New Workstation

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fobos8
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Re: New Workstation

Post by fobos8 »

christopherbyrne18 wrote: Wed Oct 28, 2020 8:36 am My 2 cents:

I have 2 high power workstations on the project I'm on:

One is an Intel i9-9980XE based system, 64GB RAM, Samsung Evo 970 * 2 in RAID 0 and Quadro RTX4000

The other is a water cooled Threadripper 3960X, 128GB RAM, RTX2080Ti, 1TB Firecuda 520 PCIE 4 NVME

On paper you'd expect the AMD system to wipe the floor with the i9 system but in practice the i9 system performs batter for Cyclone & Autodesk AEC workflows. I've been trying to tweak things to improve it but overall disappointed by Threadrippers performance given the cost of the system. Feedback from my 2 BIM guys using them is the i9 system is much faster.

Core count has little to no effect on Cyclone, never has really in my experience using it for 15 years.
That's great feedback Christopher. It's so helpful when people post comparisons on different setups. Many thanks
fobos8
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Re: New Workstation

Post by fobos8 »

christopherbyrne18 wrote: Wed Oct 28, 2020 8:36 am On paper you'd expect the AMD system to wipe the floor with the i9 system but in practice the i9 system performs batter for Cyclone & Autodesk AEC workflows. I've been trying to tweak things to improve it but overall disappointed by Threadrippers performance given the cost of the system. Feedback from my 2 BIM guys using them is the i9 system is much faster.
What water cooling system do you have on the Threadripper? custom loop or standard AIO. None of the AIO systems have blocks big enough to cover the whole of the 3900 series Threadrippers and so don't do an efficient job of keeping them cool. Maybe that's why the Threadripper isn't performing as you'd hoped.
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smacl
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Re: New Workstation

Post by smacl »

christopherbyrne18 wrote: Wed Oct 28, 2020 8:36 am My 2 cents:

I have 2 high power workstations on the project I'm on:

One is an Intel i9-9980XE based system, 64GB RAM, Samsung Evo 970 * 2 in RAID 0 and Quadro RTX4000

The other is a water cooled Threadripper 3960X, 128GB RAM, RTX2080Ti, 1TB Firecuda 520 PCIE 4 NVME

On paper you'd expect the AMD system to wipe the floor with the i9 system but in practice the i9 system performs batter for Cyclone & Autodesk AEC workflows. I've been trying to tweak things to improve it but overall disappointed by Threadrippers performance given the cost of the system. Feedback from my 2 BIM guys using them is the i9 system is much faster.

Core count has little to no effect on Cyclone, never has really in my experience using it for 15 years.
I've found the best way to improve performance for a new build is to measure the bottlenecks on the existing build. If the CPU isn't maxed out on all threads in one build adding more threads isn't going to improve performance. If CPU threads isn't the issue performance could be bottle-necked with single core speed where Intel still does well. This is often the case with older software but much less so with newer updates. Disk speed could also be a big issue and your Samsung Evo 970 * 2 in RAID 0 could be a real winner if that's the case. Unfortunately, all of this changes with different software applications and even between releases.
Shane MacLaughlin
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rik68mi
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Re: New Workstation

Post by rik68mi »

Hi everybody, i am new here, from Milan.

Could you help me for my new pc desktop configuration?

I use Autocad 2d/3d and 3dsMax render:
rtx4000 or gtx3080?
with cpu i9-10980hk...

Thanks!
christopherbyrne18
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Re: New Workstation

Post by christopherbyrne18 »

Hey,

Standard AIO water cooler for the Threadripper. I custom specced it from PCSPECIALIST for close to €5k. There are no over heating issues.

And there are certainly no bottleneck issues. The base closk speed of the3960X is 3.8Ghz on 24cores boosting to 4.5Ghz versus 3.0Ghz base on the 18 core 9980XE boosting to 4.4Ghz. So its base clock speed is faster on a newer more efficient design. It also has twice as much RAM running at a faster speed. Its Firecuda NVME SSD is PCIE 4 and has 5x the read write of the dual EVO 970's in RAID 0. It has a faster GPU with far more CUDA cores & graphics memory. So again, on paper it should crush the I9 system but the reality is the opposite. I'm hoping its a driver issue or something but pretty disappointed with its performance so far.

The performance per $ sweetspot is always somethere in the middle. I should have known better from experience. I bulit a lot of custom PC's in my mining days for processing massive phtotgrammetric models.

More cores rarely results in an improvement unless using highly multi threadded software of which there are few. Software is always years behind the HW in development & support of core count.

Fewer cores with a higher clock speed is more ofter advantageous but that doesn't even explain what Im seeing as the I9 has fewer cores and a lower clock speed......I give up
fobos8
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Re: New Workstation

Post by fobos8 »

christopherbyrne18 wrote: Thu Oct 29, 2020 12:50 pm Fewer cores with a higher clock speed is more ofter advantageous but that doesn't even explain what Im seeing as the I9 has fewer cores and a lower clock speed......I give up
Your Intel, although it has lower clock speed might do more instructions per cycles. So it runs slower but does more.
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Re: New Workstation

Post by TommyMaddox »

I think a lot of software is still optimized and tested on Intel processors. This was a big issue I had several years ago with dual opteron 16 core processors and mass amounts of ram completing projects slower than a I7 3rd gen laptop.
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Re: New Workstation

Post by smacl »

TommyMaddox wrote: Thu Oct 29, 2020 4:47 pm I think a lot of software is still optimized and tested on Intel processors. This was a big issue I had several years ago with dual opteron 16 core processors and mass amounts of ram completing projects slower than a I7 3rd gen laptop.
True, though the larger part of the low level CPU specific optimization comes from the compilers rather than application developers. There's a lag of about a year or so between mainstream compiler releases and CPU releases where the compilers implement the most optimizations for the market leading CPUs. It is also dependent on the software builders updating their tool sets and using them to build a new release. This adds another year or so of time lag. That said, given the dominance AMD have started to enjoy on the desktop, I think they'll be enjoying the advantages of better optimization going forward.

For those buying PCs, I think the most pragmatic approach is to test what works best for you, your budget and the applications that you'll be running.
Shane MacLaughlin
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fobos8
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Re: New Workstation

Post by fobos8 »

TommyMaddox wrote: Thu Oct 29, 2020 4:47 pm I think a lot of software is still optimized and tested on Intel processors.
I just messaged one of the software developers at Faro. They messaged back to say that Scene should work just as well with AMD as Intel CPUs
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Re: New Workstation

Post by TommyMaddox »

We do observe this to be true with SCENE on our 3970x platform but I was making a more general statement
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