 divided by 8). That being said the fastest machine will be the one with the fastest single core. If you bought a cheap quad core processor, it won't be faster using sketchup compared to a higher end dual core processor.

As for the modeling and working tasks that is solely dependent on your graphics card, better card = faster it can handle the graphics, this part has nothing to do with your processor.

So -that leads me to the question of Video Cards...which do you feel are the best for a SU/Twilight/Kerkythea machine?
CG Architect has a good sticky thread that covers a lot...but still left me wondering if the one they suggest is still the best for my use.
http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/29581-sti ... dvice.html

I have read that the video card doesn't have an effect on the render times...but then some threads that say that it is necessary to get a quality card for rendering...so that leaves me a little confused.

Also - would I get any advantage out of a dual card setup?

Thanks for the responses so far, It's been so long since I have spec'd a render machine 3+ years and it is pretty amazing of what has come out since then.

[notareal]

A new "Lynnfield" based Core i7-8xx system might be a good option (if those are yet available as a full system). i7 has a turbo boost feature for programs that do not support multiple cores. I basically overclocks itself with a single-threaded apps. In Lynnfield based i7 this feature is even better than in earlier i7-9xx

[notareal]

Video card does not effect to rendering with Twilight (but some rendering programs do have a GPU acceleration). In SU video card has an effect, as SU uses OpenGL for acceleration. Dual video card would be waste of money.

[Ecuadorian]

Another vote against investing too much on a video card. No render program I've tried until now gets any benefit from the video card (POV-ray, Artlantis, MAX, Indigo, Podium, Kerkythea, Twilight)
Better put that money towards a better CPU.

[marvins_dad]

Thanks....

So what model card would you guys deem worthy? I am basically building for SU, Twilight, AutoCAD, Kerkythea...have a seat of Max Design 2010...but will probably stick Twilight/Kerky for the long haul. Sounds like from the CG Architects thread that OpenGL is really important for SU. I checked out the benchmarks from Tom's Harware on the QQuadroFX's and ATI Firepro's and these are the top dogs for 3d Studio (since that was the closest to what I guess that Kerky is).
Ati FireproV8700 or the Nvidea QuadroFX 4800. However the V7759, V5700, V3750 and FX 3800 were also in the upper range.

Looked it up and the FX 4800 w/1.5gb runs around $1500 and the V8700 w/1gb is around $890.

I've always liked the drivers that came with the FX boards I have used in the past over the ATI, but the ATI's were at the top of the charts...and with them being cheaper it makes me wonder if it's time for a change to ATI?

Anyone have thoughts on this? Am I trying to spend too much on a card when it won't affect it that much if I get one of the lesser cards I mentioned?

[Ecuadorian]

About two months ago I upgraded from an old GeForce 7300GS to a new GeForce 9600 GT. I tested orbiting in SketchUp with a heavy model I have and it was exactly the same. No change at all. I also tested LightUp's tourtool performance and it was the same again. But hey, now I was able to play Trackmania (a racing game) at a higher frame rate!

What did improve dramatically the performance of both SketchUp and LightUp navigation was upgrading the CPU from a Core 2 Duo to a Core i5.

So, unless you're into gaming, just stop worrying about the graphics card and get whichever has DVI output with HDCP and support for the latest version of DirectX.

[Fletch]

Max2010 and Photoshop use Hardware acceleration (I'm positive about Photoshop, and iffy about max2010, but think that's the case)

SU's single thread is only a problem when rendering animations out of SU or save a large still image. Just modeling day-to-day in SU you will not notice a difference about 1 or 8 threads.

Notareal or others would be better qualified to talk video cards, they are valuable with many programs like Revit and Photoshop and video editing, etc... and won't hurt in SU to have a good card.

[notareal]

It's hard to justify a $1500 videocard for SU use. I am fairly happy with a first generation 8800GTS. 3DS Max uses a speacial DirectX acceleration with QuadroFX (With a little tricks that same acceleration is available in some consumer cards), I would consider QuadroFX only if I where sure that I will use a program that will benefit of it. A new interesting videocard is AMD's Radeon HD 5850 with DX11 support.

[marvins_dad]

Thanks...I'll look into the reviews on those.

I guess my primary programs are: SketchUp, KT, Twilight, AutoCAD, Photoshop CS4....with the occasional Revit open/export.