Hi Mun144
Check out Holomark if you haven’t done so yet.
http://discourse.mcneel.com/t/holomark-2-released/8040/631
If you study the charts then you will see that the big differences can be seen with pure mesh setups, in the display mode where all fancy stuff is turned off (I named it RenderSpeed to indicate that it is a speedy render mode ;)). That’s the only area where you can supercharge Rhino as it is the only area where Rhino it self isn’t a bottle neck. So if you work in nurbs and not only meshes then you will waste a lot of money buying top of the line stuff.
CPU: i5 is as fast as i7 which is as fast as Xeon:
Xeon’s are not faster than i7. In fact they are slower, as they are clocked lower to prevent overheating as they are designed to be as reliable as absolutely possible. Ordinary modelling in Rhino does not benefit from multiple cores. (of course it benefits from four threads as background tasks in windows won’t affect modelling, but all cpu’s has that these days) If you render you will benefit from lots of cores, unless you use a cuda based render engine, then it doesn’t matter any more.
GPU:
Top notch Quadro’s are faster than Geforce when it comes to AA and massive meshes.
For ordinary modelling it doesn’t matter that much since ordinary modelling will use display modes that show curves (wireframe, shaded mode etc) and curves are calculated by the CPU as Rhino doesn’t use the GPU to accelerate that. (that of course is a simplified statement, but not too far from the truth)
SLI has no speedgain in Rhino, at least it has not in the past, so check that out thoroughly before you buy two monster cards!
HDD:
Running ramdisks won’t give you any speedgain what so ever. Unless you need to save everything veery often, and even then I doubt a ramdisk will be faster than an SSD as the cpu has to process what’s being saved. But an SSD for storage will faster than an ordinary hdd.
The best you can do is store your monsterproject on a disk, on the web, or what ever and then ask different people with different systems to test it for you. Store differend display modes and run TestMaxSpeed in different display modes to see where the systems start leveling out.
Edit:
PS! I’d LOVE nothing more than to be wrong, so if you choose to buy a top of the line machine and get a supercharged experience then let us know.
Personally I would buy a fast i7, a geforce 1080 or a k5200 depending on need (the 1080 as a few more cuda cores, both has 8 gb vram, the 1080 is better for VR, the quadro might perform better in Rhino, but I do not know as I have not tested them), 32 GB or 64 GB Ram (again depending on need, fill all memory slots, that’s important for the CPU to run as fast as possible when handling much data) two SSD’s, one for OS and one for storage. Get good cooling systems that are quiet, a noisy machine will likely irritate you or your colleges.
You can find tests on K5200 vs K6000 online, here is one: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/nvidia-quadro-k5200-k4200-k2200_7.html , and see that in some tests the K6000 is a bit faster, on other the K2200 is just as fast as the K6000. This indicates that software is the bottle neck and not the hardware.