Advice on new workstation

shirahockman · September 27, 2020, 9:01pm

Hello Rhino friends

I am researching building a new machine for myself and have narrowed the contest down to 3 machines and would like to some advice on which is the most suitable. I model in Rhino and Render in Octane. Here is a breakdown of how I work in Rhino and some other requirements as well as the specs of the machines I am looking at. Any advice will be welcome, but please keep it in layman’s terms as I am not super well versed in all the in depth tech.

I use Rhino for large scale architectural and landscaping models. I work in film, so I often receive crazy big messy OBJ and FBX files from visual effects teams who are exporting from Maya, and need to make sense of them very quickly. This often requires me to put them into layouts in rendered mode and also to navigate around them with a bunch of people peering over my shoulder. So I need a system that is powerful enough to always display smoothly.

I use layouts very extensively. I have a preference toward arctic displaymode in my viewports, with quite a lot of line work added on top of the viewports in the layout. So I need a system that can cope with many viewports in may layouts, with lots of clipping planes, all in arctic or rendered display mode.

I use Octane for rendering and need to keep working fast and seamlessly whilst a render is going on in the background, not just in Rhino but often in Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign at the same time.

I would also like the machine to be VR ready. I don’t a whole lot about VR but in the next year or so, I would like to get a VR setup so that I can create virtual walkthrough of the sets that I build in Rhino.

I am hoping that this machine is going to last me at least the next 5 years and so should be able to be upgraded easily.

I currently use two BenQ 27" 4k Monitors ( BENQBL2711U) which sees to be rather exhausting on my current system.

Here are the specs of the 3 machines I am looking at. I am especially interested in views on the difference between an Intel or AMD Ryzen processor and if the RTX 5000 is a good graphics card for my uses:

Thanks guys!

theoutside · September 29, 2020, 4:23pm

IMO you can’t go wrong with any of those options.

I’m running a watercooled i9 here (very mild overclock) with a quadro rtx 5000 and it’s been great.

for rendering in rhino or any other system that is cuda enabled, more cores= better faster.
rhino doesn’t care much about processor, and is not extensively multi threaded so you’d be better off buying faster graphics cards, than a faster processor.

shirahockman · September 30, 2020, 8:06am

Thanks Kyle!

Do you have an idea of what part of the system is most taxed when working on layouts?

theoutside · September 30, 2020, 3:22pm

layouts are not super resource intensive. there is a cpu and gpu component to them, if you buy any of the systems you outlined above you’ll be happy IMO.

The only caveat is if you are doing a lot of rendering the 2x graphics card set up may be nice due to the additional Cuda cores as rhino render is fully gpu supported. More cores= better/faster. However my quadro rtx 5000 runs really well and I have yet to wait more than 10 min for a production quality render, especially with the denoisers running. Check out my portfolio page to see examples of the stuff I render typically. https://discourse.mcneel.com/u/theoutside/activity/portfolio

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Advice on new workstation

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