I don’t know exactly how deep you’re getting into sim. I think I was looking into the tesla cards at one point too and there were some key things I learned about them. That may still be true now, or Maya may have integrated it in more, but I doubt it. The tesla cards are more about number crunching than rendering. If you’re looking for them to render a big scene, I don’t know how much help they would be compared to doing massive dynamic simulations or something like that.
Also, they don’t work with anything by default, so you’re going to have to do some programing if you want it to help out with a program like Max or Maya. It won’t work with them off the shelf. Think like multiple processors back in the day, where 2 processors were as much the software could work with regardless if you had more.
SSD can be nice, but they are freaking expensive. They will mostly help with load time of things. So if you are doing the kind of work where a lot of textures have to be loaded into the ram to render, you will see a time gain. I’m not so sure about number crunching data. Personally, I would go with 2X of those 500mb drives you are talking about, because I find those caches for sims start taking up a lot of hard drive space.
Think reasonable on your computer. I think the last time I upgraded my comp, I went overboard on the specs too and came up with a machine that was over $4,000(And upwards of $6,000 on the dream end of tesla cards). But I sat on it and really thought about what I needed and what was practical. Most of the time I’m not rendering all day, so a $1,000 tesla card seems kinda stupid in the long run for the money. Same with ram. I was thinking 12 gigs at first too, but again, I’m not rendering stuff all day with giant textures. Most of the work I do is set up, and a lot of it I can do test renders with lower rez stuff.
As you get into the higher spec hardware the price increase is not at all proportional to the spec increase. The bottom of the line i7 works pretty well, and they extra grand you’ll spend to get a little more speed out of it probably isn’t worth it, unless your time is extremely valuable. Eventually, the computer I got was about $1,700. It’s a modest system that still works great for me, and in two years, if I want, I can spend another $1,700 and upgrade again to the newer faster stuff (Please be light peak, please be light peak) and still probably be under the original $4,000 I was planing at first and in 4 years time probably have faster hardware than what I can get now at the high end.
And, there is something to be said of being efficient with what you have. I’m sure there’s times where we would all just like to throw money at the problems but sometimes its about doing things smart with tricks that just seem to work than doing it realistic (Again, unless you are doing massive star sim calculations or complex particle reactions or something very sciencey)
I would say do it if you are working somewhere where the time saved on the rendering somehow offsets the loss of money elsewhere. Like you were on a project where every day you get behind, thousands of dollars are spent and wasted, if if you had that data faster, much more money is saved. But if it’s your learning rig? By some off the shelf computer on sale, save your money for smarter things, and when you get a job, let the company buy you a mega rig if that’s what you actually need to do your job.
And, if a Tesla card is something you feel you actually need to use, you can always see if your school can get a grant to get a card so you can play with it there. But if you’re doing game development, if you can’t do it with an off the shelf del (Not that a recommend a del and it’d be a higher end line.) then you are probably doing something wrong, because if you can’t make game assets on a machine like that, I don’t know how the game is going to run on a machine like that. Keep in mind I think the xBox is like 7 years old now as far as tech and the graphics keep looking better and better. They’re not getting that by shoving better guts into the xbox.
One more note, If you’re talking desktop pc, just buy a case with a lot of room and room for expansion. Get the one that can hold four drives and 12 gigs of ram and 2 video cards, if it’s something you feel the need to build, and then build in stages. Get 4 gigs of ram, get a single hard drive for now, get a single nvidea card that you know could later be coupled with another card, but for now just do the one. See if it meets your needs. If not, then dump in a little more money and upgrade it in stages to see what is just enough. After a certain point, it’s kinda like putting a spoiler and lowered bumper on a car. The performance increase for how you are using it starts to become questionable and it’s probably more about showing off what you got. And again, I think when I priced stuff out, unless I’m going higher end on the equipment and want fancy custom stuff, an off the shelf package was all ways cheaper in the long run (Unless you are getting used parts off of e-bay and buying things only on sale, in which case will take you longer to build your system).
I keep editing this and adding stuff.
But just wanted to let you know what I use and it’s great for me, and this was the default package. I went lap top because I wanted to be able to bring my work with me, and at the office it was great just being able to bring my computer over to show somebody. It has another monitor port so I plug it into a second screen at home to get duel monitors, and it has hdmi out so I can watch movies on the regular tv in the living room. This thing solves both my work needs and my entertainment needs. It’s a Asus G732. It’s an i7-2630qm @ 2.00 GHz, 8 gigs of , 2X 500 GB 7200 RPM 4 GB SSD Hybrid drives, Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M, Blu-Ray Player, with a 17" screen. It came with a gaming mouse and backpack and was just under $1,700 and then I added another $200 for insurance that covers stuff like me dropping a hammer and soda on it at the same time, no questions asked. I can rig stuff on here, do sims, model, render, play games, edit video, animate 2d/3d. Yeah the sims and rendering take a while, but if you want to make those go faster, invest in a render server that focuses on that, not the pc you’re working on. And again, a render farm only makes sense if you’re loosing money on how slow you’re going. If you can’t make a good set up that works for you, especially while you’re learning for under $2,000 you are doing something wrong.
