#1

I’m looking to acquire a VR & render box for my studio. Undecided as to whether I’ll build it or go off-the-shelf. Looking for something versatile and expandable. Anyone here have tips on well built enclosures, quality components and preferred vendors? We’re planning to do GPU based rendering, so support for dual Nvidia Titan X cards is key.

Thanks!

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#2

the custoMac / hackintosh guide on tonymacx86 has some pretty good recommendations

https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/december/2016

#3

thanks. thinking i might just go falcon northwest. seem like quality builds with a good warranty.

#4

You might consider going the route of referb’d hardware… and adding some newer GPUs if desired.

@randy mentioned in the madrona labs forum about getting a new dev box from these folks https://www.theserverstore.com/. I was curious and looked at what they had - they sell HP Z workstations which I can say from first hand experience are built like tanks and stand up to heavy use (animation, rendering, simulation, etc.)

The prices on used Z620 and Z820 are low enough that I’m tempted to get one for home use. My daily driver at work for the last four years has been a Z820 which has never left me wanting more (16 core, 32GB ram, Quadro 4000).

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#5

I built one in the summer around a 1080 and it has been great so far. We were going to do VR on ultra high rez natural scenes but the student graduated. Shouldn’t have let that happen! Probably going to play around with some Unreal scene building and Terragen rendering over the break.

One thing I went with which has been nice is a 500Gb M2 drive. Smoking fast.