Hey all, I'm needing a computer for heavy 3d (houdini, maya, mari) and 2d (nuke) work I'm wondering if you have any suggestions for specs and graphics. budget is about 10k give or take.

Ive used mac pros before but now leaning towards a windows based system.

advice is appreciated

cheers

First of all - thank you for not advertising football games!

$10K can get you quite a workstation. I would currently recommend an Intel i7 5960K (8 core), Nvidia Titan Black or Quadro K5200, 64GB RAM, and a reasonably sized SSD for the system drive (512GB-1TB)

Thank you!

Would there be any need for a 12 core or would that be overkill?

10K will buy you a stellar machine especially if you spec it yourself and run linux.
I would have on my hit list a duel xeon supermicro mobo EATX form factor. quadro card, 2x Xeon CPU's 6 cores and up , 48gigs of crucial ram, 4 2tb drives in Raid and 1 SSD add a HP dream colour monitor, topped off with linux as your OS

Rob

twod
First of all - thank you for not advertising football games!)

LOL!

twod
First of all - thank you for not advertising football games!)

What? I come here daily for those

On a serious note, does this forum not have an admin? Maybe SESI should appoint some members as mods so that they can remove spam topics immediately.

Would there be any need for a 12 core or would that be overkill?

12 core CPUs are good for farms where they can run multiple jobs. Their clockspeed is generally a bit low for general workstation use, where single-threaded tasks are still very common. The 10-core Xeon workstation part is the highest core count I'd recommend (the 3.1-3.5GHz E5-2687WV3: http://ark.intel.com/products/81909) [ark.intel.com]

On a serious note, does this forum not have an admin? Maybe SESI should appoint some members as mods so that they can remove spam topics immediately.

There are several people with access to the admin account, but the forum only allows for single post removal and it can't ban IPs. That must be done using more advanced tools. Spammers always seem to get restless around our holidays

twod
There are several people with access to the admin account, but the forum only allows for single post removal and it can't ban IPs. That must be done using more advanced tools. Spammers always seem to get restless around our holidays

I see. I thought the admins weren't removing them due to time constraints. I guess it's easier/better to change the forum software then. Right now we can't even sort threads by number of views, posts, etc.

This is the best one I have seen in another 3d forum:
https://xenforo.com/ [xenforo.com]

Hope SESI considers

since dec. 2011 sesi is looking for a web developer i think they lack a bit of resources.

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2100&Itemid=210 [sidefx.com]

more the marrier, give as much as possible to the CPU and RAM, you can even go with a consumer video card just to direct the budget to Dual Xeon.

but get min 64 Gb ram

You don't really even need 3k for a very good workstation.

for 10k you could get yourself houdini indie, a workstation and a few machines to render on.

if you are starting out then start smaller, dont just blow money ( unless you are filthy rich and that is pocket change. in which case, you can mail me a check at…

Yeah, for 10k, I agree that you'd probably be better off getting several machines, rather than a single super-computer. Xeons have rapidly diminishing economic returns once you get above the ~3k mark. I reckon 3x 3k workstations would likely give you a lot more aggregate power than a single 10k one. Remember that for everyday rendering/sim purposes, you don't really need much of a GPU, so you can pile the money almost entirely into CPU and RAM.

Of course, then you have to think about a file server and render distribution, etc… so it'll take a bit more homework and elbow grease getting the pipeline set up.

at the same time for 10k you could get houdini indie, modo, zbrush, mari, that workstation you want, and still have enough to get yourself a render box. Again there are better ways to use that money than a single machine only.

better monitors? that is usually a decent investment as you will keep those around for a while.