New Computer for BimX Render Only

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,
so I have been reading through a lot of post in regards to best hardware specs and performance, but I have to open a new one, since our needs are more specific.
We are working on really heavy interior TI models that we are trying to generate BimX models for client presentations. Exported BimX file is 600+ MB.
Our computers which are mostly later generation I7s with 36GB memory take hours (4-8 hours) to push out these models.
We are looking for a dedicated render machine. This will not be a working computer, so we do not care about speed of updating plans and sections. Ideally it would be used for still render in CineRender as well, but that is secondary, it's really about pushing out BimX in a decent time frame (ideally under 1 hour).
Budget is $4,000 - $6,000 on the pc alone. Are the dual xeon better on this? We had terrible experiences using them as a regular workstation, since they were outperformed by i7s. Unfortunately the ones we are left (xeons) are too old to do any comparative testing.
Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Replying to my own post.

We are down to 3 minutes from 12-15 minutes for a still rendering
i7 6900k
64GB 3333 DDR4
1080 GTX
dual 512 GB Samsung 850 Pro in RAID 0

Pretty awesome, but...
we realized that Archicad does not seem to be using all available memory. Max use on our 64 GB system is 32 GB. As another example, on a 32 GB system, it does not seem to be using more than 18 GB. So it appears some proportional usage. Anyway to change this and use the full (or almost full) capacity?
Registry hack?

[Jacques Toerien]

Quick question, when you generate your bimx models, are all your CPU cores pegged at 100%? If yes, then investing in a multi-core, dual-cpu xeon workstation with oodles or RAM may be your best investment. If that is all it's going to be doing then you only need a very basic gfx card. Do invest in some good CPU cooling though.

[Anonymous]

Jacques wrote:
Quick question, when you generate your bimx models, are all your CPU cores pegged at 100%? If yes, then investing in a multi-core, dual-cpu xeon workstation with oodles or RAM may be your best investment. If that is all it's going to be doing then you only need a very basic gfx card. Do invest in some good CPU cooling though.

Cores are only at 100% for about 5 minutes max. After that they drop to under 10% for about 45 minutes, before they spike to 100% for a couple seconds prior to being done.
Not a CPU issue.