Building a new workstation

argus1000

I have he means of buying a super workstation, whose purpose is to have as many cores as possible for rendering purposes. At the moment, I have my eye on an Asus dual-socket motherboard with two 16-cores AMD Opteron CPUs. Is this a good choice?

Dartanbeck

My opinion?
Absolutely! Then go for a minimum of 32 GB RAM to give each core no less than 1 GB to work with. But I would personally shoot for 64 GB RAM, allowing 2GB per core.

In this setup, you'll find that an important building decision, right from the start, will be a high-quality PSU (Power Supply) with plenty of extra power and all of the various leads that you need, plus those that you 'might' need for further expansions - things that you might have your eye on towards adding in the future. Graphics solutions might be less of a concern for using the Carrara render engine, but I'd at least go for something with good OpenGL ratings, as that will be your working view powerhouse. But if you plan on using GPU-based external render engines, you may wish to up the ante on the GPU as well. But if you're going to be using Carrara for the most part of your "Now" rendering, just make sure that your new system can handle the GPUs that you 'might' want to fit yourself into later, and save that $$$ for a future expansion - only IF you decide to go that route.

I prefer to make sure that all of that power has excellent cooling - as heat can slow down the fastest components in a hurry! So rather than devoting my hard-earned cash on the latest and greatest graphics, I usually save that as an upgrade option down the road, and, instead, stick my investment into a really good case with plenty of room for cable routing, giant silent fans, etc., and a monstrous supply of hard drives for storing my 'Full Frames' animation files!

Good for you, Argus! I cannot wait to see what you make with your new Monster Machine!!! :ahhh:

argus1000

Thanks for your input, Dart.

Dartanbeck

Any time, my friend! ;)