What CPU/RAM should I get?

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lek1
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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 4:29 am

Hi guys, I am new here. Nice to meet you. :-)

I tried the Octane demo and is really amazed. The thing is, my video card is GTX 460 with 1Gb VRAM. But my CPU is athlon x2 dual core 64 6000+, 3.10GHz. with 4 GB RAM.

So do you think it will make huge difference for me to upgrade CPU and RAM? I can't throw a thousand bucks to upgrade my gears, just want it to be just good enough to get some work done.

Right now with an interior scene I made, Octane can get about 2-3Ms/sec in direct lighting, <1Ms/sec in pathtracing. What score do you usually get? I am not talking about 8xGPU, just a fair computer.

After this upgrade, how much more score do you think I can get?

Thanks for any tips in advance.
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steveps3
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Upgrading your CPU won't make too much difference. As for the RAM, a bit more might be useful as the voxelising process is very RAM intensive. I am about to upgrade to 16-24GB RAM for this reason.
(HW) Intel i7 2600k, 16GB DDR3, MSI 560GTX ti (2GB) x 3
(SW) Octane (1.50) Blender (2.70) (exporter 2.02)
(OS) Windows 7(64)
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lek1
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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 4:29 am

Thank you. I do have another 9600 video card in my trash can. Do you think if it will help that much if I get a new motherboard which supports two PCI-E video cards so I can have the 460+9600 work together?
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mib2berlin
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Do you think if it will help that much if I get a new motherboard which supports two PCI-E video cards so I can have the 460+9600 work together?
Not for rendering so much but if you connect the 9600 to your display you get a smooth working without stuttering and free all the vram from the 460.
You need about 200-300 MByte for display your gui.
I had a setup with 9600 + 260 and it was really nice to work with.

Cheers, mib
Opensuse Leap 42.3/64 i5-3570K 16 GB
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Octane 3.08 Blender Octane
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Refracty
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For my needs 12 GB Ram are enough.

A scene that needs 1,040 GB in Octane with many textures applied takes 2:10 min to load and voxel with my system.

That is OK for me until the plugins (Rhino, Maya,...) are ready.
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lek1
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Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 4:29 am

what needs 1,040 GB ram?

I will probably have to update both CPU and MOBO so I can plug more ram into my system. Any idea about Intel/AMD? i7 is too expensive.
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Refracty
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This was just a specific example of a scene that I have rendered. It had around 600.000 tris and the obj was around 700 MB large.
Just to let you compare loading time, scene size and available Ram.
Usually with Ram its like this: When it exceeds the limit it takes very long because then the scene will be splitted and transfered in several chunks.
I have a few little tips for you based on my experience:

1. For a 1GB card I would recommend 8GM Ram. Rendertime will not be affected. Only loading time might be affected for large scenes.
2. The CPU is also not unimportant for loading time. A faster cpu will load faster but the number of cores are not important because Octane still uses 1 thread.
3. Look for a mobo with 2-4 slots depending on what you can spend. I would recommend 3 slots in your case. You can leave one free and upgrade it in the future and you have more space for airflow if you have three (double size) slots.

So for a small budget get a 3 slot mobo, a second used 460 and plug in your 9600 for display purposes. This will double the speed and make it possible to work with other applications simultaniously. If you can invest more, then upgrade to 8 GB Ram.

Search for t_3 s graphic card comparsion chart for more infos about GTX GPUs.

Cheers
Refracty
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