CAD machine

[Jetster]

The 212 EVO comes with thermal paste. That would save you 8.99

[DanishDevil]

I think if you're cutting cost, just use the included thermal paste that comes with the Hyper 212 and ditch the MX-4. There's enough included with the Hyper 212+ for 3-4 applications. Otherwise, looks really good, but where's the PSU?

[dathai]

Ah, didn't realize paste came with it.

PSU is Corsair Builder Series CX 600W V2 '80 Plus' Power Supply

[n-ster]

Yea paste comes with it... I am a bit outdated because I'm use to the i7 9XX where 2-3 C makes a difference, but the i5 2500K runs really cool and that 3 C difference between the thermal pastes won't matter at all. If I were in you position I'd still take the MX-2 though xD It's nice to have and if you ever need it in the future, at least you don't have to pay for expensive shipping just to get thermal paste (at least here the shipping kills the price of thermal paste ie: 5$ thermal paste 7 $ shipping)

[repman244]

Originally Posted by dathai

To be honest for my purposes speed is more important than absolute accuracy.

The Quadro/FirePro cards completely obliterate gaming cards in CAD (if the application can benefit from it) plus you get to enable some of the extra features some CAD programs have (like the RealView in Solidworks).
However they come at a price, and if you know you won't benefit from them it's better to keep to your plan on getting a normal gaming card.

[dathai]

@repman244 I have looked at the quadro cards quiet a bit but it really came down to price. I don't do a massive amount of rendering and even when I do, the scenes are pretty simple so I couldn't justify the price of the quadros.

[repman244]

Originally Posted by dathai

@repman244 I have looked at the quadro cards quiet a bit but it really came down to price. I don't do a massive amount of rendering and even when I do, the scenes are pretty simple so I couldn't justify the price of the quadros.

Yea I understand, I was in a similar situation myself so I just used the software hack and turned my HD 3870 into a FireGL V7700 and it serving me well. I don't use it anymore since I bought a laptop with a FirePro.
The biggest benefit for me was the use of realview in Solidworks (3DSMAX also has similar features I think) and of course the FPS increase especially when operating with more complex models.
As for rendering, you don't need a Quadro or a FirePro since GPU rendering uses CUDA (NVIDIA) or OpenCL which consumer cards already have. But most of the rendering is done by the CPU anyway.

I need to ask you tho, is stability very critical for you?
Because if it is I would advise you not to OC much, I had my CPU at around 3,7GHz for rendering and it was doing fine, but I got a BSOD 6 months down the line so I backed down the OC a bit, plus I didn't want to strain the VRM a lot since I'll probably stick with my PC for the next few years.

[BlackOmega]

Exactly. People saying that the 550Ti was too much don't know about the CUDA cores and all that. For the applications that can utilize it (CAD, 3DstudioMax, Maya, etc) they'll speed up your rendering by A LOT. Definitely worth it to get more CUDA cores for that application. And as REPMAN said, the Quadro's do give you some advantages, i.e REAL 32xAA rendering and such.

Repman, as far as your overclock is concerned, you must remember that all electronics suffer from Electromigration. Eventually, all electronics will degrade over time. However, overclocking and applying more voltage accelerate this process. I had a CPU degrade over a period of 3 months due to high voltage.

Also, it's about keeping the CPU cool. Remember the higher the overclock the lower your max allowable temp becomes. It's a direct inverse function.

[repman244]

Originally Posted by BlackOmega

Repman, as far as your overclock is concerned, you must remember that all electronics suffer from Electromigration. Eventually, all electronics will degrade over time. However, overclocking and applying more voltage accelerate this process. I had a CPU degrade over a period of 3 months due to high voltage.

Also, it's about keeping the CPU cool. Remember the higher the overclock the lower your max allowable temp becomes. It's a direct inverse function.

Yes I am aware of that but thanks for the heads-up anyway. The CPU was kept cool (around 50-53C) and I actually had a slight undervolt.
But the funny part is that it was rock stable with prime I think I kept it running for 3-4 days and no errors, but crashed in rendering. It wouldn't be a problem with fast drafts where you are done with rendering in a few minutes, but I use realtime rendering + final render which can take hours to finish.
So I decided to take the clock down to 3,5GHz and raise the NB to 2,8GHz and have no issues anymore


@dathai my suggestion is that you should go for 4x4GB RAM, because of the prices we currently have and don't worry about the timings or clock since you won't get much better performance from it on SB system (1600MHz and CL8 should be good), as for the graphics card, just get one with a lot of CUDA cores and you're set.

[BlackOmega]

Originally Posted by repman244

Yes I am aware of that but thanks for the heads-up anyway. The CPU was kept cool (around 50-53C) and I actually had a slight undervolt.
But the funny part is that it was rock stable with prime I think I kept it running for 3-4 days and no errors, but crashed in rendering. It wouldn't be a problem with fast drafts where you are done with rendering in a few minutes, but I use realtime rendering + final render which can take hours to finish.
So I decided to take the clock down to 3,5GHz and raise the NB to 2,8GHz and have no issues anymore

Prime is pretty good for stability testing for sure. But it's not without its flaws. When I test for my stability, I typically run 24-36 hours of prime (blend). Then once it passes that, I'll run Folding at home for a few days. I've found F@H is a little bit more sensitive to errors than prime is. And for what it's worth, I've found that Intel Burn test isn't very good at all for finding true stability. It's ok for quick and dirty stability testing, but that's about it.

Do you ever use your GPU to do any rendering? Just curious what the actual time to render is compared to doing it on the CPU.

[repman244]

Originally Posted by BlackOmega

Do you ever use your GPU to do any rendering? Just curious what the actual time to render is compared to doing it on the CPU.

Yes I tried it but since I have an ATi/AMD card I'm stuck with OpenCL and it's very very hard to find a proper rendering program. The only one I tested was the LuxRender (version for GPU rendering) and while it is very fast for real time you just don't get the same quality as from CPU rendering. Its similar like using GPU for video conversion, it is fast but the quality is lower compared to the CPU rendering.
I'm using keyshot as the real time renderer (quick demo for those interested http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLOT7g_4H4c with an overkill system of course ).

I don't know how do renders turn out with using CUDA in terms of quality but I guess for real time rendering they are good enough.

[n-ster]

Originally Posted by BlackOmega

Exactly. People saying that the 550Ti was too much don't know about the CUDA cores and all that. For the applications that can utilize it (CAD, 3DstudioMax, Maya, etc) they'll speed up your rendering by A LOT. Definitely worth it to get more CUDA cores for that application. And as REPMAN said, the Quadro's do give you some advantages, i.e REAL 32xAA rendering and such.

Repman, as far as your overclock is concerned, you must remember that all electronics suffer from Electromigration. Eventually, all electronics will degrade over time. However, overclocking and applying more voltage accelerate this process. I had a CPU degrade over a period of 3 months due to high voltage.

Also, it's about keeping the CPU cool. Remember the higher the overclock the lower your max allowable temp becomes. It's a direct inverse function.

I don't know about CUDA cores? Yes they help a lot, but the GT 240 already has half the CUDA cores as the GTX 550Ti and is a much better bang/buck. 550Ti is stupid to buy as it has a much lower core count then a GTX 460/560 which have 336 vs the 192. He chose to go with more CUDA cores just in case to make sure he has enough performance, and I see nothing wrong with that, but the 550Ti doesn't make sense to buy, hence why I suggested a 560 and a 460

SB runs very cool and OCing doesn't make enough of a difference in the life of a CPU to matter, unless you put unreasonable amount of voltage. From what I understood, he is looking to get a decent OC, nothing extreme. He has heat very much covered with his cooler as well

[BlackOmega]

Originally Posted by n-ster

I don't know about CUDA cores? Yes they help a lot, but the GT 240 already has half the CUDA cores as the GTX 550Ti and is a much better bang/buck. 550Ti is stupid to buy as it has a much lower core count then a GTX 460/560 which have 336 vs the 192. He chose to go with more CUDA cores just in case to make sure he has enough performance, and I see nothing wrong with that, but the 550Ti doesn't make sense to buy, hence why I suggested a 560 and a 460

SB runs very cool and OCing doesn't make enough of a difference in the life of a CPU to matter, unless you put unreasonable amount of voltage. From what I understood, he is looking to get a decent OC, nothing extreme. He has heat very much covered with his cooler as well

lol, That's exactly what I meant. You want more CUDA cores and not less. They way you worded it, I may have misunderstood what you meant.
You're absolutely right that he should go with the 460/560, the added cores will help out a lot.

[ZenZimZaliben]

CAD support mutli-threading and as many as you can give it. I would go with a i7 Socket 1366 or wait for i9. Actually an AMD Bulldozer would be a great CPU for a CAD/Rendering rig. Might want to think about that.

[dathai]

@repman244 on the ram, I should have listed I am getting 2 of those 2x4gb ram kits, so total ram will be Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel.
I do tend to have Adobe Illustrator, InDesign (maybe Photoshop but I avoid raster) open while SketchUp is exporting some massive EPS drawing so I would like the room in the ram.

Regarding the stability, yes it matters a lot. Currently getting ready for a thesis in architecture so there are a lot of tight deadlines for very large volumes of work. But as n-ster said, I only plan on doing some fairly modest overclocking, 4.4-4.5 max and I have put in a good cooler.

The reason I opted for the 460 over the 550 was the CUDA cores. It seems like support for CUDA in the programs I use is expanding so it should offer some future proofing without going to Quadro.

@ZenZimZaliben the support given by 2d vector programs for multi-core is still pretty limited and there seems to be a lot of skepticism about how and if it could be expanded. The linear nature of the processes makes it very difficult apparently. There is growing support for running background processes such as vector export and plug-ins but not for the core functions of AutoCad and Illustrator, in 2d at least. And that's where I work most with those programs. Most modeling is done in SketchUp and then brought out for render/post processing.


Again, all of your input is really appreciated. Thanks