Howdy !

Looking to get a couple machines for a project where they will be using Maya 2020 and bifrost for liquid simulation. (yes - not Realflow or Houdini)

What are the characteristics I shoud look for in the box ? This is  possibly a 2 part question: one-how do we increase the time for the initial 'simulation' (where you create the initial cached 'playblast') vs. two- rendering out the final frames and mesh. They may obviously be parallel/similiar answers, maybe not.  Any advise from experienced users would be super appreciated !

Here's the proposed questions up for discussion:

Do we want/prefer:

• Higher CPU clock speed 
• # of cores 
• certain CPU architecture (i9 vs AMD Ryzer)
• OS - Windows vs Linux (is there a huge difference?) Windows is also handy if one needs the box to render Redshift/C4D or run Adobe
• GPU - ie NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 vs 2080

Yes, I know you can pay top $$ and a premium for a Boxx/Falcon/Puget etc - but is the price worth the performance you gain ? Should I be able to use an older z800/820 (24 core 3.4GHz, RTX2080) HP box and still get decent performance ?

Thanks for your time - let me know if you have any specific questions. Also if there is another resource I should check - pls let me know. I looked at the obvious  (Autodesk Knowledge base, Creative Cow) but there just isn't much info about hardware specs for bifrost sims, more about using Arnold or other renderers. 

TY

-maciek