Advice on how to Upgrade my Work-Machine to run C4D Octane faster and improve render times?

[DawidG]

Hello!

Fresh to the forum, been trying to figure out how to upgrade my machine at work to run C4D Octane more efficiently, at the moment the live renderer and final render struggle to output on the simplest of models. I've been allocated a budget of £1000 for the upgrade - the current machine (as far as I know) is somewhat decent but I'm sure you can advice on how to upgrade it to up the performance.

At the moment, I am running C4D Octance on a HP Z2 G4 Small Form Factor Workstation:

• Intel® Core™ i7 8700 with Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (3.2 GHz base frequency, 12 MB cache, 6 cores)
• 16 GB memory; 512 GB HP Z Turbo Drive PCIe® SSD storage; NVIDIA® Quadro® P1000 (4 GB GDDR5 dedicated)
• BaseBoard; HP 8456 KBC Version 07.D2.00

The workstation is not your classic standard tower, it's a smaller workstation.

Any help is appreciated, please let me know if there is any extra info I can add that would help

 

[Alex Glawion]

The best you can do is take out your Quadro P1000 and get a new GPU. For £1000 you should be able to get a 2080Ti or a 2080 Super. What you'll have to check, though, is if your PSU has enough wattage to power the new GPU and also the required gpu power connectors. Best to just open up the HP and take a look inside.

Of course all the big All-in-one PC sellers like HP or Dell absolutely do not want you to upgrade the pc yourself and usually make sure it is extremely difficult to do so. But you can try.

So check this:
- Your PSU should have 500W+ of Power
- The PSU has to have two GPU PCIE Power Cables
- The inside of the case has to be big enough to fit the new gpu (after you take out the old one)

I'm no HP expert so you'll have to see if you can check out those things yourself. Could be that many of the inside connectors and such are propietrary.

As for CPU or RAM, you could get a 8700k at most, I'd say that board will support nothing else, but this is not worth the upgrade. You might be able to get 32GB of RAM, but again I am not sure as to what RAM Modules are supported by the proprietary HP Board.

In the end you might have to go through HP customer support, of course that could cost you an arm and a leg to get official HP upgrades.