3Ds Max / Unity / AutoCAD rig

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Hey folks,

A friend of mine is looking to do some freelance work at home using the software mentioned in the title, i.e. 3Ds Max / Unity / AutoCAD and probably some Photoshop as well.

Budget of about £400. Don't need a monitor or peripherals.

Any suggestions? I can spec a gaming rig just fine, but I have no idea what sort of CPU/GPU combo would be ideal for this area of work...

Thanks :D
 
Going to be a stretch with that budget to spec anything other than a budget standard pc. If he wants anything that caters specifically for his software needs he'll need to up his budget.
 
 
I must ask the question as to why she only willing to spend £400 on a PC to run these extremely demanding programmes that cost an arm 'n' leg to actually buy and use commercially.

Autodesk Autocad 2014 LT - £ 1178.75 RRP
Autodesk 3D Stuido Max 2014 (1 Month rental licence) - £235.75 RRP
Unity Pro - £925.58 RRP
Adobe Photoshop CC (1 year licence) - £210.35 RRP

This just makes no sence to me, a £400 PC will not be upto the task to handle all this at once.
 
Anything with a decent amount of RAM will run those comfortably for what they will be using them for; I would suggest a dedicated GPU too for viewport acceleration in 3DS/Unity.

To be honest you're not going to reach 'power user' levels of use with a £400 budget, and if you were chances are you'd already know what you need anyway.

mickyflinn's build is as good as you'd get for the budget, maybe up the RAM to 16GB if there will be several models (3DS), textures (PS) and Unity open all at once for example.
 
you dont need a high powered rig to use those programs. The only thing that will take a longer time is the rendering.

Modelling wise its all about how you manage the polygons.

Used to run Maya/3dsm/lightwave on a P4 2.8 1gb Ram.
 
Heya, I'm a 3D Artist for games and movies so thought i'd help out :).

The 8 Core Piledriver is perfect for anything from begginer to working on AAA Titles and Movies, your going to want at least 16gb of ram but if your working on high res textures your going to want more, as far as a gpu goes it depend's on what your making stuff for.

I'd Recomend a Firepro V4900 or a R9 Series GPU.
That firepro is about best in class for price and performance and will handle up to and over 30 million polys in 3ds Max with that set up, however it will struggle on the game engine side of things so an R9 Could be a good Compromise.

I just swapped out my Firepro V4900 for 2x R9 280x's.
But i have just swapped over to developing for next gen titles :).

In short my advice would be to go for the Firepro unless your doing a lot engine side, and even then a firepro will handle just about anything unity can do.
 
Hey Luna, welcome :) And thanks for chipping in. Sounds like the 8 core Piledriver is the best solution as far as a CPU goes...

However my friend is fresh out of uni, hence the budget unfortunately. In regards to pushing the ram from 8gb to 16gb, do you think it would be worth switching to the 6 core Piledriver and thus saving £30 for more ram? Or get the 8 core now, and when money allows, get another 8gb of ram?

I'll ask about the game engine side of things, not sure where her focus will be. Don't know anything about the Firepro / Quadro cards. May have a look on an auction site and see how much they go for as they are expensive brand new!
 
i would go for the 8gb for now and get the 8 core, i use the 4ghz varient clocked at 4.5ghz for my work so it's a perfect choice.

Upgrade the ram when you can, a new firepro v4900 is about £160? from memory and is about on par on the engine side as a GTX 260 usually. :).

Feel Free to add me on steam if you want faster reply's (Lunastraza).
 
Last edited:
Lunastraza said:
i would go for the 8gb for now and get the 8 core, i use the 4ghz varient clocked at 4.5ghz for my work so it's a perfect choice.

Upgrade the ram when you can, a new firepro v4900 is about £160? from memory and is about on par on the engine side as a GTX 260 usually. :).
Click to expand...

Ok sounds good to me, 8 cores and 8gb for now it is. I'm sure I can grab a used v4900 pretty cheap somewhere ;)

She dabbles in Minecraft from time to time, so that should be plenty grunt to run the game.
 
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