Hey guys and gals!
It's been a long time since i was on this forum. My college life is harsh! (work wise not party wise
)
I just want to say i do miss you guys over at overclockaholics :<. But its like the 980x era again, where overclocking is only for the high bidders
Today i'm going to show you the Gigabyte x79-UD7's awesomeness in the field of content creation. This is a very relaxed review, i just want to show you guys some stuff about how we create our 3D content.
1st let's take a look at our beauty
.
What is content creation?
Movies, Games, Music. All these things need to be created by someone on a computer, and this takes time.
a 3 minute song might take weeks to make, a 3 minute 3D Animation might take months to make, a game
might take years to make.
To create any of the above you need to use EXTREMELY memory and cpu intensive software.
Since i am studying 3D animation i will base this review around 3D Animation. (Shrek, finding nemo,
cinematic game trailers, transformers, special effects, that kind of stuff).
With 3D animation there is no ultimate computer. You will always need more of something, more memory,
more cpu cores, more speed. Because you can always increase your quality if you have a stronger
computer.
In our 3D Creation application Maya, we have to create our models / characters from scratch. We shape
blocks and planes and put lots of parts together to form our vision.
Then it looks like this.
Then we have to texture / colour-in our creation. (like taking a spray can and spray our model)
Then this is how it looks inside the 3D application.
This model is 100% DONE. but it looks so bad? why?
Well currently our character is in a PREVIEW state. If you watch any 3d animated movie it doesn't look
like this does it? It is in a low detail mode because viewing it in higher resolution would be too much
stress on the computer. And verrrry slow.
We now need to "Render" it.
What is "Render"?
In a nutshell, it makes your 3D model look pretty by making MANY calculations and saves it into an Image
file.
As you can see it took 2 minutes to Render just ONE image.
When you make a movie, you have to render out MANY images called Frames for it to become a moving
picture.
Movies display at 24 frames per second. Meaning we have to render out 24 images ONE AT A TIME to make
only 1 second of movie.
bare with me i'm almost done explaining
.
Now listen to this. All 24 of those frames took me 5 minutes to render EACH.
24 x 5 = 120minutes.
Thats 2 hours of waiting for the computer to do its thing, i CAN NOT work during this period. The
computer uses ALL of it's resources.
A typical 3D complex movie like Transformers don't take just 5 minutes per frame to render, most of
their frames are all over 5 HOURS. and some of them take DAYS. One of the big scenes in transformers 2
it ook 72 hours to render out 1 frame. Because the calculations of the robot was so complex.
It was devistator:
He featured in the movie for about 25 seconds.
Lets do the math:
So thats 25 seconds x 24 frames per second
= 600 Frames that need to be rendered
= 600 Frames x 72 hours per render
= 43200 hours
= 1800 days
= 5 years of rendering if you used 1 computer only.
Ofcourse they had many computers and render-farms to help them out alot quicker
.
Now you know how not-fast computers are for 3D production
.
So every new cpu generation is a BIG help.
This is where overclocking comes in to play.
Bringing back my bad-looking robot i made in 1st year, i will now show you render time at default -
optimized - and overclocked speeds.
System used:
Gigabyte x79-UD7
G.skill Ripjawz 2400mhz memory 16gb. Quad channel kit
Intel I7 3930K
Nvidia gtx 580
Cooler master 1200W
Intel 60gb SSD.
Default motherboard settings:
19 seconds (640 x 360 image resolution)
1min 21sec (HD 1920 x 1080 - Same image in HD 1920x1080. The higher the resolution the longer a render
takes.)
NOW lets try the same images at overclocked speed:
It's verrrry important to get a stable overclock rather than a crazy overclock for rendering. You can
not risk losing work. This was extremely easy with the Gigabyte UD7. It took me 5 minutes to get this
OC.
I just upped the CPU voltage to 1.45 with 60% LLC and i was good to go.
Memory voltage at 1.68
Thanks to Gigabytes powerful new digital PWM system i don't have to fear that i might get a crash during
renders, i've noticed when overclocking, if im stable, im very stable, and thats what you want for 3D.
16 seconds (640 x 360)
1min 5sec (HD 1920 x 1080)
You see a slight decrease in render time. But the difference becomes HUGE when scenes get really big.
Like this one, i have smoke and lights and many other effects that need calculating.
Default:
11min 17 sec
(~4.5 hours to render one second of this in motion)
Overclocked:
9min 35sec
(~3.8 hours to render one second of this in motion)
So already you can see if i had 1 second of this robot moving,
i would save lots of time on an overclocked system. And this is just me, a single user using 1 computer.
_____________________________________
Below is one way overclockers can possibly employ themselves.
Imagine this, you are a BIG movie company with lots of money, you have THOUSANDS images to render all
taking 5hours per frame. How much would you pay a person to come overclock your computers, and possibly
save you MONTHS of rendering? I think alot of money
. I can not even begin to describe how big a deal
a month is in movie making.
_____________________________________
Another thing,
16GB Memory Quad channel running at 2200mhz CL9 at 1.68v no problem on the UD7.
Ever wondered why you would need 16 gigabyte's of memory?
This is one of the reasons:
This is a landscape scene i made where i used BIG textures (4096x4096) on almost everything. So when i
start my 3d application it needs to load all those high resolution textures somewhere.
Look at the memory usage! (and this scene isn't even close to big compared to production scenes.)
This is the scene from within my 3D application.
I have been using Gigabyte motherboards most of my life, and the stability it provides has never failed
me. I've always had a fast computer compared to other students in my class, im really lucky for that.
But i can say my 3D program has crashed 95% less than theirs. I can never join the conversation when we
talk about crashes, because it happens very little to me.
And im very sure it has to do with overall system stability and speed (duh). So think wisely when
building a system for 3D related work.
Overall thoughts on the X79-UD7.
•Since Gigabyte released their F7 Bios this board has been a dream.
•I felt a huge increase in overclocking performance and stability compared to P67 and Z68. Specially
with memory clocking.
•It handles high memory speeds well. Something the Z68 was a hit and miss case in my experience.
•Excellent PWM system for that extra stability.
•It handles a 6core 12 thread overclocked processor rendering for nights at a time. Without crashing
even once.
•Overclocking it is really easy.
•Helping customers over the phone with 3D bios makes life much easier.
The only Con i have for this board would be the 4 memory slots only.
But it was a strategic decision from gigabyte to only have 4 slots as they were running out of space on
the board and having the extra slots won't make a difference for extreme overclocking or gaming. 16gig
memory is more than enough, and if you have the cash you can get 4x8gig sticks. Content creation is
probly the only field where you would ever need so much memory.
Thanks for reading i hope it wasn't too technical :O
Any and all questions welcome!