which hardware choose for octane?

[supermac]

Hello,
i must buy a new PC. (my actual PC is Broken)
i'm graphic designer and i work with octane.

while i want choose the best material, i want ask to you

- 2 processor are best that 1?
- octane take a lot memory or 8 go are enough?
- octane work with swap memory?
- which motherboard choose? tyan, assus? gygabit?
- which hard disk choose? SSD? is very best for octane?
- which graphic card choose? gtx 480? 580? other gtx?
and..
- it's possible to install a quadro 5000 for visualisation and 3 gtx"xxx" for rendering?? or it's best to use only 4 same graphic card??

- there is a configuration that you can suggest to me? the best configuration..

i'm anxious while i must command my new PC this week.
can you answer most quickly, please??

thank you very much for your help.. And Sorry for my english. tell me if it's not understandable...

Best regard.

[supermac]

hello all, nobody have an idea??

thanks

[timbarnes]

There's no right answer to your question. I have an Asus P55 motherboard with Intel i5-750, normal hard disks, and graphics cards as indicated in my signature. It works really well for Octane and other CAD applications. You need lots of memory: consider 8GB or more.

I have seen models go up to 1GB in size (including the frame buffer), so consider 1.5GB or more of VRAM. A lot of people seem happy with the 2GB GTX 460 (or two of them). But the 580 should be faster. It really depends what you're going to render. It's a really good idea to have two cards: one for screen interactivity and one for Octane. If they are both fast, you can then turn them both on for final renders.

I can't help you regarding the Quadro products: they should be great, but I have only tried the GTX 470.

If you search through the forums you'll find a lot of discussion of appropriate hardware.

tim

[supermac]

ok, thank you Tim..
So, but there is a supreme configuration, the best of the best??

i sent a mail to octane and they say me to send a mail on this forum..

while i must buy all my material, i want choose the best, you know?

it's better to buy 48 go of ram and create a ramdisk ( you know?).. how work octane?
or SSD disk?

and... gtx580 are the best gtx?? more number are up and more the card is powerfull???

thanks

See you

Aurélien

[timbarnes]

Octane only makes significant use of the computer's CPU to prepare the model: this takes a lot of RAM, so buy at least 8GB and 12 is probably better.

For the GPU, get as many of the best you can afford, I guess: right now a couple of GTX 580s are probably the way to go if you want to maximize speed. If you want to maximize render size (complexity) you should look at the Quadro cards. If you have no budget limit you can also get a card for your display (so the screen still responds when the other cards are rendering).

The power of your PC is probably more important for other software you might use for modeling. I use Revit's built-in renderer for a few things: it eats all the cores I can throw at it.

tim

[supermac]

ok, thank you Timbarnes..
i choosed:
1 quadro 6000
3 gtx580

and 36 go ddr3..

know you if octane can work with ram disk ?

thank you very much

Best regard

aurélien