Workstation for solidworks/keyshot

First post.
Here is my workstation:
Case: Fractal Design Core 1000 mATX
PSU: Fractal Design Integra R2 500W
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H mATX
CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K 3,4GHz (3,8GHz Turbo) dualcore
Mem: G.Skill RipjawsX 2x8GB DDR3 1600MHz
SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 128GB
Gfx: AMD FirePro V4900 1GB
Total ~$1000

Its built for 100% SolidWorks modelling, no rendering, no simulations etc. It is rock solid for 99% of our projects but it will slow down on the most complex ones, but the $3000 workstations don’t like it either. It is built to minimize those small but many loadtimes to not disrupt the workflow, low latency components is king. Chose an SSD that is good for OS-related loads and fast memory also helps. AMD FirePro workstation graphics cards are the best bang for the buck, the V4900 is cheaper then most gamer cards but the difference in speed and stability are miles apart.

I am experimenting with turning Hyperthreading off to get more cache memory per core, to see if it helps rebuild times . Rebuilding is a single-threaded process and its very noticeable when you go with the top-down approach were you have a master part that controls other parts, but rebuilding an assembly with stand-alone parts i think multiple cores helps.

But your need for rendering makes this setup not so optimal. I would go for an i7, raided SSDs and even faster memory if i had a bigger budget.

What are peoples thoughts on this config?

I used to colorize in Solidworks, but now that Keyshot has live-linking, I’ve found it’s better to add no shaders in Solidworks, so when you update to Keyshot it doesn’t keep reverting to the old Solidworks shaders every time, usually keeps the ones you have pretty nicely.

Looks pretty good, my only suggestions would be:

Go for the 4770k cpu which is unlocked and gives you some flexibility to overclock and get a little more bang for your buck. It looks like that builder offers that as an option although for an extra $150 I would just do it yourself. I’m not sure if he offers a better heat sink as well, that one is fine for stock speeds but won’t handle much heat above that.

I’d consider adding a separate hard drive for some extra storage, but that’s also easy to do yourself after the fact if you need more room.

Lastly I’d consider spending more on a monitor. Since it’s what you look at 90% of the time it may be worth investing in an IPS monitor for better color reproduction, especially if you’re doing design work with any sensitivity to color. Those panels are very fast and contrasty which makes them great for gaming and movies but for photo/graphics/rendering stuff the colors will be a bit off and difficult to calibrate.

I’ve used MySolidBox as a baseline for requirement vs. price point. They basically take a customized dell machines and performance test them against SolidWorks Benchmarks.

Unless you are an experienced overclocker I would not recommend to try overclocking your workstation. To notice any real difference in speed you need to overclock quite a bit and you will need to adjust the hardware voltages and need better cooling to keep it stable. But if you adjust the voltages too much, you will damage the hardware.

I wouldn’t agree with this anymore and having overclocked many systems Haswell is a very easy “Set it and forget it” type of system, albiet at hot one. Investing $75-100 on something like a Noctua DH-14 air cooler (or H100i closed water cooler) will comfortably allow you to use any of the “auto” settings most BIOS’s include.

On my current motherboard (which is a cheap Asrock entry level Z87 board) overclocking for a novice is as simple as going to “Overclock->Factory 4.4ghz->Save”. Yes you can push it harder, reduce the voltages to minimize the heat, and notch every slider up incrementally like a pro nerd, but even when doing that you may only get an extra 100-200mhz. Haswell easily overclocks 700-900mhz without a hiccup, even on poor quality chips.

After that all it takes is a quick check of the temperatures to make sure everything is happy (and that your heat sink was correctly installed) and you have a 10-25% performance boost.

25% is not a trivial amount of time when you’re doing a 4 hour rendering. Yes, it requires some extra work, but to get something for effectively free is a pretty good deal, especially if it comes down to saving time in the end.

thanks for all the feedback. I would like a system out of the box that runs fast.

You have a lofty budget here but not building the box yourself will really chew into that with minimal gains. That said, these two quick picks are easy and take your buck pretty far. Nothing fancy but it sounds like youre not interested in frills/complications.

i7-4770 box, 12gb memory, gtx645 1gb ($870)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883155873

23" 1080p IPS ($220)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824260105

If you go this route, youll need to put up with Windows 8. I do not know if OEMs and retailers even sell boxes with Win7 anymore so that may be moot. Theres room here to replace the internal hard disk with a solid state down the road if youre comfortable with that.

Hi guys, if you don´t mind, i would like to ask you too for advise for a new workstation.

I am going to run the product design suite from autodesk, mostly inventor and showcase and maybe some more 3dsmax and alias in the future.
On the graphic side I use the Adobe suite, but i guess that doesn´t really matter for specs. Only I would like the pc to be reasonable capable for some videoediting.

Beside maybe some general recommendations I wanted to ask you guys, how you make the most use of a SSD. Do you put all the data and programms you are working on, on it? I work a lot with data on our servers, would that mean that an SSD doesn´t make much sense?

thanks!

Any files you want to access quickly should be on an SSD. In the past, SSD’s were very low capacity or very expensive, so it was common to buy a 60-120 gig drive that would give you just enough storage for the operating system, some key programs, and that was it.

These days, SSD’s have come down enough in price they are fairly easy to use as your primary drive for everything, but if you are doing video editing, especially with HD content then you’ll likely need an additional drive or RAID array for the performance needed to edit. I would not buy a regular hard drive as a primary drive ever again, the speed boost is significant.

If you are working with data on servers and not copying it locally, it makes less of a difference. Though often times your machine will create local temporary files to work with, so the SSD will still help for certain apps or tasks.

thanks for the detailed answer.

I have to decide very soon which one to get and we are looking at ready made rigs right now.
What really confuses me is the choice between graphic cards.
I have some with the Quadro K2000 and some with the FirePro W5000 and 1 set in the same price range with the Quadro K4000.

Any ideas or recommendations to what card i should take?

best,

Of the software you mentioned, none of it is very graphics card heavy except for Showcase (assuming you use the realtime GPU mode primarily, and not the raytracing mode).

If your current machine is adequate for your Showcase needs, the K2000 or W5000 (which are both more entry level) are probably fine.

The K4000 has about double the horsepower of the K2000, so if you work in Showcase a lot and do very heavy renderings (I used to bring Showcase to it’s knees by trying to display dozens of products at once using full engineering assemblies) that could be beneficial. But I’m assuming whatever your upgrading from is slower than the K2000 so that would probably be OK for your needs.

We have a workstation with a quadro 2000, which already doesn´t handle our assemblies well in showcase.
Raytracing enabled and pushing two buttons without waiting for it to respond - nope, restart from the beginning :slight_smile:

my consumer laptop is not able to run it at all, which of course is going to be a huge upgrade anyway.

How about rendering with vray, 3dsmax and such. is that more cpu or gpu heavy?

nvidia seems to be the go to brand for autodesk products. is there a huge difference between the firepro and quadro? any at all?

Thanks again for you help, it´s highly appreciated.


EDIT: possible setup. any thoughts?
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2, 4x 3.70GHz • RAM: 16GB (4x 4GB) •1TB HDD + 256GB SSD • NVIDIA Quadro K2000, 2GB

When you say Raytracing enabled - that means that the GPU is doing absolutely nothing. Showcase has 2 dedicated modes, once you hit R and enter raytracing mode you are only using the CPU. So if that is your primary mode of using it, the GPU won’t help much. If you disable raytracing for the real time mode, then that is all GPU based, but if you don’t use that for your renders the GPU won’t help much. Either way the K2000 is roughly 2X more powerful than the old 2000, the 4000 should be about 4X.

Rendering with Vray is 100% CPU.

The Firepro 1500 should be fairly similar but you’d have to try and google some benchmarks to get real answers. It’s an entry level card so it likely won’t blow away one card over the other, especially since most of your software is bottlenecked by the CPU.

That setup seems good, if it’s within your budget I don’t see any issues. You can always try for more CPU if possible but that should be good for a quad core machine.

wow, thanks. now i know a lot more.

You should write an ID tech guide for the frontpage.

we´ll see what the hardware suppliers gonna offer but this one setup i posted seems to be the best i could find with the budget.

I actually did write a hardware guide for another ID forum but I can’t seem to find it these days. I’ll have to see if I can find the original and if anyone wants to repost it.

I have to bother you once more.
Since you said that those kind of renderings with raytraycing only uses CPU power (showcase,3dsmax,vray…), i had another look and saw this setup: lenovo-
Tower/E5-2620v2 2.1-2.6 GHz,15MB L2,1600 MHz FSB, 6 Cores/12 Threads)/ max 2CPU/ 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-ECC UDIMM 1600MHz / 256GB SATA SSD/Opal 2.5"" with a K2000 quadro

Or Tower/ Intel Xeon 1xE5-2630v2/ 2.6-3 .1 GHz/ 15MB L2, 1600 MHz FSB, 6 Cores/12 Threads/ Intel C602/ max 2CPU/ 4GB (1x4GB) DDR3-ECC 1600 UDIMM/ 1TB / 7200rpm SATA 3,5/ with a K2000 quadro

compared to the one before, how do they do?

You are going to be paying a premium when going to the Xeon CPU’s. The ability to have more than one processor really up’s the price. Do you know if the motherboards allow for the addition of another CPU, or will you have to upgrade that later if you want to add in another? Those are not cheap motherboards, so if you dont think you will be upgrading it later I would stick with a good i7.

However, we just upgraded our render farm, and those new Xeon’s rip.

For rendering intensive applications the 6 core will do better. Not necessarily 50% better (since clock speed and other overhead factors including the software control how well the performance scales) but it will definitely be a significant time chunk.

The second CPU is a good bit quicker (2.6-3.1.ghz) but I notice it says it only has 4 gigs of ram? That’s a non starter. RAM likes to be allocated per core, so for a 6 core machine I’d suggest running 24 gigs of ram. You don’t need to buy it that way from the factory (you’ll pay a hefty premium), just upgrade it once you get the machine and save some money.