Arnold

Arnold

Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and now their main renderer, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM, Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures.

Hardware Recommendations

Processor

Rendering

Arnold is a GPU-based rendering application, therefore we recommend a higher performance graphics card.

Graphics

NVIDIA Quadro A5000 or A6000. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3080Ti, or RTX 3090.

Storage

We recommend having two solid-state drives which provides the best performance:

  1. Primary Drive: SSD for the operating system and applications
  2. Secondary Drive: SSD for active projects; a dedicated SSD will offer optimal performance

2.5-inch SATA SSD performs at ~500MB/s
M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD performs at ~2500MB/s

For long term storage or backup, infrequently accessed files, we recommend a 4TB to 18TB hard drive. Hard drives also work well for storing export files as the export/rendering process is generally not write intensive.

Memory

In general, 3-6GB of RAM per CPU core is recommended. For example, if you select a single 12-core processor, 32GB will suffice for basic tasks or 64GB for more demanding workloads.

Configuration Recommendations

HP Z8 G4 Workstation

 

  • Dual 28 cores, 2.2 GHz base frequency | Intel Xeon Gold 6238R
  • 192GB (12x 16GB) of 2933MHz DDR4 ECC Memory
  • 1TB NVMe M.2 Solid-State Drive

$13,100

Configure & Buy

HP Z8 G4 Workstation

 

  • Dual 20 cores, 2.1 GHz base frequency | Intel Xeon Gold 5218R
  • 192GB (12x 16GB) of 2933MHz DDR4 ECC Memory
  • 1TB NVMe M.2 Solid-State Drive

$9,600

Configure & Buy

HP Z840 Workstation

 

  • Dual 18-Core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon Haswell E5-2699 v3 [36-cores / 72-threads]
  • 128GB (8x 16GB) of 2133MHz DDR4 ECC Memory
  • 512GB NVMe M.2 Solid-State Drive
  • NVIDIA Quadro M2000 4GB

$5,700

Configure & Buy

HP Z840 Workstation

 

  • Dual 10-Core 2.2GHz Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2630 v4 [20-cores / 40-threads]
  • 64GB (8x 8GB) of 2400MHz DDR4 ECC Memory
  • 500GB SATA 2.5" Solid-State Drive
  • NVIDIA Quadro M2000 4GB

$3,950

Configure & Buy

HP Z6 G4 Workstation

 

  • 16 cores, 3.2 GHz base frequency | Intel Xeon W-3245
  • 96GB (6x 16GB) of 2933MHz DDR4 ECC Memory
  • 512GB NVMe M.2 Solid-State Drive

$6,500

Configure & Buy

HP Z4 G4 Workstation

 

  • Intel Core i9-10900X (3.7 GHz base frequency, 10 cores)
  • 64GB (4x 16GB) of 2933MHz DDR4 Memory
  • 512GB NVMe M.2 Solid-State Drive

$3,300

Configure & Buy

Recommended Hardware References

Running additional applications on this system?

The recommended components and configurations provided on this page are specific to this software. If you plan on running other applications, please view our recommendations for them as well and choose a configuration that best suits the needs of the application requirements collectively. Feel free to contact us for further assistance.

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Condition

New: Purchased new from a HP authorized distributor. Never used. Ships in original manufacturer packaging.

Refurbished: Pulled from corporate environment in working condition. Tested upon arrival at our location and also after customization. Cosmetically grade A or B. Overall in good condition, but could have light scratches / scuffs. Ships in double-wall brown box with durable packaging material.