up to date CPU configuration

[scavenger]

hello all !

It's time to get back to work, after one year of real life entertainment
i went into deviantArt realisations, and discovered the work of "vidom" and others, and went into a conclusion : i hate waiting 1 to 3 minutes for the main window to generate the little 900x400 preview !

i need to change my configuration and get a $700 or more budget for CPU+motherboard+RAM

I saw some packages with i7 3870K+P8Z77 asus at this price, with 16Go RAP, but i'm not sure what to choose :
- is 16Go RAM is useless for mandelbulb ?
- is the GPU used at any step of the generation ?
-- if so, should i choose a compatible motherboard + GPU configuration to share the flops ? is this even possible ? I heard nvidia can share GPU flops with CPU for some softwares, is it a myth ?

i would be happy if any up to date user can share his/her thoughts with me on this case
i only follow the news about cpu and motherboards when it's time for change my configuration is like 3 years old now... it's a P7 asus deluxe with 775 socket, now there are so much new sockets like LGA and i'm completely lost !

where do we find the life cycle from the intel sockets ??
i'll buy only intel platforms since they always get better flops (floating point) than AMD for the same price, and never heard about incompatibility drivers as for AMD under windows. It always has been, as far as I can remember (made former comparisons between cyrix, AMD and intel 486 lol)

it's hard for me to understand when a CPU has 6 or 8 cores and always seek for the best flops per Watt. it's time consuming !

i'm greedily waiting for your advice !!!
thanks in advance

[numbergazing]

Did you ever get a new rig? Having to wait 20 sec for a preview render can make a person dream of speed! I have a Core Duo 1.6Ghz and a Core 2 Duo 2.53Ghz, maybe I should look into distributed rendering!

[Renmen]

interesting discussion and timeless

for example, I heard that Mandelbulb 3D are in 32 bit then have more of 4 Gb of RAM it's useless

 is the GPU used at any step of the generation ?

interesting, should be asked to experts, here

[youhn]

Depends mostly on the software that you use. Mandelbulber is 64 bit, so it can use more memory and probably higher precision. But it works on CPU, which makes it slower compared to Fragmentarium. See for example http://www.fractalforums.com/images-showcase-(rate-my-fractal)/menger-t20430/

[hobold]

TL;DR: It all depends on the specific software you are running. If you want to tailor a computer to a specific program, read on.


The available fractal renderers vary quite a bit. If you want to be on the safe side, get a midrange CPU (that would be an Intel Core i5 quad core these days, two or three notches down from the most expensive model) and a midrange video card (which probably means a recent model that requires a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, i.e. that burns no more than 150 watts total). That's a nice, affordable machine for pretty much anything.

If you know for sure that your most frequently used programs are running on the GPU, get a Geforce GTX 970 (as of this writing - the market will keep shifting; generally you will want the most affordable GPU of the "high end" range), and save some money on the CPU by getting the cheapest midrange (i.e. a small Intel Core i5 model, or some AMD quad core).

If you know that your favourite program runs on the CPU, your options are pretty much limited to Intel: either an overclocked high end Core i5 "K model" quad core (if the programs in question are not heavily multithreaded), or a Core i7 quad core with hyperthreading (if the programs do scale to many threads). The integrated graphics of these processors is comparably slow, but that doesn't matter for this use case.

If your budget is unlimited, Intel also offers Xeon branded CPUs with a dozen or more cores per chip (lacking integrated graphics), but the premium one has to pay for these is so extreme that performance per dollar decreases.

Finally, there is an exotic niche if your fractal software uses multiprecision integer math and is heavily multithreaded. Under these very special circumstances, a dual socket machine with octocore (or more) AMD Opterons will be the best value per money.


Conclusion:
The safe bet is to pick a combined budget for both CPU and GPU, and distribute that rather evenly for a balanced machine. So for example one could spend, say, 450 euros or dollars on the two processors. A more GPU heavy machine might allocate 300 bucks to graphics and 150 bucks to a main processor.

More extreme configurations (say, a 400 bucks GPU and a 50 bucks CPU) are not usually a good idea, because then the faster processor usually spends most of its time waiting for the slower one. If you spend the whole budget on a CPU, you'll likely get integrated graphics that is underpowered, but still faster than any really cheap graphics card you could still find in the market. So it probably makes no sense to allocate less than 100 bucks to graphics, unless you allocate zero.