Barton_Brown

JT, your comment got me to thinking about my older PC (i7-6900K) and its repeat failure mode - graphics cards failing. The PC itself is working great (ASUS motherboard) but it is now on its third graphics card (this time also made by ASUS). It is air cooled and I'm now wondering if that is the reason for the failures... It could also just be the marine environment as the previous graphics cards displayed considerable corrosion on the printed circuit boards at the time of failure. Time will tell :).

Yup. PCI4 and DDR5 make for a nice speed boost!

Don't disagree with you here. That is why I focused on the fastest RAM+M.2 NVME I could get. I will disagree slightly on 'the other crap'. Water cooling, in my situation, has been very helpful (non-AC house in the tropics). I have had both air and water cooled solutions and won't go back to air-only. I did a slight upgrade on the case, not to see the lights, but to get an aluminum anodized solution that would not rust out as some previous cases have.

John, if one were using the PC strictly for CA business, your cost perspective suggestion seems correct. However, I'm a retired nerd that uses the PC for other stuff besides CA - and I have a personal problem with PBR and the way it creates shadows (or doesn't). Yes, PBR is fast and as Renerabbitt has shown, can produce some stunning results. If I were in business I would settle for PBR, but since I am not, ... On a more subjective level, the i9 PC is enough faster for most tasks to be noticeable (by me). Did I need to upgrade? At the time I purchased the i9 PC the answer was yes because the i7 PC would not boot. Turns out electronics stuff on Bonaire suffers from the salt air and warm temperatures in a house designed to be cooled by the trade winds. While waiting for the i9 machine, I determined that the i7 machine needed a new graphics card (the third one to date). The new card brought the PC back to life but the i9 machine had already shipped by then. So now I have a backup PC . For me, the Nvidia 4070 TI GFX card is good enough, and certainly not a slacker card. It rips right along on video editing tasks as well. I use a windows gadget called 'cpu usage' that shows the activity level of all cpus/threads and their associated temperatures. On the i7 machine I can have all 16 threads/cores pretty well maxed out and the CPU temps stay in a reasonable range. On the i9, when more than 10 cpus/thread are running, I get critical temp warnings on a couple of the CPUS. But, as I said, 8 I9 cores are still faster than 15 i7 cores. Time to tweak CyberPower again as they have not responded to my temperature questions. Interestingly, for me, the i7-6900K machine and the i9-13900k machines were almost exactly the same cost - one purchased in 2017 and one purchased in 2023. I haven't considered either one of them to be 'cheap' .

For those that love data... Ran an A/B comparison between the 6900K and 13900K computers this morning (ambient at 27C) using the same image but CA X14 on 6900K, CA X15 on 13900K. 6900K, 15 cores, 2 passes took 7:14, max temp 60C, PBR took about 5 seconds using 3060 GFX card 13900K, 8 cores, 2 passes took 5:15, max temp 85C, PBR took about 2-3 seconds using 4070 GFX card While it is possible that the liquid cooling performance on the 13900K PC could be improved, it is definitely working well enough for the needs of this DIYer that only needs a few ray traces at a time and has plenty of 'island time' available to get the results. . IMHO it is not worth the risk/effort for me to tear the PC apart to investigate if there might be an issue. I'll call CyberPower but pretty sure the answers I'll receive. For everything else I do on this PC, the CPU temps are typically in the mid-40 C range with "idle" temps around 32-35 C. Time to spend my spare time exploring PBRs. Thanks again for all the suggestions and help.

A big THANK YOU to all that have provided input about my CPU situation. Time for me to respond.... Jeff Dillon suggested a possible power supply issue: The original recommended supply for the system was 850W, I upped the build to 1000W but I guess it could still be an issue... There was a question about the liquid cooling system - it is the CyberPower DeepCool Castle 360 EX. Not much info available on the CyberPower website. Also the system is housed in the Phanteks Evolv X ATX mid-tower with a total of 7 fans (two front, one rear, three liquid cooling, one power supply). What I did not mention previously is the system is located in a non-AC house in the tropics. Typical daytime ambient temperatures at the PC now are 30C (85F) when I have been running the test. Relative Humidity about 75%. I added an external house fan blowing directly on the front of the PC since it is presently sitting in the "computer slot" of my desk which does restrict the airflow above the PD. I ran some test ray traces and the fan alone dropped the peak junction temps by 2-3 degrees C. Running ray traces with 10 cores for 10 minutes resulted in peak junction temps of around 90C. Using 15 cores I got a couple of core temperature warnings after about 3 minutes. Idle junction temps are around 35 C. If I pause the ray trace, the junction temps drop to the low 40 degrees C within a second or two. I suspect, without any proof, that if this PC was in a 25 C environment with lower RH that I could run ray traces with 15 cores without any heating issues. Thanks again for all the helpful suggestions. I'm on 'island time' here so it could be a while before any further investigations will be completed

Adam, after some simple investigation, I do not believe the cooling system is defective but may be 'under spec'ed'. The computer is only two weeks old and was a custom build with the cooling system a slight upgrade from the recommended solution. The cooling system does a great job of keeping the CPU junction temps pretty close to ambient (plus a degree C or so) until the CPU starts working hard. When a particular core gets to 90%+ utilization, that core temp goes up to high 80 C but drops immediately when the utilization drops. The cooling air outflow from the liquid cooling and the back of the PC also gets very warm when the ray tracing is underway. For me, I think this is just a 'live with it' situation. I am a complete newbie with PBR and it looks promising although it lacks realistic shadows in some situations (probably an newbie issue). I did a couple of PBRs and the 4070 graphics card only takes a second or two to "complete the image". Good enough for my situation. Thanks!

Curiosity question for those with systems that use the Intel I9-13900K processor and do ray tracing: How many cores/threads in CA can you enable for ray tracing before the CPU junction temperature exceeds 80 degrees C ? I recently got my new system and was disappointed to see that even with a 3-fan liquid cooled CPU, ray tracing with more than around 8 cores/treads selected in preferences (out of 32) resulted in Tjunction of 80+ degrees C. (don't exceed 100 degrees C) While the i9-13900K system is definitely faster for a lot of tasks, it turns out that the ray trace times on this system versus my older water cooled i7-6900K system with 16 cores/threads enabled has roughly similar ray trace times without the heating issues... bummer/ Is this heating issue to be expected with the I9? I knew it ran hot, but was not expecting the heat limitation when only a quarter of the cores are 'cranking'. Is it my system, or just a 'live with it' situation? Thanks,

Thank you SHCanada2 and Alaskan_Son for your discussion! My crude solution was going to be similar to Alaskan_Son's but without the dynamic capability. I would create the tables, take screen shots, copy and paste back into the layout. I like the suggested solution because it is dynamic, create once. Sorry Alaskan_Son but you gave away too much of the solution - I'm sure I can carry on from here . I'm not a 'commercial user' of CA, just a DIYer that used CA to design, build and now improve our retirement home. Thus, I abused the layout pages during construction of the house by using many renderings and Google translated text from English to Spanish to communicate to my Spanish speaking-only contractor and foreman the construction details and my expectations. Good news - IT WORKED, fabulously. The house looks just like the ray traces . Now I am using the layout pages to gain consensus with my significant other on interior design and landscaping (her expertise areas). Again, Thank you both!

Using CA X14. Is it possible to have more than one unique layout page table in a layout? For example, one page layout that lists pages 1 to N and another that lists pages N+1 to "max number of pages in layout" ? I know that I am abusing the normal use of layout pages by having a lot of pages but I want to have multiple tables side-by-side on the first page to provide a readable Table of Contents (TOC) for a layout that contains more than 100 pages. My knowledge on this says the answer is NO but I am hoping to be proven wrong. Thank you,

Interesting article. Thanks for posting.

I believe that Chief, especially X9 is no longer single threaded when developing plans and standard camera views. I recall reading a statement to this effect a number of years ago here on the forum but can not locate the thread at this time. For what it is worth, a quick demonstration confirms, at least to me, that Chief is multi-threaded in plan preparation. I use a windows gadget (CPU Usage) that displays the % usage of each CPU core/thread. Just the act of opening an inactive camera will cause all the threads to bump to 100% until the view is displayed.

I can not access ChiefTalk when I am connected to the internet through a VPN (Witopia). I did not have this issue with the old forum. Obviously, I can connect when I turn off the VPN feature.

Joe, FWIW, the architect on Bonaire (used to be Netherlands Antilles, now part of the Netherlands) that I sometimes provide rendering services to dimensions everything in mm with no separators and no units indicator (mm is assumed). Don't know if this is standard practice for all architects on Bonaire but it appears to be acceptable for the local plan permit office. ie 1 10 100 1000 10000

It has been quite a while since I watched the training videos and read the documentation so I may be repeating what you already know... If you prefer to not be making multiple copies of your plan and deleting portions of it, another approach which I believe is still valid and produces similar results is to use the layer sets to selectively hide portions of the plan or items in the plan. When doing this in the past, I typically used the approach to turn off things like fixtures, furniture, or items with high face counts that would not be displayed. In one case I had a porch that wrapped almost completely around the second floor of the house. the porch railings had detailed balusters (high face count) so I created multiple layers for the railings/balusters. In the desired 'camera view' set I could then easily turn these items on/off to improve ray trace performance. I found this approach less confusing than keeping track of multiple partial plans, especially if the design wasn't finalized (is it ever?).

Sliders move in 10% increments for me as well. Finer tuning can be done by typing the desired number into the dbx.

Alan, The water material has transparent properties. It is intended to be used in features like swimming pools where the pool bottom, etc is visible. I suspect that to use it successfully as you are intending, you will have to provide bottom materials for the lakes and the stream bed... Just a guess...

Bryce, just to reiterate, as I mentioned last year when this thread started, there was a huge performance difference between OneDrive and Dropbox - with Dropbox being significantly faster. I don't know about the performance of Google Drive. It all depends upon whether Google does 'intelligent' syncing where only the changed parts of a file are updated and not the whole file. OneDrive would update the whole file which was a killer on a library database. I'm not much help here on answering your question other than to confirm that it is likely that one approach is faster than another... If you start using Google Drive and find that it is taking minutes for the syncing to complete and this time is getting in your way from a workflow standpoint, I would suggest getting a free Dropbox account and 'give it a go'. Obvously, if you find the syncing time to be insignificant with Google Drive, no need to change...

Mike, I left the core, manufacture, and bonus library files alone (did not move them to drop box). I only moved the 'Chief Architect Premier X7 Data' folder to Dropbox. This is working fine for me. I didn't want to muck around with the CA core libraries and since it wasn't a big deal to keep them upgraded on each machine I left them alone. For me, it is the user library that changed a lot and I wanted to have an easy way to keep my desktop and laptops in sync.

I agree with Joe on considering a desktop PC for your van. You can easily get two high-end, overclocked desktops for half the price of the laptop you quoted, and I suspect with much superior performance.

Regarding Rapid mode, I disabled this feature after reading the following article: http://techreport.com/review/25282/a-closer-look-at-rapid-dram-caching-on-the-samsung-840-evo-ssd/8 (this is the conclusion page). Granted, this article is a year old now and Samsung may have improved the performance of Rapid mode. The conclusion of the article is: "Although I wouldn't recommend that folks enable RAPID mode as it exists right now, I am encouraged to see Samsung exploring new ways to speed up its SSDs. RAPID mode definitely has the potential to become more appealing as it matures, and it won't be restricted to the 840 EVO for long."

Thanks!

Jintu, would it be giving away too much of your technical advantage to tell us what rendering SW you used? If you chose to remain silent on this, I fully understand! Thanks. (I took a short tour around your website - very impressive - gives me something to aspire towards! )

Scott, unless I missed it somewhere, you have not stated what internet speed your plan is supposed to provide. Are you paying for a higher rate than 7.5 mb/sec? if not, 'nuf said...

Uhm... the limited warranty on my 840 EVO is 3 years. Also, before I turned on the Rapid mode, the little 'help' description stated that it actually improves longevity - this would make sense in that a lot of the reads/writes might never make it to the SSD as they likely stay in the DRAM memory cache (the Samsung Magician looks like it allocated 4 GB RAM on my system). Anyway, I'm nit-picking - thanks again for pointing out this feature!