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Workstation Power
Hi Doctor. My son is a 3D digital design student at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). We purchased a Lenovo P700 system for his design work and, of course, gaming. He uses applications such as Maya, RealFlow, and Adobe’s CC suite.
He’s having an issue setting up his hardware to reduce the time it takes to render projects in Maya—they take as long as 30 hours to complete. I don’t think adding more memory will help, and he’s already running dual Xeon processors, with a pretty good graphics card.
We looked for ways to better utilize both processors, but can’t figure that out. He also thinks a second graphics card might help, but can’t find documentation supporting his hypothesis. Any ideas you have would be greatly appreciated.
–Dave Fantauzzo THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The Doc is well versed in matters of hardware, but less familiar with Maya, and the resources its renderer exploits. To get you the best answer, the Doc went to his friends at Puget Systems in Auburn, Washington, who test and write about optimizing configurations for workstation applications. Matt Bach, in Puget’s lab, sent over the following guidance: “If faster render times from Maya are your primary concern, the solution isn’t quick or easy. You are correct that more RAM likely won’t help (32GB is typically plenty), and as Maya uses a CPU-based rendering engine, upgrading the GPU won’t improve render times either. The weakest link in your son’s dual-Xeon workstation is the CPUs themselves. Two Xeons can work very well for rendering, as they scale nicely with higher core counts, but the E5-2609 v3 is only one step up from the lowest-end CPU of that generation. Upgrading a dual-Xeon setup isn’t as cheap as adding RAM, but it’s the only thing that will help significantly.
“For rendering, the Xeon E5-2630 v3/v4 is usually the lowest-end dual-CPU config we recommend to one of our customers. Compared to the E5-2609 v3s your son has today, a pair of E5-2630 v3s could be expected to drop that 30-hour render to 17 hours or so. You could use a cheaper CPU, but anything lower than the -2630 will typically be outperformed by a 6- to 10-core 3GHz-plus single-CPU system, which is also more affordable. If you have the budget to go higher than the E5-2630, a quick rule of thumb for rendering is to use Xeon CPUs that end in a 0 (-2630, -2640, -2660, and so on).
“Keep in mind that many of the other tasks you mentioned (gaming, Maya modeling, and all Adobe software) do not work well with dual-Xeon systems. There is extra processing overhead when you have two physical CPUs, and unless the software is good at utilizing multiple cores at the same time—as rendering is—you often get better performance with one CPU than with two. In fact, for gaming and modeling/ animation, four cores running at high clock rates yield much better performance.”
Mixing Memory
Dear Doctor, When it comes to memory, if I’m using the same brand and speed, does it matter if I install two 16GB modules with a CAS rating of 14 and two 4GB sticks at CAS 16? Both would be DDR4-3200. Or would a slower data rate at CAS 12 be better? I’m doing some gaming,