HP Z8 G4 Workstation

mattjgerard · April 06, 2018, 01:57:04 PM

Just got our new toy in, IT just hit me with full access to manage and run this beast! Wasn't my choice as to hardware, but they stepped up and stuck this on the bottom end of a rather large invoice for other server gear.

HP Z8 G4 Workstation
2x Xeon Gold 6142 2.6GHz
32 Cores/64 Threads
32 GB ram
Windows 10 Pro

Cinebench 4940 CPU
Keyshot Camera Benchmark Scene 464.9 FPS

This is compared to my local workstation an HP 640Z 24 Thread machine that runs about 140-145fps. This new G8 will be our new render server and should help the 2 (soon to be plus an intern) of us pump out some wicked cool images quickly.

I have KS installed on it as well, and I just might be tempted to remote into it and see how it does using it as a development machine for our lighting products. Will probably push it pretty hard until the other artist starts submitting images over!!!!

Eric Summers · April 06, 2018, 03:01:35 PM

Nice! That's crazy fast! It's really fantastic having something with that many cores to work with. I remote desktop to our render machine to do my rendering, but I find myself using it more and more for working on materials and lighting too because it's so fast!

Esben Oxholm · April 07, 2018, 07:47:14 AM

What a beast!
What did it cost if I may ask?

hnax · April 07, 2018, 07:33:29 PM

Wow that is impressive! What is the cost if you don't mind?

mattjgerard · April 09, 2018, 07:06:46 AM

I think the invoice was almost $9000 USD, but that is retail without any discounts. IT had placed a fairly large order of other server grade equipment, and tagged this to the end of it, so I'm assuming they got a bit of a price break on it. That being said, I wonder what $9000 worth of ryzen 1950x builds would pull on a render server!

I get the feeling that I probably shouldn't even ask for so much as a new mouse from IT for a while since getting this thing

And ironically, the one drawback to these huge multicore beasts is something I am coming across on my own machine, I am running Cinema 4d locally and because of the relativly low single core speed, the interfacegets really laggy quickly with large poly count scenes, and when running dynamic simulations. So, more and more I'm looking at the 1950x builds and wondering what they would be like as a local workstation while having the HP Z8 as the render muscle. Man, that would be the ideal setup, a dual Ryzen local workstation and this HP as the render server.

But, as Burgess Merideth says in one of my favorite movie quotes in Grumpy Old Men, "You can wish in one had and crap in the other and see which gets filled first!"

Cheers!

Will Gibbons · April 13, 2018, 08:43:13 AM

Quote from: mattjgerard on April 09, 2018, 07:06:46 AM
I think the invoice was almost $9000 USD, but that is retail without any discounts. IT had placed a fairly large order of other server grade equipment, and tagged this to the end of it, so I'm assuming they got a bit of a price break on it. That being said, I wonder what $9000 worth of ryzen 1950x builds would pull on a render server!

I get the feeling that I probably shouldn't even ask for so much as a new mouse from IT for a while since getting this thing

And ironically, the one drawback to these huge multicore beasts is something I am coming across on my own machine, I am running Cinema 4d locally and because of the relativly low single core speed, the interfacegets really laggy quickly with large poly count scenes, and when running dynamic simulations. So, more and more I'm looking at the 1950x builds and wondering what they would be like as a local workstation while having the HP Z8 as the render muscle. Man, that would be the ideal setup, a dual Ryzen local workstation and this HP as the render server.

But, as Burgess Merideth says in one of my favorite movie quotes in Grumpy Old Men, "You can wish in one had and crap in the other and see which gets filled first!"

Cheers!

Yeah, $9K isn't bad for that kind of performance, but you hit the nail on the head. When you're wanting an 'all-rounder' servers start to suck. That's why I prefer to stick with something like a 1950x rather than go with a server with loads of 'slower' chips. Also, servers can be noisy and a power suck of course. The preferable setup is a snappy machine that can handle your working files and then offload them to a farm with enough cores to chew through the animation/images.

hnax · April 13, 2018, 08:58:25 AM

I totally agree about the noise. But if you custom build your server you can have everything water cooled with almost zero noise. I buff up the radiators of each CPU corsair H115i and lower the rpm to the minimum for the fans. https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=20835.0

As far as snappiness I didn't notice any difference between my iMac Pro https://www.keyshot.com/forum/index.php?topic=21162.0 and my PC.

I use my iMac Pro as my primary for Photoshop and even Solidworks on Parallels. I am modeling on a 5k screen!

And I use my PC as a workstation for Keyshot + the farm 3 x 88 cores. All in one room. The drawback of the PC is that they don't have a good 5k monitor. So my Keyshot is done on a 4k screen. But I bet this might change sometime soon.

mattjgerard · April 13, 2018, 09:44:26 AM

Quote from: Will Gibbons on April 13, 2018, 08:43:13 AM
Yeah, $9K isn't bad for that kind of performance, but you hit the nail on the head. When you're wanting an 'all-rounder' servers start to suck. That's why I prefer to stick with something like a 1950x rather than go with a server with loads of 'slower' chips. Also, servers can be noisy and a power suck of course. The preferable setup is a snappy machine that can handle your working files and then offload them to a farm with enough cores to chew through the animation/images.

I'm glad that they moved us onto this workstation, but it still is running server CPU's basically. Its here for 5 years, so now its on to specing out new workstations at our desks. There I am going to go the direction you stated, fewer cores and higher speeds.

I have not had any luck with my first PC build at home, so far in teh 16 months I've had it, the MB has been RMA'd twice and now the SSD and the PSU have been RMA'd. I have a feeling that the PSU was bad from the start, but I didn't diagnose it that way until I got the MB back for the second time. The bad PSU might have taken out the SSD as well, I don't know and Gigabyte is utterly useless at trying to figure it out. I don't even know what they did to my board to revive it both times, so I have no data to use for troubleshooting.

I digress...

So, apparently Alienware (Dell) has been making Ryzen builds, so I'm looking into that. My IT dept is in bed with HP which does NOT do Ryzen builds, so I might need special permissions to go outside their regular supply chain. But I'll be looking for a machine local to load keyshot on and Cinema and run some real world tests with products. I have a friend that does large builds and supplies post houses, so I'm in contact with him to see if he can get a demo unit in for me. I was looking at teh Epyc stuff too, and don't see much that would make me jump to that. More cores=lower speed all over the board. I am finding that I need the higher CPU clocks to deal with viewport performance in Cinema for some of my larger scenes and simulations.

Good reading, thanks everyone!

Will Gibbons · April 19, 2018, 12:09:37 PM

Quote from: mattjgerard on April 13, 2018, 09:44:26 AM
So, apparently Alienware (Dell) has been making Ryzen builds, so I'm looking into that. My IT dept is in bed with HP which does NOT do Ryzen builds, so I might need special permissions to go outside their regular supply chain.

I don't own one, but if I hadn't just built my own machine, I'd have purchased from these guys. They seem genuinely good, not excessively marked up and willing to do some interesting builds. If you do a 'custom build' you can get to under $4000 with a 1950x build. https://www.pugetsystems.com/configure.php

Furniture_Guy · April 21, 2018, 08:13:29 PM

Quote from: hnax on April 13, 2018, 08:58:25 AM
I totally agree about the noise.

We got a Dell Precision Tower 7910, dual Xeon E5-2699 processors with 22 cores each for 88 threads and when I work on it (usually just for animations, it is fast) it sounds like it's going to take off...

Perry (Furniture_Guy)

mattjgerard · April 23, 2018, 06:12:45 AM

I have to venture back into the bowels of the IT department to find out where my render server is. I haven't even seen it, or heard it while its chewing on an image. I know my HP640Z under my desk is quite silent as keyshot is running, I'll give HP that one, they make them quiet.