Build advice for 3D animation and special effects

ALS57

ALS57

ALS57

Associate
Joined
24 Oct 2005
Posts
75
Location
Muswell Hill London
Hi there, some help and advice if you will please.

I need to build or maybe buy a pre-built PC desktop to handle 3D animation and special effects / rendering for my daughter who's at college. She'll be using the following software:
Maya
Nuke
Cinema 4D - Redshift
Blender
Z Brush
Mari
Substance painter
Houdini (later in the course)
Unreal engine

The build shortlist I have at the moment is the following:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3.4GHz 16-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: be quiet Dark Rock Pro 4
Motherboard: MSI X570 wifi Tomahawk ATX AM4
ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti TUF GAMING OC 8GB
32GB (2 x 16GB) G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C16
Phanteks Eclipse P300A Mesh Case £62
Storage PCIe-SSD: Samsung 980 PRO 1TB NVMe M.2 Solid State Drive £85
Power Supply: Corsair RMx Series, RM750x £85

This build is roughly £2000

Ideally I'd like to keep the PC under £2300.

The prebuilt option i have at the moment is an i9 Intel 12900K DELL XPS 8950 with a GeForce 3080 on sale at £2099. Looks like a high spec for the money?
https://deals.dell.com/en-uk/productdetail/dsst

Can you also please advise on a 27" monitor in the £250 - £350 budget.

Any advice on this spec would be much appreciated so I can get her up and running ASAP.

Cheers

Al
 
I am not sure you are allowed to link to that PC company on here because they are technically a competitor to OCUK. It looks like good value because they skimp on core components like motherboard and PSU and they are not as good as what you would normally buy. Also what cooler do they have on the 12900k , does it keep it cool and working to its full potential. Their laptops are ok but I would not be looking to buy one of their desktops

Your build list looks fine. Some components like the samsung drive are expensive but all depends on the day you buy whether it is good value.

I am no expert on monitors so cannot really advise. Not sure what level of colour accuracy you will need for that sort of work but I am sure someone will come along who knows a lot more than me in this area.
 
ALS57 said:
Can you also please advise on a 27" monitor in the £250 - £350 budget.
Click to expand...

As said above, for production work she might need a monitor that has higher colour accuracy / bit-depth, but if a gaming monitor will suffice then there's a lot of choice. I'm aware of BenQ, Asus and Dell having professional models.

If a gaming monitor is fine, you might find this interesting as a starting point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84LBVtBMLrU

There's a lot of reviews on prad.de if you find a model you like.

I'm not aware of how much those programs use the GPU versus CPU, but I do wonder if having more VRAM (versus the 8G on the 3070) would be an advantage for rendering / render windows, etc?

In productivity benchmarks I've seen, the 12900K and 5950X seem to swap places, so purely performance I don't think I'd care which, but the 5950X is more efficient and has a lower top power draw for extended workloads.
 
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