FFidelis Posted March 30, 2018 Share Posted March 30, 2018 hi I am a novice in houdini with little experience with simulations. I need some advice from experienced houdini artists. I want to get a new pc, which would be better for sims and what should be added? budget is btw 1600-1900euros. Intel Core i7 7700K overcl. @4x 5.0GHz 16GB DDR4-RAM PC-2400 GeForce GTX1070 Gaming X 8G 120GB SSD + 2TB S-ATA3 HDD DVD-Brenner 24x Dual-Layer Corsair Wasserkühlung-water cooling 7.1 AUDIO BOOST / GAMING-LAN Intel Core i7 7800X 6x 3.5GHz 16GB DDR4-RAM PC-2400 GeForce GTX1060 Gaming X 6G 120GB SSD + 2TB EcoGreen HDD Corsair Wasserkühlung-water cooling 7.1 AUDIO BOOST / Gigabit-LAN Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atom Posted March 30, 2018 Share Posted March 30, 2018 The top option looks better. You want a high CPU Ghz. Also the 1070 8Gb is going to be faster than the 10606GB. While 16Gb system ram is a nice starting point, you will eventually want more so make sure your RAM chip options allow expansion to 32Gb on the motherboard. (i.e. you want 2 8GB chips, not 4 4GB chips starting off) Or a single 16GB if you can get that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StepbyStepVFX Posted March 30, 2018 Share Posted March 30, 2018 (edited) I think Atom is right about expanding the RAM : I am not an expert but you will want at least 2 GB of RAM per threads of your CPU. Your 7700K is 4 cores / 8 threads, so you need at least 16 GB. The 7800X seems to be 6 cores / 12 threads, so I would go directly on 32 GB. And by the way, simulations, particularly fluids, quickly reaquire lots of RAM if you don't properly split / optimize / instance you domain of computation. Same with complex rigid body sims. By the way, be careful with overclocked CPU : it is heating a lot if not well controled / watercooled. So it can impact the number of years you'll be able to keep your system alive : heat is the ennemy of electronic devices... Last but not least : indeed, the overclocked CPU will be 42% faster, but the 7800X gives you 50% more cores, so on multithreaded tasks, you'll be faster (rendering particularly). And you have the new Compiled Blocks in SOP context that allow you to multithread lots of things when you use ForLoops (it works with Boolean and many other nodes, although some of them are not multithreaded yet). So... it really depends on what you'll use or focus more... The difference is not that big. Personnaly I would opt for more cores and let the overclocked aside to keep my computer alive longer. Edited March 30, 2018 by StepbyStepVFX Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FFidelis Posted March 31, 2018 Author Share Posted March 31, 2018 @Atom and @StepbyStepVFXthanks. based on my requirements and your advice. the core i7 5.0 overclocked would be my take. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nigelgardiner Posted April 7, 2018 Share Posted April 7, 2018 Hi there I picked up an old (relatively speaking) dell r710 for N.Z $1200 (roughly 600 euro i think) which is dual hex core running at 3.4 ghz 128 gig ram, no graphics card of course, but it's working pretty well with hqueue for simming and rendering. Seems to be pretty cost effective to me. Fans are slightly noisy but hey.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StepbyStepVFX Posted April 7, 2018 Share Posted April 7, 2018 23 minutes ago, nigelgardiner said: Hi there I picked up an old (relatively speaking) dell r710 for N.Z $1200 (roughly 600 euro i think) which is dual hex core running at 3.4 ghz 128 gig ram, no graphics card of course, but it's working pretty well with hqueue for simming and rendering. Seems to be pretty cost effective to me. Fans are slightly noisy but hey.. That’s a very good deal, specially for rendering :-) This kind of beast used to cost 10times that price... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nigelgardiner Posted April 7, 2018 Share Posted April 7, 2018 yeah, they've been well and truly superceded now tho, (i think that particular line is r730 now) so prices are low on the second hand market. a little bit power hungry esp the 3.4ghz cpus in comparison to newer chips but not horrendous and still cheaper than a render farm. I think it idles for about N.Z $1- (0.50c euro) per day and draws about 500w max running all cores 100%, haven't seen it utilize full memory yet so it's likely it could draw the full 800w if totally maxed out. And it's built solid. I've put it in a ventilated cupboard for now and its happy. to run hqueue, I had to learn a bit more linux, in particular bind9 to bind local dns addresses, if thats the correct terminology, and a few other things but nothing drastic. and sidefx support are great with help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CinnamonMetal Posted April 11, 2018 Share Posted April 11, 2018 RAM is not in-expensive for a while. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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