Rendering pc - spec check and questions

iviv

iviv

iviv

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Hi all! A friend's asked me to pull together a PC for them, mainly for use with 3ds max, so I've done some digging and built this spec:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £2,127.75 (includes shipping: £15.90)​
​

I'm planning on presenting this as a base system with options to move on some of the other components (more/less storage, more standard case, potentially moving up to threadripper, though I'm not entirely convinced the uplift in cost would be reflected in the increased performance, though it would futureproof the system more). However, my main question was actually on the subject of the ram. As I read it, the motherboard only supports up to 2666mhz without overclocking it? What does this actually mean? The 2700x supports up to 3600mhz, which the ram is, so this differentiation just threw me off a little.

And final question, from reading around, 3ds max does a lot of its work using directx now, meaning a 1080 is a better option than going for a workstation quadro, even if it's not officially supported, right? I don't want to spend that much on a graphics card that isn't going to perform well, but the same applies to buying a quadro card that isn't really needed for something that doesn't require the increased precision.

Thanks in advance!
 
Spending that much I'd be tempted to shoehorn in a Thread Ripper build now. TR2 will likely knock everything Intel has into the long grass for a couple years on price/perf.

I do overkill though most things though
 
Yeah, I'm going to offer that as a 'You could spend an extra £x to get a much more powerful cpu', but the 1900x doesn't seem to be worth the £75 uplift in cpu cost alone, so you'd really want to drop more for the higher core counts.

TR2 is due next month, right? I'll see if he's able to hold off for that, since that would probably be a better leap from ryzen 2.
 
iviv said:
Yeah, I'm going to offer that as a 'You could spend an extra £x to get a much more powerful cpu', but the 1900x doesn't seem to be worth the £75 uplift in cpu cost alone, so you'd really want to drop more for the higher core counts.

TR2 is due next month, right? I'll see if he's able to hold off for that, since that would probably be a better leap from ryzen 2.
Click to expand...

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £2,761.40 (includes shipping: £22.50)


You’d need to get Windows but there are cheaper ways to get that. Ideally you want some form of Air Cooler or AIO if you go the Ryzen route. I think prices will go down after TR2 launches but for video production this would be an amazing setup.

It is a very similar build to the Ryzen 2700X that I purchased last month but with Threadripper instead of Ryzen.​
 
Is this a business PC? Or a personal PC? If the former, you might like to look at dual CPU and quad CPU systems.
 
Thanks for the replies. It's going to be a business PC, mostly running 3ds max and zbrush.

After chatting with him, he's expressed interest in TR2 so I'm going to wait for that, and that he's happy to increase his budget if needed to get a solid foundation for his work, though he's also told me that he'd rather have a Quadro card than a Geforce, as apparently he had issues in the past with using a card that wasn't technically supported.

Obviously, there's a far slimmer selection of Quadro cards to go for, and benchmarks seem to be pretty lacking. Looking online you can find higher end Kepler cards going for similar prices as much lower end Pascal based cards, but it's pretty hard to tell if this is actually a good deal or not!
And finally, as a side note, am I correct in simply writing off the firepro? I'd go AMD 90% of the time in a gaming build, but don't most professional applications use CUDA rather than openCL, somewhat limiting the use for firepro cards?

Thanks again!
 
ZBrush according to their website is CPU only based and doesn't benefit from Quadro or FirePro cards. Any normal gaming card will do and the extra core count in TR2 will help with ZBrush. With 3ds max Nvidia Quadro and AMD Radeon Pro are recommended. If your friend is using VRAY and uses the classic CPU only renderer waiting for TR2 is the way to go. Vray's new RT renderer can employ one or more GPUs in conjunction with the CPU to further reduce render times.
 
iviv said:
Thanks for the replies. It's going to be a business PC, mostly running 3ds max and zbrush.

After chatting with him, he's expressed interest in TR2 so I'm going to wait for that, and that he's happy to increase his budget if needed to get a solid foundation for his work, though he's also told me that he'd rather have a Quadro card than a Geforce, as apparently he had issues in the past with using a card that wasn't technically supported.

Obviously, there's a far slimmer selection of Quadro cards to go for, and benchmarks seem to be pretty lacking. Looking online you can find higher end Kepler cards going for similar prices as much lower end Pascal based cards, but it's pretty hard to tell if this is actually a good deal or not!
And finally, as a side note, am I correct in simply writing off the firepro? I'd go AMD 90% of the time in a gaming build, but don't most professional applications use CUDA rather than openCL, somewhat limiting the use for firepro cards?

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

Well the Radeon Vega Pro 20 cards are hopefully not too far away, if the leaks are anything to go by then it could be a beast of a card and it’s targeted at the professional market.

When considering which GPU it’s really important to check what applications he will be running, for example Adobe and nVidia GeForce cards have a long and sad history. As a previous person said it depends on whether the applications will use GPU or CPU rendering. For professional use the other thing to consider is whether your friend needs full 10-bit colour as this is definitely a use case for the Professional cards, since the consumer cards due not support native 10-but colour.

The charity I help out recently bought a new workstation for the Marketing person and I specced a Quadro P4000 as at the time, earlier this year, it was the best professional card in the sub-£1000 range. Also don’t be worried to pickup an OEM version from PNY or HP as they are the same card.

Another thing that’s worth considering is whether you’ll be able to use Store MI to create a storage pool. On my rig I split the boot drive into two and used a 250gb partition for cache acceleration for storage.

Finally if the rig is used for content creation then make sure you get a display that covers as much of the Adobe RGB and sRGB spectrum.
 
Hmm, Store MI does seem extremely useful. I was originally planning on the intel M2 PCI-E as a boot and main program drive, a regular SATA SSD for fast storage and then a handful of 7200 drives for mass storage. But looking at Store MI, would that be able to essentially combine all those together, even the M2 drive? And what does this do to the lifespan of the M2 drive?

Cheers
 
iviv said:
Hmm, Store MI does seem extremely useful. I was originally planning on the intel M2 PCI-E as a boot and main program drive, a regular SATA SSD for fast storage and then a handful of 7200 drives for mass storage. But looking at Store MI, would that be able to essentially combine all those together, even the M2 drive? And what does this do to the lifespan of the M2 drive?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Well the technology isn’t new and is licensed and the reviews have been very positive, depending on whether it was a workstation (write intensive) or gaming rig (mainly reads), I would go Samsung Pro or Intel Optane for the workstation or a Samsung Evo or WD Black 500GB for gaming.

If you go for the WD Black make sure it’s the 500GB and not the 512GB version as the latter is older whereas the newer model can hold its own against the Samsung. Also make sure to use the vendor software, e.g. Samsung Magician, for drive monitoring as that would hopefully give some predictive warnings.

As always backups are essential in this config!
 
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