VFM workstation

[Frood]

and it's very likely that for the first time it won't be Intel's product.

Still not sure about that. I decided not to aquire any Ryzen (for myself as workstation) for two reasons:

1. Idle power consumption (more than 40W cpu pack for a 1950x in idle mode! My box runs 24/7) and

2. Single thread performance. A scene loading 7 minutes on a 1950x loads in 5:30 on a i9-9900K (stable overclocked with no special measures to match render performance of our trusty dual E5-2670 Xeons) for example.

As I use farm nodes to render (where a ryzen combined with wake on lan and maybe some smart sleep options which I have not explored yet makes definitely sense), single thread performance was more important for me.

As mentioned, I'm not entirely sure but I'm at least able to compare i9-9900K and 1950x directly for different tasks atm and so far I stilll would decide the same :)


Good Luck

[romullus]

You're looking it from the power user perspective, but my situation is entirely different. 9900 is way too expensive for me and if ryzen will offer similar or slightly lower performance for much more attractive price, then it's no brainer for me. I don't care about absolute performance, but i do care about price to power ratio. I'm working on old 4771 now and to be honest, i still find it adequate for my needs. I probably wouldn't even consider to look for replacement yet, if not the fact that my pc has very little RAM. And i don't think that it would be wise to put new parts to 6 years old machine, that might start braking appart due to its age :]

[Nejc Kilar]

Its quite fun to see how all of our needs and wants can differ so much :) Looking at it from a power user perspective or not, I personally would much prefer not having to wait longer for the IR to give me a cleaner image and I'd be willing to wait a few extra minutes  / seconds when opening files.

That being said, when I picked my current CPUs like two years ago, I splurged a lot more money to get to 3.6ghz on a single core. I still find it really important but luckily money wasn't a problem so I could in a way have the best of both worlds at the time :)

[Frood]

have the best of both worlds

Well, yes that somehow was my intention. And I'd like to give that "it-has-to-be-a-threadripper" discussion a bit of another perspective when it is about a workstation (not render node).

Working with Corona and especially with IR is only a small part of the job. And to render a complex scene (not divided up into xrefs/parts) is a pain on all systems anyway. So I prefer to have shorter preparation time and less passes. From my feeling, the first -say- 10 passes of a complex scene are reached in the same time on both systems (i9 preparing faster | 1950x rendering faster), then the ripper zips away of course - leaving the i9 behind in a cloud of dust. But I'm still shocked by the idle power consumption. Imagine having a 1950x farm of 10 nodes: About 500W without rendering a single f*g sample!

You're looking it from the power user perspective, but my situation is entirely different.

Hmm, "power user" ... in the sense that if you earn your money with a computer, every second waiting is too much - then yes.

I'm working on old 4771 now and to be honest, i still find it adequate for my needs.

Oh, then your current WS is still about 10% faster than my old one :]

I probably wouldn't even consider to look for replacement yet, if not the fact that my pc has very little RAM.

Oh, yes. Even my old had 65GB and that was one reason to be able to keep it for such a long time. Maybe you could look for used ram fitting in your box if you have free slots?


Good Luck

[romullus]

Maybe you could look for used ram fitting in your box if you have free slots?

Now you want to take away my single excuse to buy a new shiny toy, thank you very much :]

[TomG]

Now you want to take away my single excuse to buy a new shiny toy, thank you very much :]

Never let mere "reasons" or "logic" stand in the way of buying something shiny and new!

[lupaz]

I personally would much prefer not having to wait longer for the IR to give me a cleaner image and I'd be willing to wait a few extra minutes  / seconds when opening files.

Doesn't it kill you to wait for all those single threaded 3ds Max's tasks?

[Nejc Kilar]

I personally would much prefer not having to wait longer for the IR to give me a cleaner image and I'd be willing to wait a few extra minutes  / seconds when opening files.

Doesn't it kill you to wait for all those single threaded 3ds Max's tasks?

If I'm doing cloth sims on a daily basis then yeah, I hear ya. From my experience the rendering process is fairly easily the most time consuming thing especially when using IR in interior scenes. Its like saying, would you rather wait 10 seconds each time you change a material parameter or wait 10 seconds each time I do a cloth sim.

Or...
Its like when some people shell out 500€ so that 3ds Max starts in 10 seconds instead of 15. I'd much rather have another 128gb of RAM, heh :)) Not that there is anything wrong with the above, just I think personally thats where my I want to focus in terms of upgrades.

Conversely, my SO was doing cloth sims in MD everyday (she changed careers, thats why the past tense) and she totally benefited working on a 4790k with a 4.4ghz turbo. That being said, given the IPC advancement a 4ghz Threadripper is probably very close to that single threaded performance if all the cores are parked.

Ultimately its a balancing act I guess. Believe me though, I am not too patient when it comes to panels taking 5 seconds to open.

Oh and yeah, 3ds Max is sometimes really slow but most DCC apps are single threaded still because multi threading is not always worth it / is not faster.