Hardware upgrade to cut down reconstruction time

Hi,

We are looking for a hardware upgrade to cut down computation time to about half compare to our
current one and have some questions.
Here is our current situation.

of Images: 300 ea

Duration 2 ~ 2.5 hours (Mostly consumed at High Detail Reconstruction)
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-6800K Processor
*https://ark.intel.com/products/94189/Intel-Core-i7-6800K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz
GPU: Two Geforce GTX 1070 connected through SLI
*https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/10series/geforce-gtx-1070/
RAM: 32GB

1] # of CPU cores vs. CPU clock speed? (Which one is more effective?)
2] GPU or CPU upgrade? (Which one is more effective?)
3] Recommended high-performance spec settings to cut down high detail reconstruction time to 0.5~1 hour(Considering full system upgrade)
*Maybe you can just give out your most powerful setting
4] Expected computation time savings with upgraded system

Best Regards,
Justin

are you running out of ram at the moment?

running everything off ssds?

Hi,

Yes, We are running everything on SSD.
No, we never had trouble with RAM …

its probably also worth figuring out what takes longer gpu or cpu.

I’m also not sure how well rc handles multiple numa nodes. but think it suffers a bit so your probably best to stay single cpu rather than dual xeon. esp if you don’t need the extra ram.

adding anymore video’s cards will only add a little bit of extra speed.

for cpu’s you could go a 6900k or 6950k. (im running at 6900k @ 4ghz).

or you could go for a single xeon like a e5 2687w v4. just keep in mind keep below 16 cores unless you want to disable hyper threading.

probably by far the cheapest thing would be to get a few machines, at similar spec to what you have.

I think going for 1 very powerful pc, makes sense if you need lots of ram, or are getting cli version.

Hey a couple of observations which are based partly from experience, partly from research, and a good bit of guessing so don’t take this as gospel. Also, this is a bit eclectic, major headache and running out the door…

  • I think you’ll be hard pressed to get 1/2 the speed of your current set up: could be wrong, please someone chime in if I am. CR has suggested that node based clusters are being actively worked on, so I’m getting ready for that.
  • I upgraded to 64GB from 32GB of RAM with a similar set-up and was surprised to see that RC happily used it - don’t know how well that equated to performance, but it wasn’t eating up more than 55% when I use using 32GB either so I was surprised it used it.
  • Wishgranter just posted a good article from Tweaktown (there is another on Tom’s Hardware I think) about building some really good multi-CPU systems on the cheap given a quirky dip in the CPU market. Can’t find it at the moment but chase that down…
  • From everything I have seen, I think the best bang for the buck right now is a 6900 overclock it a bit if you want, with 64GB+ of ram, 2 GPU cards, some PCIe-like (nvme) memory speeds, and some crazy good coolers if you want to overclock for 10-20% gains (good luck on that though). You’ll get faster speeds with more CPUs if you start to switch over to Xeons, but I don’t think by much at all to be honest. Read puget system’s multi-CPU/GPU analysis on **************** totally different software, but it’s efficiencies for multi-GPU and CPUs are crazy good, RC may be the same, but the multi cpu/gpu return ratio seems to putter out pretty quickly, so going for 32 CPUs isn’t necessarily the best decision if price is a major factor.