Afternoon,
I need to build a WorkStation that is designed for 2 purposes. It should be capable of doing high end 3d Max renderings and secondly serve as a NAS Drive that stores all my office data, serves as a home video station, I have a lot of HD Videos and I like to watch movies in High Definition. Please advise. I've heard that the Xenon processors are the best for rendering.
Thank you.
I am not an expert, there are others here that know much more than me, but I think you need 2 systems (possibly in one case?) to do this right.
http://www.phanteks.com/Enthoo-MiniXL-DS.html
Motherboard support: Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX simultaneously.
The system requirements for a NAS are not that high. You need plenty of RAM and hard drives, but the CPU (i3 or i5) and SSD can be small. The primary functions of a NAS should be security, stability and reliability.
The workstation needs power and that means a 2011-v3 socket CPU. Xeons are good because of the price per core. Try to find Xeons or i7's with lots of cores and threads. You will want to get as much RAM as you can afford or is compatible to make a good render station. I would also suggest a high speed NVMe or PCIe SSD to work from in addition to whatever more storage you want, but you won't need much WS storage because you have the NAS.
From what I have read 3D Studio Max is heavily CPU bound for rendering, your choice of GPU wont matter much (what I read may be wrong?). As long as you have a compatible Geforce GTX or AMD Radeon, a Quadro or FirePro is not required. However Autodesk recommends the top of the line Geforce cards like the GTX 1080 or the Titan X.
I am imagining a setup where you can design at the workstation and while you take a break in the other room streaming a movie off of the NAS, the workstation is rendering to it's fast SSD and then backing up those files to the NAS.
But again, I think you are better off with two separate systems for redundancy and data safety. Bury your NAS in a closet with a dedicated circuit and an Uninterruptible Power Supply for both machines. That way electrical problems have less of a chance of screwing up both machines at the same time (that could trash a render). If you are using one PC to do both, when your NAS messes up, you cant work. Same with a dual motherboard setup, you can't fix one without taking down the other.
Buy a pre-built NAS box and build a dedicated Workstation.
But maybe just slapping a big old hard drive in your workstation to be your "NAS" is all you need.
Budget?