Buying a new computer... Looking for advice on specs
wmiller314
Posts: 184
Okay all. So I have convinced the BF to buy me a new machine on which to render and I want to know what kind of hardware I need for a good machine to render quickly. A little bit of background. Right now I'm using an HP laptop with an intel i5 and NVIDIA GTX 1050. My boyfriend is far more computer literate than me and willing to build a machine. But I want to know what kind of parts I should be putting in it. I've done a little bit of research and I'm thinking an AMD Ryzen 7 for CPU combined with NVIDA GTX card but don't know which one. Any help in choosing parts would be awesome. Thanks in advance.
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I am running at GTX 1080TI. The TI means 11Gb of video ram instead of the usual 8Gb or less. This makes a difference if you have three or more figures. Somewhere between 3 and 4 G8 figures plus clothing will max out the video memory and force a CPU render, rather than a GPU render. That means way longer render times. The 1080TI is no longer manufactured. Brand new are still available on websites, and used ones are available from the usual sources, ebay, OfferUp, Craig's list. I picked up a used one that has been performing flawlessly for a year.
The other consideration is going to the 2080TI. Lots of discussions here in the forum. I am not conversant enough to advise on that. The board is awesome. It is also expensive and unclear if it is a real benefit with DAZ studio. OTOH, if you game that's another matter. Gaming is a much better case for the 2080 with its RT cores.
For me, the remainder of the spec is less important. Load times will improve with SSD's and even more dramatically with M.2 memory on the PCI bus. But, load times are a tiny fraction of the total time spent on creating images. Hence,this seems less important. For the artist, a 27 inch screen or better two, is a place to spend the money as compared to the latest CPU or motherboard. The CPU and mobo price curves are super steep at the high end. Getting a year old model drops the price dramatically and gives at worst 10% less performance. And again since DAZ workflow is so render dependent, It makes even more sense to splash out for the video card rather than the CPU, mobo or hard drives.
Be aware that the later versions of Iray use more memory on non-RX cards for code that matches the RTX features. Unless you are expecting to be pushing the memory limits an 8GB RTX card might well be better than an 11GB GTX card, faster and not as far off in effective memory capacity as the raw numbers suggest (I think it tends to be about 1GB on the code, so instead of 8GB vs 11GB it would be 8GB vs 10GB - or rather as much of those as the application is allowed to take).
Okay, couple of questions here. What does non-RX mean? I'm a medical professional and when I hear non-RX i think off label prescription. lol. I'm sure that's not what you are talking about.
Also is there one graphics card brand that is better than others? How doe you know how much vram is on a graphic card and how much ram should the computer have?
Oh and where do you suggest buying from? Is there a specific sight or should I go to Best Buy?
GTX and RTX don't stand for anything officially. Nvidia has a number of childish engineers who name things and both have scatalogical meanings.
In practical terms GTX cards do not have the real time ray tracing hardware while RTX does. If you can afford it for iRay rendering you want RTX.
Do not just go to Best Buy. They carry next to nothing. If you're buying a pre built system then determine your budget anmd go to a site like iBuyPower or CyberPowerPC and configure the best system you can in your budget.
If you, or your BF, feels up to building a computer from parts you can order the parts from Amazon or NewEgg.
There's a good comparison of cards on https://www.versluis.com/2019/09/daz-studio-render-speeds-the-results-are-in/
Don't buy the ceapest card on ebay, it's probably fake.
Kenshaw is right, Ibuypower is a great place to look. ( I personally have not used CyberPowerPC though)
You need at least a 700 watt power supply or greater to run a high powered graphics card,
I prefer Intel CPU but that is highly debatable, the more you put into this PC the more you will get out of it.
Spend as much as you can, $2000 - $3500 is not an unreasonable amount to spend.
As for getting an Nvidia 1080ti, I just bought a used one on EBAY for 500 dollars and it works PERFECT! ...and I saved $500 off the list price new.
Many graphics cards have been used to death for bitcoin mining so beware of that.
I got lucky on mine and it was worth getting it used. (but this is for my second graphics card in my PC)
You need twice the amount of system ram than is in the graphics RAM.
So, if your graphics card has 8GB of graphics RAM then you need 16GB of system RAM.
Don't spare any expense because once it is all bought you are stuck with the speed of things pretty much.
A full sized tower will accommodate many hard drives if you plan to accumulate a lot of models and projects.
3,500 is not an unreasonable amount to spend on a really good workstation.
If you do not have that to spend now maybe you should wait (or get a loan like I did) until you have saved up for something really substantial instead of buying something that you may need to upgrade considerably in a year. Upgrading wastes money because parts get set on a shelf.
No matter what you buy it will still be slow rendering. NOTHING is fast enough. haha
If I had a whole room full of computers rendering it would still not be fast enough.
But $3000 should get you to a place where you are happy with what you can do.
I think probably the RTX 2080ti are the best solution if you are going to buy new and if you have the money to spend. Just because they can be connected through the new nvlink bridge and IRAY supports that connection.
You can always get a second RTX 2080ti later as long as you get a big enough power supply now.
If you plan to add a second RTX 2080ti card later, then get at least 1000 watt power supply now.
Make sure you have a 1 TB SSD for your main operating system and for apps you want to load fast.
And at least a 4-8 (or greater) TB back up drive.
My computer has 6 hard drives in it, so I needed the large sized tower.
The Asus motherboard I have is far superior to the other motherboard I had. (not to name the brand)
This is my current motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING LGA2066 DDR4 M.2 USB 3.1 802.11AC WIFI X299 ATX Motherboard for Intel Core X-Series Processors
(But this is for an intel i9 processor)
The other motherboard I had shared resources so if I plugged in additional hard drives other things would not work. With this motherboard every port works without any sharing.
Asus probably makes an AMD equivalent of this board. I HIGHLY recommend it.
Consider that having an expensive computer, when things break down, it is expensive to replace the parts. But, it is worth it to be able to render 10000 x 10000 pixel scenes with tons of geometry in the scene in a couple of hours.
I can easily add several Gen 8 characters, large scenery, HDRI skies, lots of props, strand based hair, effects like rain and fog/mist and/or volumetric lights still get it to render in a couple of hours at 10000 x 10000 pixels.
So if you are thinking a thousand dollars on PC, tripple that and then you will rule the world!
It is better if you buy the parts and build it yourself then you get all of the xtra manuals and things that come along with the parts. A place like Ibuypower keeps those "extra" things. But Ibuypower also gives you "deals" on parts. Hidden on Ibuypower's website is a page where you can assemble from scratch your own system I personally prefer that approach. Their warranty deal is expensive and who wants to send in the whole tower across country and wait a couple months to get it repaired when you can just replace the part that is broken yourself.
Building a new system on your own can be fraught with a lot of unexpected events.
Whatever Richard recommends is gold. I've watched his posts for several years. He is amazingly knowledgeable and helpful.
Wow! So you have all been really really helpful! This is a lot of information to work through. Plus I've been doing research online. I think I'm going get a Ryzen 5 or 7 with 16gb ram and an NVIDIA RTX card. I probably can't convince the boy friend to get the 2080ti so I'll probably go with a 2070 (fingers crossed). We have decided building a PC would be a great project while we are quarentined. lol.
One last question: Does anyone have opinions on the best GPU brand?
I like Asus for GPU brand but I am not sure how they compare to others.... I just know the Aus ones have stood up to heat and are still going strong.
I've owned most of the major US brands, EVGA, Gigabyte, Asus and Zotac. They're all fine. I'd avoid the ones you can find on chinese sites like AliExpress. They're not all shady but you'd have to do a lot of research to figure out which aren't.
Poke around the vendors' forums and note the average level of frustration of the people in the support section.
That's pretty pointless. People don't generally post in such places when they have had a good experience. Anyway I've been buying GPU's for decades and never once had an issue.
Are there any customer review sites that you do find helpful?
To me, Newegg customer reviewers seem to be somewhat more tech-savvy than, say, Amazon reviewers, but since I'm a non-techie myself, I have no way of knowing for sure.
I hate Amazon reviews. They are very easy to scam. I was recently doing some shopping and the reviews were clearly for another product..
NewEgg is pretty good IME, as are the ones on PCPartPicker.
It is not pointless.
Like you I've been doing this for decades and was not expecting any issues. But... there were issues. After dropping almost $9000 thinking I was going to be in rendering heaven, there were issues. Each component's vendor was of ZERO help. If I had just looked on the vendor's forums BEFORE I commited, I would have known about the problems with:
No video with 2 X Titans
Multiple bad BIOS "upgrades"
Bad memory detection
Flaky PCIe negotiation
Weird problem with SATA ports disappearing
All of which I experienced. I have no idea why you would say it is pointless to know what you're getting into before you spend your money. When is that ever a bad idea? If everything goes smoothly, great. But what would it cost to just inform yourself? 15 minutes of your life?
I said its pointless because problem like you are reporting are difficult if not possible to diagnose remotely yet here you are saying they should have been more help.
Those issues were almost certainly an incorrectly seated CPU, bad memory detection is almost always a badly seated CPU, or a bent broken CPU pin so nearly the same thing. All those other issues could also result from either a bad CPU or a bad install of the CPU. That you updated the BIOS and still had issues further points to the CPU (if the MoBo manufacturers release a bad BIOS it isn't one person reporting issues but everyone who installed it).
However calling Nvidia or whoever else isn't going to get you anywhere. Even AMD/Intel aren't going to be much help beyond saying to RMA the CPU.
You say that these types of problems are impossible to diagnose remotely and then you immediately... diagnose it remotely.
But I do thank you for the golden comment about others reporting issues that so beautifully illustrated the only point I had: Know what you're getting into, before you spend your money.
Instead of inventing phantom problems that I "almost certainly" had but didn't, and then providing solutions to them, why not just let someone else here have an opinion that is different from yours, but also valid?
The problems with Chinese off brands are not the hardware, in fact, the hardware is often superior and very low priced. No, the problem is not the hardware but the software support.
The software is often nearly nonexistent, full of terrible bugs and the help pages are in Chinese (only) and you will experience problems with that software that will probably never get fixed.
Case and example, look at all the Chinese GoPro style cameras that are on Amazon, they are comparable in hardware to the 800 dollar GoPro cameras and they are usually only 20 bucks.
But try and get a picture out of them with the included Chinese software.
You will end up returning them to get your 20 bucks back because of codec problems, things like no image stabilization and the list of software features not included are endless. What works is usually is not enough to even get a basic photo out of them (seriously).
Compare that to the Nvidia GeForce experience and their drivers/software updated almost on a monthly basis and you have your answer.
I built mine strictly on price, speed, and capacity, eventually even ignoring brand names.
I used https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ to evaluate CPU & GPU performance and then picked based on best performance for under $200 for the CPU & GPU. Then I used PC Part picker to design a suitable desktop. I picked only SSDs for system disk based on capacity and price for again under $200 (meaning at the time I was forced to buy a Sata III 6GB/s SSD instead of the PCIe NVMe SSD I wanted). 16GB DDR4 RAM modeules less that $100 (I got them at $49 since I ignored brand name and accepted 2666 as speed instead of 3000+ for speed). The rest I picked based on getting the total price under $1000 (less that $700 ultimately). PCPartpicker.com warns if parts aren't compatible so I didn't have to mess with that. Also PCParkpicker was good for getting a ball park range low price on the various parts but ultimately I got the best price by searching for the parts or there near equivalents on Amazon and buying returns when available.
I wrote probably not is. But that is part of the problem. You literally cannot diagnose the sorts of problems you're describing remotely. I'd need physical access to the machine to be sure. Which is precisely why remote support wouldn't have been able to help you beyond telling you to RMA the part.
That you're unhappy with the only solution possible is why I wrote to not bother with support forums.
However it truly wouldn't have mattered the brands in this case. Nvidia could not possibly fix a problem somewhere else in the system. Neither could the RAM maker. I'm sure the Mobo company and Intel/AMD both said to RMA the part(s). Which truly was the only solution available remotely.
You speak with a certainty that cannot be justified by the knowledge of the situation that you can possibly have.
Despite your asserting that it was the "only solution", my motherboard vendor would not authorize an RMA. I was told to install a certain BIOS update. I did. It did not fix the issue, and halved my detected RAM. I was told to install another one. It restored my RAM but killed virtualization. Finally, I was told to wait for the new one. I did. It fixed everything but killed all of my SATA ports.
If I had just read the forums, I would have known about all the people who were frustrated with the product, were unable to acheive satisfaction, and eventually stopped posting after a hail of curse words that didn't even get moderated out afterwards. I would have known not to get a AORUS Gaming 7 for my setup, but the AORUS Extreme for just $100 bucks more.
I don't know why anyone would argue to limit their knowledge before making a costly decision.
The 2070 Super is a great card, damned-near 2080 performance for a lot less. As for brand, I stick with NVidia's Founder's Edition. They're not as fastas some of the gaming-oriented cards, but they're standard sized so you don't have to worry about your case being too small.
Ok. Not going to go down this rabbit hole.