Quadro cards overpriced or worth it? and xeon over i7?

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
1

So hello (hopefully),

Logan and or Wendell and or Pistol and or Qain (or any one else),

:D I do 3D stuff (using maya) blender, substance designer and a lot of other stuff, since all of them have some very strong sides, but also some very weak ones.

But that's not what this is about, right now my system is:

Fx-8350 on a sabertooth 990fx r2.0 cooled by the nh-u14s, with 8gb ram, a 750 gold psu and a (dang, stock cooled) gtx660. All of this in a Fractal define r4 shelter :D (just btw, the define's front airflow is quite blocked and in my opinion Reallly needs two intake fans, just saying because in some reviews, just like your's, its said that it does well in the silent vs airflow category which ain't true with the stock fans)

But now to the actual question I wonder if switching to a quadro card will give me much of a performance improovement, I am getting better and my 8gb's of ram have been filled too damn often, and the 3d performance is getting choppy.

Right now the only card I could buy is the K600, but compared to my gtx 660 it seems much lower spec (less memory cuda cores etc).

Would it still be a upgrade?(beacause of ze grand drivers)

Also I am looking to maybe buy a new system in terms of mobo and cpu, I need more powaaa.

I do remember that in your build you say its better to get the extreme i7 and that those outperform the xeon's.

But I found this review on the lower E3 xeon tier compared to an i5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcB1BIyJ5j8

Maybe you could help me :D ( please do so )

 

Greets Max

2

the xeons differ wildly, but you're not going to get a worthwhile improvement unless you go socket 2011. that means E5 xeons, which are really server-oriented, unless you pay like $3000, or i7's. if you do upgrade to socket 2011, get the 4930k.

I think the first thing you need to do, however, is upgrade to 16g of ram, or more.

 

i'd also stick with the 660, as blender does CUDA fairly well.

3

well actually I deffo planning on the 16 gb's I have to :D my sculpts are too big and even with freaking instancing and disp mapping etc, it shoots up :D and I have to upgrade the gpu too, my 660 is too weak :)

4

You have to be careful at how people quantify how a desktop CPU is better than a Workstation one.

Firstly although the Xeon processors are optimised for certain environments, like 24/7 server and database situations, they often perform a tad worse than the equivalent desktop version. However once you place them in a server environment etc, they will often outperform slightly.

That is just one aspect, they are usually subject to greater quality control and selection, 'binning' and will sometimes run lower VID's than your average desktop equiv.

They also support ECC Ram, which comes in various flavours (won't go into that now).

The reason for using ECC ram is when the processes you are running are 'mission critical' or essential to be completed without errors when time is money. If you buy a workstation such as a Dell Precision or HP Z you would usually get a Xeon(s) with ECC Ram (Dell favour unbuffered ECC on some models whereas HP use Registered, and they can't be substituted, FBB Dimms are another thing altogether and won't even fit in normal slots and run HOT.)

So if you are doing mission critical or time is money computing and can't afford any errors, and also need graphics horsepower, using a Xeon (or Opteron) setup with ECC and a 'cooking' grade (gaming) graphics card is a bit like getting in the shower and only washing half your body.

They say Quadro and AMD Fire cards are so expensive because of the ISV certification, like Adobe, Autodesk etc. Then they say the drivers are better. The drivers though, tend to contain optimisation for certain things...

 

As an example, I used to have a Dell Precision 490, Dual Xeons, 16gb of FB Dimms and a Quaddro FX-1800 card which is like an 8800GSO. It could do this task in Maya, I think in about 2 minutes.

I installed a 9800GTX card which was a faster card at the time and it took nearly 3 minutes to do the same thing. The drivers are in effect 'rigged' which they call 'optimisation'.

People used to mod cooking cards to Fire GL or Quadros with BIOS flashes or soft mod them with drivers off Guru 3D. This also gave big gains in apps like Autodesk etc.

It is harder or impossible to do this, these days as they cottoned on to it, and were losing money over people buying Pro cards.

I once soft modded a 7900GT (or GS) to an FX-3500 Quadro which made it quicker at CAD stuff.

So if you are serious about working with pro apps or doing it for a living, building a machine with a pro CPU and ECC ram plus a pro level card is a good idea. Depends on the seriousness of it.

5

your gpu is fine, 2gb of vram is plenty. the gpu itself is only really important when rendering.

I might even take it a step further, and suggest getting 32g of ram, before you upgrade your gpu, unless you have the cash for a 760 or better, along with the RAM.

as for gpu's, stay away from AMD, blender devs can't seem to understand how openCL works, as opposed to CUDA.

6

A Xeon processor where orinonaly for Servers because of there 24/7 operation qualification. So if your thinking of putting a Xeon in you systeem, think again. Of course the high end Xeons have 8 - 16 or even 32 cores and 16 - 32 or even 64 threats. But do you need that, for simple rendering is that a definite NO!

And first look at your ram, 8 gb is not a whole lot. So first upgrade your ram to 16 or even 32 gb. That will give a great performance boost.

The videocard is just fine. And if you think you haven't enoug, just buy a second one and put them in SLI. That will be beter bang for the buc than an whole new card.

And last maybe take a look at your storage, a SSD or a RAID configuration for caching or sutch will also have a great performance boost in 3D applications.

 

 

7

I would say to try upgrading your RAM and getting an SSD before I replaced everything else. At least with those, they would be useful even if you decided to move to a new rig. Personally, I think the GTX 660 on its own is only the introductory stage of GPUs. If you want more graphical power, then maybe an upgrade is in your future. The best method that you can use to figure out what to upgrade to (workstation vs. consumer) is to look at what your software can use and what about it it uses. If you are doing things that only use OpenGL or other open sourced computing api, then you would probably be okay with any of the higher-end Radeon line of cards. If you need double-precision also known as double-precision floating point calculations, then you'll want a workstation card, as those utterly thrash their gaming counterparts. Take a look at the comparisons between the Titan and the 780Ti if you need more evidence about what optimization is for. Same basic chip, different optimizations, vastly different performance.

8

Well I have a ssd, the system isent slow at all, its just the scenes are getting so big I need a better gpu, I am really wondering if it is worth it, buying a quadro :) 

9

The last time I recommended a Quadro to one of my clients was years ago. They ran Autocad Inventor, with very large drawings. By large I mean manufacturing equipment with quite a comprehensive parts compliment. Most of my other clients did just fine with a mid-level GPU and a butt load of RAM.

Keep this in mind, a Quadro or FireGL are what programs like Inventor are designed to function with. Using a consumer level card with those programs can sometimes produce visual artifacts and be slow.

10

Maya really likes workstation cards and quadros in particular from what the standard benchmarks say...

A quadro k4000 or k5000 should be a solid choice for it.

11

O I actually finally found a english review of the k600 for any one interested:

http://pcfoo.com/nvidia-quadro-600/