Buying a new Workstation for Houdini use *HELP*

[VfxHansen]

Hi 

 

I'm in the process of buying/building my self a new Pc/Mac for mainly Houdini use (some Modo and Nuke to). 

Main focus is sims but it will be used for everything Houdini has to offer.

 

My price range is from $3000 - $6000 hopefully on the lower side of the scale but if i have to spend 6k so be it.

 

What i need help with is basically everything from pc or mac to what kind of graphics card i should get and should i get 1 or 2 graphic cards and so on.

 

I was thinking like this

 

HD 250GB SSD + 3 or 4TB SATA 7500RPM

64GB RAM (been looking it ECC but its only 1600Mhz, safer but slower. Tempting to go 1866Mhz)

Gtx 780 ti 3Gb + Titan Black 6Gb ( only i don't know how thees two work together or how to set up so that houdini uses this correctly)

I7 4930 LGA2011 6-Core or E5 2630 v2 LGA2011 6-Core maybe duel even.

Water cooling

850W power supply (dont really know how much i need)

A mother board that supports what i need

 

or just Tweek a Mac Pro to what i need.

 

Is this completely stupid? Do you guy's have any good ideas/ tips for a good houdini beast? I need all the help i can get!

 

Thank you! 

 

 

 

[mangi]

What´s your urgency.

there´s a lot of new stuff that will be hitting the market.

SATA EXPRESS . for example. I think you should keep this in mind.

 

Intel z97 etc...

 

I guess you are limited for the moment on x79 for the 64 GB RAM

 

Mangi

[VfxHansen]

It's no rush at all, i have a decent computer atm, so if i have to wait a couple of months for new and better gear to come out i will definitely do that.

 

I was looking at the x79, nice to see you mention it

 

if you don't mind, could you please list up what you would buy if you where to blow of 5k on a new houdini oriented workstation? (or a quick draft with some essential must have parts)  or is what i wrote above OK?

I'v done some research, but i know way to little about building computers to feel safe with what i picked out my self. 

 

Thanks.

[mangi]

Well , for x79 ASUS has just made a refresh on the 

Asus P9X79-E WS

 

 

However  I think the x97 with the sata express is a lot to think about. the "10GB" hard drive data rate.

 

 

the problem si the 32 GB RAM LIMITS on these boards they will be able to put in a 8 core BROADWELL when they come out.

 

 

Looks like a long time to wait.

[danw]

If you want to go for super-high-end... dig around for Dell official outlet resellers.  I got two Dual Xeon E5-2687w T7600 workstations for around the £2500 mark each, about a third of their retail price.  I think they were essentially cancelled custom orders that had already been built.  They came with a full 3-year Dell on-site warranty.

I'm not sure how often that kind of deal comes up, it could mean waiting around for months on end with your ear to the ground, and being ready to grab it when you see it.

 

For more sensible realms, I'd say maybe wait out the Haswell-E refresh coming later this year, as that will replace the current bottom-end Socket 2011 i7 quad core chip with a new 6-core baseline - the i7-5820K, or if you want to splash out some more, the i7 range will be getting its first 8-core - the i7-5960X

Both of those have the advantage of being overclockable, which depending on your requirements may or may not be of interest.  Xeon's don't allow it, but with a Dell or such, you get guaranteed stability and on-site support.  I had some sort of crash glitch cropping up in one of my workstations, and Dell very diligently sent an engineer round the next day to swap out the entire motherboard without hesitation.  Good if you're on deadlines :-)

 

For the GPU side, I'd say only get a Titan if you know you're going to make use of the OpenCL acceleration... otherwise a basic GeForce 750 (/Ti) with 2GB of RAM will cover anything you're likely to throw at it, which outside of GPU compute applications, mostly comes down to playblasts.

 

(Edit: Noticed you intended to use two GPUs - in which case I'd say get the 750 as the basic display card, and the Titan as the compute card... there's really not much point going overboard on the display card)

 

Storage-wise, I don't know if there's that much point chasing the bleeding edge of storage interface tech.  A decent SATA SSD for system files/scene files will work fantastically, (The Corsair Neutron GTX is fast, consistent and reliable... the Seagate 600 Pro has capacitors to protect against power-out data-loss, and appears to be a solid performer), then whack in a couple of 3TB drives in a RAID 0 array for cache storage.  You could maybe make the drive you keep your scene files on a mirror for safety, or just make sure you have a solid backup plan (backup is always safer than relying on RAID)

 

I wouldn't worry too much about RAM speeds... I haven't noticed much difference between 1600 and 1866, and it's added peace of mind having ECC.  There are too many potential causes of instability in CG work already, without adding too many extra unknowns.

Edited July 13, 2014 by danw