Firepro V7900 or Quadro 4000?

Hi guys

I’m building a personal workstation which will cost maximum 3000 euros (for now). I’m more of a software guy meaning that I don’t know much about hardware specs. However, I’ve done some research and I’ve chosen not to go for a mac pro as I can build something more powerful with less money (and of similar quality). I’ve chosen to go for one 6 - core intel xeon x5650 2.66 GHz 6.4GT/s (which I think is what the short version of 12 – core mac pro uses currently) on an intel server board and potentially build a 12 –core machine if I see the need. This machine will mostly be used for digital content development for small indie game projects and photorealistic 3D rendered scenes (3DsMax, PhotoshopCS5, ZBrush, Unity3D and FlashCS5).

I’ve understood that AMD builds video cards that work better for games and cost cheaper than nvidia’s and it seems that the computer tech society tends to love amd more than nvidia (thus making their reviews a bit bias). Nvidia on the other hand claims to build cards tuned to work better for professional digital content development packages like those I use, and they are powered with the CUDA technology architecture (which looks cool but I don’t know if that will be critical for my work). AMD on the other hand has the Geometry Boost Technology, which sounds quite useful for 3D design and features the eyefinity multi-display technology. Finally, the Quadro 4000 is being manufactured by PNY (featured on the Nvidia sites), Hewlett-Packard (hp) and Fujitsu (all having some minor differences…so WTF is going on here???)

I understand that this may be a HUGE issue but I would really appreciate answers which are understandable to me (therefore not extremely technical) from experienced users and not fan boys.

Thank you all in advance for reading 300 words (and respond)
rexenor

 

First - do the research and find out if there is any point in getting a professional card over a normal desktop one.

Then find out if you really want to spend a sh*t load of money on a single machine. For example a 2600k is plenty fast and is so comparatively cheap that you could easily buy two maybe even three machines for the cost of a proper workstation. I don't know if it is viable to farm your rendering out via the internet - but if so you could see some massive saving there as well.

 

A simple i7 with SSD and 8gb ram with any gaming nvidia card 500x will blow anything out of the water for rendering and modelling, do you really need more? Just ensure the card has a gig.

Those pro cards don't necessarily update the viewports any faster. They can offer overlay and other stuff though for mixing realtime video with 3D. They really just support a few extra extensions. For modelling, they offer no improvement that you will notice.

Back in the old days you could unlock those extensions (a few years ago when I was in 3D as a day job), and you could get accelerated wireframes and a few other bits and pieces) by hacking the bios in. These days, its the exact same hardware, but they cut a few pins on the circuit on the gaming cards so they can't get unlocked in software. It's really not worth the additional expense.

SSD will make unity, flash and ps fly. Those are file heavy at the best of times. The i7 will maul all the listed apps. if you must, get 2 i7's (xeon).

nvidia is best. Ati is cheaper. Thats the state of affairs right now.

Please ignore industry cards like quadro or fire, or whatever, you're not going to do anything except lose money. Money that's best spent on great software like unity pro, more ram, and a far better display (preferbly, dual high quality displays).

Investing in a top quality multiple monitor setup will pay off big time in productivity. A gaming card will eat 2 for breakfast. A quadro will eat 16. Do you need 16 monitors? no. Do you need more than 1gb onboard ram? nope. The point of the workstation cards is they can do an insane amount of antialiasing and have the ram for extremely high resolutions. Resolutions and AA you will never use unless you are doing realtime overlays for production. They will not help you render more polygons than a gaming card, nor help you do photoreal renders.

Most of the extensions in the pro cards do not actually get accessed by anything but custom software either. Max and Maya have realtime previews and accelerated renders which workstation cards can be used for (but so can gaming cards), and these will not give you photoreal renders. For that, you need to trim back the spending on the card, and give more spending on the cpu.

There's a lot of buzz talk on how it can accelerate rendering, but due to the large array of programs you use (most of which don't care a jot for quadro) you will be wasting it.

Get i7 (or xeons), SSD, a top-line gaming card, as as much ram as you can with two displays of really high quality.

 

Thank you for replying I appreciate it.

I should mention that I use cinema’s 4D physics simulations and Realflow 5.0

I think it’s impossible to use 2 i7’s, they are meant to work solo.

 

I think you can get a motherboard that will support both, alternatively get the xeon version I guess. That would be 8-12 cores to play with.

Edit: after research, it looks like the xeon. But a single i7 + a dummy box (integrated gpu +i7) for render farm would probably be cost effective as well if you needed to expand. I'm not sold on the alternatives just yet.

 

Benches: even a single i7 top end is pretty much going to waste an amd chip.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/processors,6.html

 

Yeah why not go with an i7, some nice ram, nice hdd&ssd and spend the rest on unity Pro. If you find that you really need. MOre hardware because you decide to render whole animations in full hd get another computer with a simple mainboard tiny graphics card and i7 then use some networked render. But come on even on normal user hardware you can make photorealistic renders.

I use solidworks flow simulation (20000$ I got it for 200 legal I'm a student) and it uses max of 2 cores. There we go with optimisation...

 

LOL.

These are CPU heavy renderings yes?

Then the real comparison would the soon-to-be released interlagos where you have 16 cores a chip and 4 chips in a box

But that's not for this budget.

 

You don't need Quadro or FireGL unless you are a mechanical engineer using Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire or other high-end CAD packages and requires absolute precision because you are working on mission critical projects. If you are just doing general CG/CAD/rendering a nVidia 5xx series is more than enough (nVidia 560 Ti is a good choice right now for price and perforance sweet spot). And you are exactly right - AMD/ATI's focus are entirely on game graphics (DirectX) mostly - their OpenGL support were horrenderous (from low-end game cards to high-end FireGL alike - all had problems with various 3D packages I use). Nvidia is all-round workhorse that are generally trouble-free and works great with both games and 3D packages. So unless you are a gamer you really don't want to get an ATI/AMD.


Other than that, go for Intel CPU, they run cooler than AMD in general (thus more overclocking potential - an i5 with stock speed of 2.8 Ghz can easily overclock to 4 Ghz with very little modification (get a bigger CPU cooler) and effectively double your money's worth than spending on expensive higher-end CPU. But if overclocking is not your cup of tea, by all means, buy high-end CPU.

And definitely get a SSD for your boot/system/program drive - it will save you enormous time and generally makes the system far more speedier and pleasure to work with. Dont' EVER get a "green" hard drive (eg. WD Caviar Green), they generally cause system instability if you install it as system drive (they spin down too often) and are dreadfully dreadfully slow. Go for performance hard drives - 7500 rpm for non-system drive, and quality (intel) SSD for system drive. And spend money on quality RAM, 8 GB would be ideal too.

Motherboard is pretty important - I generally go for GIGABYTE for reliability, quality and price, but if budget is not a concern go for Intel motherboard. A good motherboard makes quite a lot of difference that people normally ignore. Look for one that support USB 3 at least because you will need USB 3 ports for all your external connections particularly external hard drives for backup purposes. USB 2 is okay but it can be a pain when you do regular full system backup on your large hard drives that can take a long time.

And since you are building the system yourself, a quality power supply (PSU) is a must. Definitely research and go for quality brands because if you go for a crappy power supply you will constantly encounter system-wide instabilities that will be very hard to troubleshoot. Most importantly at very least get a 750 W power supply - system these days are hungry for power - particularly the graphics cards - I had a problem with my system long time ago that I couldn't figure out until I discovered it was because I wasn't feeding enough power to the graphics card that's why it was constantly blue-screen and resetting. Make sure enough power goes to the graphics card.

And good luck!

 

Thank you guys for answering my questions, I really appreciate it.