X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[dchaley217]

Question to those of you truly into machine specs and premium performance.
I am a long time builder of my own machines but am tired of messing with it. At this stage all I want is a solid machine that offers mutliple options for what ever I may care to do during the life of that machine and not just running Chief.
That said, I have been interested in the all in one machines that Apple offers even though they are quite expensive (around $2600.00 for bare bones top end I-Macs).
The one I really like ended up quoting at $3668.00 with the following configuration:

3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5

It also comes with an optional Thunderbolt Raid external drive setup which holds 4 TB for an additional $1150.00 and 12 TB for $2500.00 (Wow!)
You have to buy a Thuderbolt cable for this option which adds yet another $50.00. (Just money is all)

Obviously this is a pipe dream as I am too conservative to ever spend the bucks for something like this which WILL be outdated in a year or so.

The specs I AM looking at:

3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB GDDR5

This setup takes the cost back down to $2680.00 which is still extreme but doable. I figure the cost of a good box will run $1500.00. A good 27" monitor is going to be another 4 or 5 hundred so we are already at the $2000.00 mark. The difference gets me two OS systems and everything combined not to mention a great looking machine backed by an extremely reliable warranty and service package along with an out of the box setup. So I figure I will end up spending about 8 hundred more than I would on the standard machine type I have used for years.

I really thought about a laptop. The Asus machines have some really great specs and are truly desktop replacement machines. The one thing about this I don't care for is they are still laptops. I hate how the track pad can get in the way of typing (how many times have I wiped something due to an accidental brush of a finger on the trackpad). Mavis Beacon I am not! Too small for everyday use too.

Getting to my question, does anyone have any experience using an apple I-Mac machine dual booted for Windows 7? I really do like the idea of getting rid of all the various paraphernalia spread out over and under my desk. The I-Mac is a truly beautiful machine with everything all in one package. Another obvious advantage is being ready for the Chief version for Mac! (I would bet that isn't too far off). My wife has a MacBook Air and really loves it after years on Windows based laptops.

Any input?

Max, I do have experience running Chief X4 on an iMac. Mine is a bit outdated, late model 2009 27" iMac, 8 gigs, 1 tera HD, but only 512 video ram. I run windows 7 Pro 64 bit and it runs flawlessly. I have been using this combo for a year and I am a bit surprised how well windows 7 runs on the iMac in bootcamp mode, very stable. The 27" monitor makes up for the lack of the video ram. The clarity and size makes working on prints a very pleasant experience. I am considering upgrading and I will will will be buying another Mac. I am simply waiting to see what the new upgrades bring with the Mac Pro and the new iMac models.

So if you are a Mac man do not hesitate (in my opinion).

[MPDesign]

So I was curious how my machine I built would do on this raytrace test.
51 seconds here,

specs
I-7 64 bit machine build

Intel 2600k 3.4ghz cpu ( overclocked 4.6ghz)
Asus Sabertooth P67 MotherBoard
G.Skill Ram16gig
Nvidia geforce gtx 560 1 gig video card
300GB WesternDigital VelociRaptor 10,000rpm sta 6.0G/bs (main harddrive)
WD Caviar Black 2TB 7200rpm backup drive
Corsair H-60 liquid cooling

[Mr Oz]

Where can this test file be found?

I did a high quality raytrace of a fairly small sized restaurant containing maybe 20 lights last week and it took over 15 hours. I have an AMD quad core 3.7ghz machine with 8g ram and a 1g Radeon graphics card.

I thought this machine would be able to breeze raytracing but maybe its not as quick as I was expecting.

[cbdllc]

Just built this:

Intel i7 3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz easily OC’d to 4.0 GHz on stock air cooler
32 GB CORSAIR DOMINATOR GT DDR3 1866 MHz (PC3 15000) CMT32GX3M4X1866C9
EVGA 680GTX 1084Mhz GPU, 2GB DDR5 (6208 MHz Memory Clock Speed)
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
Fractal Design Arc Silent Insulated Case
Storage: 240GB OCZ Agility III, (2) 10k Raptors RAID 0 (striped), 1TB WD SATA III, CD/DVD:none
Corsair HX850W PSU
(3) Noctua NF-F12 PWM fans
(1) Noctua NF-P14 FLX fan @ 750 rpm ultra low noise


58 sec. (@ 4.0 GHz)

Amazingly quiet. I have to put my ear to the case to hear it running.

[cbdllc]

Just built this:

Intel i7 3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz easily OC’d to 4.0 GHz on stock air cooler
32 GB CORSAIR DOMINATOR GT DDR3 1866 MHz (PC3 15000) CMT32GX3M4X1866C9
EVGA 680GTX 1084Mhz GPU, 2GB DDR5 (6208 MHz Memory Clock Speed)
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
Storage: 240GB OCZ Agility III, (2) 10k Raptors RAID 0 (striped), 1TB WD SATA III, CD/DVD:none
Corsair HX850W PSU
Fractal Design Arc Silent Insulated Case, Amazingly quiet!
(3) Noctua HF-F12 PWM fans
(1) Noctua NF-P14 FLX 750 rpm ultra low noise
W7 x64 ULT

58 sec. (@ 4.0 GHz)

[virtualhuck]

FYI for those interested...

I used Ian Pellant's ray-tracing test file. I ran it after a restart but didn't close any background programs. My rendering time was 2:31. I added another CPU and with no other changes, the rendering time went to 1:16 (way faster than I expected!).

Dell Precision T5400
CPU: Xeon E5430 (2.66 GHz quad core) (now x2)
Memory: 8 GB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700
Hard Drive: WD Black 7200 RPM 1TB
OS: Win 7 Pro 64 bit SP1
Chief: X4

I have ordered another matched pair of CPUs in the same family (Matched Pair Intel Xeon 3.16/12/1333 SLANP Quad-Core Processor X5460), but are faster. I will let you know if that change affects rendering time. I'm also going to switch to a solid state drive (Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR240GB 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD) and will find out if that lowers the rendering time as well.

UPDATE
We have a few computers that started with the exact same specifications so it enables me to test different options fairly easily. Unexpectedly, changing to a high-end SSD drive from a 7200rpm optical drive did not change the rendering time in the single cpu machine (quad core). I then changed from the single Xeon E5430 (2.66 GHz quad core) to dual 3.16Ghz processors. The rendering time dropped to 1:06 from the original 2:31. On the computer that got dual 2.66Ghz processors, the speed was 1:16, so I'm assuming the 10 second speed increase was the change from 2.66 to 3.16Ghz processors.

In short, going from a single quad core processor to dual quad core processors is a great bang-for-the-buck change, going to SSD, not so much (exclusively talking about renderings here)...

I now need to update my specs in my signature line :-)

[Ian Pellant]

Hi Huckle,

Ray tracing should have very little to do with disk I/O - everything should be in memory once the ray tracer starts. Memory size should not be an issue either - use taskmanager and note that Chief X4 ruinning the ray tracer on the test plan uses very little memory (my old system running 32 bit Chief sits under a 1MB of total system memory usage when ray tracing small plans).

The Xeon processors were developments from the Pentium (sort of solid legacy chips while the newer i-Core series were "getting up to speed").

Great that you can swap a few cpus around and greatly boost performance. The multi-cpu socket mb's were designed for such a reason.

What I can glean from the web - Xeon style processors and boards have now plateaued where the latest i-7 3770 cpus single chip systems can outperform the mutli-chip boards for mid range applications. (Web and database servers are a whole different ball game). There could be a mutli-cpu vs multi-core battle yet to come...

Heavy weight engineering design software (such as ship building) usually sit on a SQL server data base. For those apps the Xeon workstations reigned supreme.

Cheers

[Ian Pellant]

Mr Oz,

Browse through my earliest postings on this thread - the test plan file is attached as a zip.

Cheers.

[Ian Pellant]

cbdllc,

Great - at last the sub 60 second "barrier" is broken.

The i7 3770 series processors are nominally 10% faster at most calculations and produce only about 60% of the thermal heat load of the previous i7 2600 series. Faster and cooler.

My components are on order - they have about 2000 miles of road transport to endure... the waiting game begins.

The i7 3770K has the top performance Intel integrated graphics. I found a web benchmark that indicated the integrated graphics could easily outperform many top end add-in gaming cards. Apparently it has blazing DirectX acceleration... but no indication of how it handles OpenGL (needed for Chief).

I have ordered the standard i7 3770 since I'm adding a video card and not relying on the Intel integrated graphics... so I won't be able to test how good the i7 3777K is at every day Chief Architect 2D and 3D camera viewing.... is it possible for you to try the integrated graphics and report back? (Use the perspective camera and then try a "final render" with shadows turned on - that should give a graphics processing time test as opposed to ray tracing.)

Cheers.

[cbdllc]

...is it possible for you to try the integrated graphics and report back? (Use the perspective camera and then try a "final render" with shadows turned on - that should give a graphics processing time test as opposed to ray tracing.)

Cheers.[/QUOTE]

I can do that as it still sitting on top of my desk and I have to open it up again to add another drive. I'll render your test plan with the 680 GTX remove it and time the on-chip GPU.

I purchased the "K" version to play around with overclocking. So far all I have done is turned on the XMP memory profile which reads the RAM and then resets memory timings and speed automatically (went from 1333 to 1867) and used Gigabyte's new 3D BIOS and moved the CPU clockspeed slider up to 4.0 GHz and rebooted. Internal temps only went up about 1 degree in normal use. Raytracing, using the stock Intel air cooler, jumps the temps from 43C to 75C.

Jeff

[Ian Pellant]

Hi cdllc,

I haven't gone looking for the thermal specs on i7-3 series yet. It took a while to find the old Prescott specs.... which indicated a thermal throttling temp of 75C... which may still be the design temp at which the new processors cut themselves back. So, you may have oc'ed to it's design limit. Be careful of any long ray tracing jobs at the top end if the air cooling is maxed out.

Intels hype for the generation 3 i7 with HD 4000 integrated graphics sounds impressive. Only note I could find about OpenGL is that it supports OpenGL 2.1. ATI FireGL cards are supporting OpenGL 3 and above... so I suspect that there are some apps that will be beyond the Intel integrated graphics engine.

The ATI Radeon card in my old experimental box cooked itself a few weeks ago so I had to fall back to a very old Radeon 9250. I then found that Chief X4 will not color texture render in perspective camera views. The old card can only manage OpenGL 1.4. And that's where OpenGL caps in my HP netbook. Neither of them will color render in Chief X4; there is no problem in Chief X2.

The issue here is if business (not home office) level computers hit the market with i7 HD 4000 graphics, whether they would be a good base for Chief without adding a separate graphics card. At present the "gaming" computers are becoming way over the top in bit blit graphics, sound and price to be a cost effective business choice for a production office running Chief. (We found a new ASUS Business line of computers using i7's that are a third the price of the gaming boxes sold in this little part of the world.)

The graphics card should not affect raytracing (I would have thought)... but Intel seem to have sneeked in a floating point accelerator between their CPU and GPU in the i7 Gen 3 that may have some benefit (I dunno)

Thanks to all that have overclocked a Gen 2 i7 to around 4 GHz and achieved sub 60 second ray tracings. It seems that the "magic" number is around 4GHz for the Intel i7's.

AMD seem to be a long way behind... which I must confess is a disappointment. In 2007 AMD Athlons trounced Intel... Intel has bounced back to the top. (this Quarter).

Cheers.

[Ben Palmer]

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...=900&Itemid=63

In this benchmark review of the i7-3770k (ivy bridge) the integrated graphics is significantly better then 2nd gen processors, but is no where near video card performance...so don't think the 4000 graphics will be advantageous for our uses...unless it some how helps to process the video card more effeciently...but a move in the right direction for builds not needing high powered graphics.... anyway, one perspective...