I shared your concern, but let me attempt to change your mind.

My favorite hardware site is AnandTech.com.  What I love about them is most of their reviews are very analytical in nature, but they also share their opinions and biases openly (and you can differentiate between test results and opinions).  They also have behind-the-scenes articles that explain the technology or talk about how companies balance technology-vs.-marketing concerns.

For quite some time, Anand was saying the BEST UPGRADE you could do for an otherwise “good” system was to move from HDD to SSD.  However, reading about SSDs “wearing out” scared me.

Eventually I got over my fear, and I LOVE my SSD.  I got my son one for Christmas, and even on his aging system (dual-core Athlon 64) he could feel the difference (and this spring we upgraded the rest of his sytem as a graduation present).

Key PRO points:

• You really can feel the difference between an SSD and an HDD
• If you WRITE about 10GiB/day, you are still talking about 10 to 20 YEARS of life for the small disks, much longer for 256GiB disks
• Life span concerns are really only valid in a server environment, not for regular consumers (even heavy-hitting power users)
• When they “wear out” it is graceful – it gradually becomes a read-only device – it is not like it suddenly breaks one day
• They are vastly more reliable that HDDs
• You should ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP, no matter what you’re using – what it your house gets hit by lightning and it fries everything in the case?

Key CON points:

• More expensive than HDD – I recommend SSD for boot device, software installation, and your favorite games (so levels open really quickly) – put “My Documents” and all your data on an HDD
• There used to be compatibility issues, and may still be in rare cases, so do shop before you buy… but if it works for a week, you should be in great shape, and the market has matured a lot so this is getting to be very rare
• Easy to over-shop… You can split hairs, and one is faster here while another is faster there… but keep it in context, and remember, even a mediocre SSD is way faster than a high-end HDD

Here are a few links:

SSD Lifetime Estimation – See the table in the Conclusions.

Lower Endurance – A non-issue (see the first paragraph, at least)

AnandTech goes all SSD - Because they're so fast and so reliable

There's lots and lots of interesting technology behind the drives, but in the end I highly recommed them based on my own experience.

NLE & 3D Animation Programs aren't necessarily going to function with a High-end Gaming PC. Neither will High-end games necessarily function with NLE & 3D Animation PCs.

So - You need to decide where your priorities lie & go for a Medium Spec Gaming PC that will function with both NLE & 3D Animation Programs, if you're a Gamer.

The above being said, it's how you use your PC & Programs which is more important than using a Rolls Royce to go shopping, apart from impressing the neighbo(u)rs ;)

I don't want you to think I'm pressuring you, but I do enjoy both the technology and the discussion.

I'll leave you with one final thought, and then I'll leave you in peace...

Is it a good VALUE for your dollars?

If you are constantly installing/uninstalling/reinstalling software, you would really appreciate and benefit from the performance of an SSD.  Every time you do something like that.  Every time, every day.

Graphics cards become out of date and get replaced.  CPUs too.  Suppose, in a worst-case scenario you "wore out" an SSD (like this one , randomly picked) in 5 years.  That's a long time for computer technology (and it's almost certain to last a lot longer).  That would cost you only $3.17/month.  Once you have one, you'd NEVER trade it in for an HDD for that little money.

OTHER COMMENTS ABOUT THE COMPUTER:

• You are already aware of single-threaded vs. multi-threaded performance, so it's important to understand your applications (as you already know)
• For graphics cards, consider CUDA support (only on Nvidia cards).  Right now Blender makes great use of CUDA cores with it's "Cycles" rendering engine.  It's not fully functional on OpenCL yet.
• In gaming and most other work, my AMD card and my son's Nvidia card are very similar
• In fact, with my Intel i7-3770k with HD-4000 graphics, I barely even need a graphics card for most of what I do... but when it comes to Cycles Rendering in Blender, his card with Cuda support is way faster
• Once again, any time you want to push the envelope, you have to understand your usage, as has been stated before

Have fun shopping!!!!

Nice looking case.

I did notice (among other things) that she installed a Solid State Drive (SSD).  ;)

About shopping being fun or agony, I find it to be both.  Shopping for each component has the ability to become a project of it's own.  You can over-shop the memory, the hard drive, the graphics card, the case, even the fans.  The challenge (for me) is sometimes knowing when I've shopped enough.

When I bought my RAM (about 14 months ago) to go with my i7-3770k CPU, I opted for 1600MHz RAM.  My budget was lower than yours, and at the time it was the sweet spot for price-performance.  Today I'd look at the next level up (2300-ish?).

<preaching to the choir> As you know, once you go from poor to good to really good, then you start splitting hairs.  A lot of times the only way to tell the difference it to actually perform benchmarks.  If faster RAM reduced my rendering time for a 3D model from 60 minutes to 59.5 minutes, do I really care?  In either case I'm walking away from my computer and will do something else.  On the other hand, if my favorite application launches in 5 seconds instead of 15 seconds, I can really feel that improvement. If I can now rotate my model smoothly without studdering and pausing, I can appreciate that improvement too.</preaching>

Let us know when it's built, and post a picture so I can go "Ooo" and "Ahhh," okay?  When do you think it'll happen?

Memory speed vs. quantity:

• The simple answer is in the form of a question - Are you exceeding your memory capacity?
• If you have 8GB, but need more, your system will "swap", meaning information in your RAM has to trade places with information on your disk drive.
• Swapping is SLOW (relative to other memory actions)
• So if you're routinely hitting your memory limits, you'd be better of with 16GB of 1600MHz than 8GB of 3000MHz.
• The difference between the two speeds when you're not swapping will be enough to be worth considering, but the difference between swapping and not swapping will be much greater.
• Have you considered an intermediate speed (and cost); something like 2300MHz?

32 or 64-bit, and number of cores:

• Two different topics, not really related

32-bit vs. 64-bit

• The main thing here is the amount of memory it can address
• The actual CPU is going to be 64-bit either way
• If you have a 32-bit version of Windows, there's no value in installing 16GB or RAM
• And if anyone is still wondering, you can run 32-bit applications on 64-bit operating systems... the main thing is you need proper drivers for your hardware, but that's becoming less and less of an issue (except for me with my old Pinnacle video capture card, sigh)
• Some applications are "64-bit optimized" which usually means certain portions have been rewritten to leverage 64-bit memory access, but most of the application has not

Number of cores:

• As mentioned in an earlier post, this does a great job of allowing multitasking, so while iClone is busy rendering you can still do other things without having crappy performance
• For a particular application, you have to ask, "Is it multi-threaded?"  Sadly, it's not always obvious, and you need people to perform benchmark tests to really know if you'll benefit from more cores or a faster clock speed.
• Graphics RENDERING is fairly easy to do in a parallel fashion, and that is why graphics cards have a THOUSAND CORES in them, if you look at it the right way... each "core" can render a small portion of the image
• In games, some games have great artificial intelligence and that can be spread across multiple cores
• But non-rendering tasks can be very, very difficult to multi-thread.  If you step #2 depends on the answer to step #1, you can't work on both steps at the same time.
• It is true than many applications still benefit from a faster clock speed, which comes at the expense of fewer cores.
• Once again, it all comes down to which applications you care about the most, and the relative gains (or losses) of selecting different CPUs

Number of cores:

• As mentioned, more cores help support multitasking, so while working in iClone you can still do other things without having crappy performance
• For a particular application, it comes down to programming... it is multi-threaded?
• Graphics RENDERING is fairly easy to do in a parallel fashion, and that is why graphics cards have a THOUSAND CORES in them, if you look at it the right way... each "core" can render a small portion of the image
• In games, some games have great artificial intelligence and that can be spread across multiple cores
• But non-rendering tasks can be very, very difficult to multi-thread.  If you step #2 depends on the answer to step #1, you can't work on both steps at the same time.
• It is true than many applications still benefit from a faster clock speed, which comes at the expense of fewer cores.
• Once again, it all comes down to which applications you care about the most, and the relative gains (or losses) of selecting different CPUs

MY RECOMMENDATION:

• I endorse the selection of the Intel i7-4770k... it has good clock speed and a good number of cores, and getting anything more powerful will cost a LOT more.
• My Asus motherboard does a nice job of "auto-overclocking" based on the system demands.  It idles slowly, goes up to normal speeds (3500MHz), and can kick into overdrive (3900MHz) when it gets really busy.  If the CPU gets too warm, it slows down a bit.  That is something my i7-3770k (and the 4770k) supports.  I've not felt the need to manually overclock.

QUESTION ABOUT MAX TEXTURE SIZE:

• The Max Texture Size option only affects interactive ("live") rendering, and how good thing look while you're creating your project... It does not affect the quality of the rendered output...
• Correct?

.

And if you want to learn a lot of geeky stuff about the inner-workings of RAM, and what those latency numbers mean, read this article.

Then after doing all that, go buy what's on sale.  :D   ;)   Seriously though, I never have the budget to chase after the best.  The price-performance curve usually has a sharp bend in a bad way as you enter the top-tier.  It costs a lot more, but the actual improvement is minute.  The trick is finding YOUR preference based on budget and objectives.

I'd rather buy 1800MHz than 2300MHZ RAM, and put the money into a better graphics card, or spend money at an iClone store, or buy a more comfortable chair or a bigger monitor.  But that's me.

I'm glad you enjoyed the articles.

I believe if your OS supports "TRIM" then you shouldn't need to use Secure Erase.  Windows 7 and greater support TRIM.  I don't keep track of non-Windows.

It's mostly an issue (I think) when you FILL your SSD and it has trouble shuffling data around and doing its internal housekeeping.  Some drives recover from that better than others.  And some drives reserve more space for themselves than others.

I'm running Windows 7, and I plan to keep my SSD under 90% full (it's currently around 60%) so that should never, ever be a problem for me no matter what.

For the curious (or insanely geeky) people, there are more articles on AnandTech that really get into the details of how SSDs work.  I read them, enjoy them, and then promptly forget most of the details, retaining only some basic concepts.  But at times like this, I say, "I remember reading an article about that..."  :)

Oh, that'll be good to keep in mind.  I focused on the "Real time" term.  When it's rendering, it doesn't need to be real time and the "frame rate" doesn't matter, so I figured it would then utilize the full texture maps, even if it bogged down your performance, so you'd get the best-possible output.

If I have more questions, I'll start a new thread to avoid highjacking this one too badly.

Thanks again.

P.S.

D'oh!  One of the TV Remote Control props I recently made while experimenting with texture mapping was affected that that setting.  Increasing the texture size made a visible difference on the prop.  But I never rendered any output.  I'll try that, hopefully tonight, and will report back in a fresh thread.

My "highjacking" was refering to the "real time texture setting" in the iClone Options.

I'm not much help with any video card specifics, other than these few thoughts:

• I'm not a gamer, so I buy on more of a price basis.  I shopped in the $150 (US) price range, so I looked at some bechmarks and picked one I liked.
• Since I don't stress my video card a lot, I decided FAN NOISE was going to be a significant criteria for me.
• For people with LARGE iClone models, the amount of RAM on the Graphics Card will be important.  Probably 2GB should be considered a starting point.

The cards I bought in the last year 18 months:

• Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 - My son loves having an Nvidia card because he models in Blender, and it has a rendering engine that utilizes Nvidia's CUDA technology, so it made a huge difference for him... but I'm pretty sure that doesn't have any impact on iClone.
• AMD Radeon 6850 - That's what I have, and it's probably not much more powerful than the Intel HD4000 graphics built into my i7-3770k CPU, but it works fine for my purposes.

I suspect you'll start to reach the point of diminishing returns around $250, at least for iClone work.  If you do a lot of heavy gaming, maybe closer to $350.  Anything over that is simply "bragging rights."  Is iClone physics calculated on the graphics card?  If so, and you have a lot of intense physics, you might want to shop on the higher side.

Does anyone know?  Does iClone use the graphics card, or only the CPU, for physics calculations?

Oh, even for gaming, if you don't have a multi-monitor, high resolution setup, there's no need to go over $250 for a graphics card in my opinion.  A $250 card can play pretty much any game, even at highest quality settings if you're on a single 1920x1080 monitor.  There just aren't enough pixels to bog it down.  If you have expensive, higher-pixel-count monitors, and spread your game across two (or three!) of them, then the story changes.

Once again, I run back to AnandTech where they have a "bench" section where you can pick two products and compare the results.  Be careful when reviewing GPU benchmarks, because sometimes "faster is better" so the smallest bar wins.  It's a great way to compare two cards you're considering.

Phew... good thing I only had a few thoughts, eh?

As to cards, I went with an nVidia GTX 580. It replaced a GTX 460 from a previous build and I did notice an improvement in render times. This was surely also due to a newer CPU (i7 2600K).

Now from what Freddy observed with nVidia cards in his build (which uses an AMD processor), my nVidia loyalty is waning. The current iClone built and my nVidia card don't play nice. I reverted to the 310.90 driver and then tried the latest without much success. So if there is something with the driver, the selection of the card becomes kind of a non-issue.

I've had this build for over two years and it has always worked well with iClone, but lately things have been problematic. Audio is out of sync sometimes, which never happened before.

AnandTech reviewed the Samsung SSD 840 EVO.  It comes in five difference capacities.

My main reason for posting this is they talked about "endurance" again.  Bottom line is, unless you are running a database that reads and writes constantly, you really have nothing to worry about, especially if you get the 250GB (or larger) drive.

Thanks for the links.  That does prove that having data "closer to your CPU" is always better.  Internet --> Disk --> RAM --> L3 cache --> L1 cache.

My problem with RAM disks is that it's not persistent.  The video you linked to did mention having a copy of it on your disk in case of power outage.  So at some point you'll still be hitting the disk, but I'm not sure when that occurs and what triggers it.  I also wonder how much the normal caching of data in RAM, done automatically by Windows, serves much the same purpose - in both cases you'll need sufficient RAM.

But, if you're constantly re-launching a set of applications, accessing the same data over and over again, or if you could pre-load a game with all levels into the RAM disk, yeah, that would give you some very fast performance.

The Crystal Disk Mark test did show some incredible performance, but I'd have to read more about the real-world benefits of it before I got too excited about it.

Right now, for what I do, the number one bottle neck in my system is... me.  :doze:

Yes, but with an excess number of empty disk drive bays.  You must fill them.  :)

Seriously, I'm glad it's running.  ENJOY IT!!!

Planet builds the first RAMless PC :D

Nice to see you're up & running, Planet.

Enjoy "The Beast" :)

Yeah, that's the most painful part of building a computer.  It's not the assembly.  Getting the motherboard drivers/software is usually something I over-think.  But then it's about 87 patches/reboots.  Java.  Flash.  Adobe Reader.  Shortcuts.  Preferences.  And on and on.

The "moving in" process is what's exhausting.  I (gasp!) actually turned down a laptop upgrade at work once.  The actual hardware improvement was minor that time, and it just wasn't worth the headache of making the transition.  I figured it'd take well over a week, probably two, to get it to the point where the new one was set up like the old one, especially since some of the software I used was high-end enterprise-level software that takes a couple of days for the core installation.

planetstardragon (8/6/2013)

---

Done!! :w00t:

I present to you ....THE BEAST!!



and if I wanted even more power, I can delid it and oc to an unprecedented 10.5mhz!!

Run!

Save the children!!!