Advice for a Pre-Built Desktop for Rendering
Elemental Flame
Posts: 69
I'll preface all of this by saying I am not tech savvy. I know building a PC is a lot cheaper than getting a pre-built but the task is daunting and it's not something I am comfortable doing.
I bought my current computer for gaming before I ever considered doing 3D art. It has done better than I expected but it still struggles. With my tax refund I'd like to get myself a computer specifically for this. A computer made for this and only this, where loading assets is faster, working in the viewport is smoother, and rendering is quicker.
Right now I have an Intel i7 7700 3.6GHz Quad Core, GeForceGTX 1060 6GB, 16 GB DDR4. If I have something in my scene that is set for more than SubD 2 my computer will just turn off when I click render.
I've always bought bargain computers, usually on on Cyber Monday, but now I would like something that is overkill. I do not want to consider upgrading for some time. I'm super nervous about pulling the trigger with such hefty price tags though when there's things I don't understand. I figure some more knowledgeable people could help me out.
I've only ever had Intel chipsets in every computer I've ever owned. My Googling has taught me that rendering is best done by your CPU and it will use all cores. So more cores are better. Intel chipsets seem to max out at 8 cores. It's double what I have, but I am seeing AMD Ryzen Chipsets with 10, 16, even 32 cores on Newegg. Would a Ryzen or a Threadripper with more cores be hands down better than an Intel i9 chipset with 8 cores?
I have two bookmarked on Newegg at the moment. Am I on the right track or am I way off base? And if there's any other websites with pre-builts I could be looking at please feel free to educate me.
AMD Threadripper - https://www.newegg.com/p/1VK-01UA-000W1?Item=9SIAK3P9MM1168
Intel i9 - https://www.newegg.com/p/1VK-001S-00317?Item=9SIAC3J99H6221
Note: I'll probably end up buying a larger SSD to store all of my Daz art assets.
Thank you for your time!
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Good day, I can help with some general ideas: but first, let us correct some misinformation.
) Rendering is best done with CPU ... Yes, no, maybe, sort of .... It depends on what render engine you are using. 3Delight uses CPU cores and yes more cores is better. IRAY uses GPU cores (it can use CPU cores but it is tremendously slow) so you want a GPU if you are using IRAY.
) There is a limit of 8 cores ... NO. When I built my computer (about a year ago) I purchase and intel I-9 with 14 cores and they had versions with more that I could not afford at the time. Oh ... a limit of 8 might apply to laptops, but not to desktops.
) Larger SSD for DAZ assests. YES and no. Overall, if it will all fit on an SSD, great. If your collection is growing by leaps and bounds, you may need to put older or less used items on an HDD and keep what you use on the faster drive.
) I am confused why your computer would turn off when you render at that level ... gaming computers should do okay ... did you make upgrades to the model you have? One possibility is a power supply issue.
) Hmmm ... in every case, more memory is better - computer ram, graphics card ram, etc. It is a smaller player in terms of rendering speed, but it has some effect and also it allows for larger and more complex scenes.
One last thing, cyber monday is still a long ways off, but sometimes Amazon still has some incredible deals if you are watching.
Ummm ... I just looked at the link for the Intel-9 ... That price seems high to me. Let me give a completely different suggestion. Go to the Dell website. Check out their pre-built deals if you want, but follow the links to have a custom built computer - start adding components you want and see what you can have them build for the same amount of money. You might get a better deal and probably a better warranty as well.
Both those systems are grossly overpriced.
If you want a Daz Studio rendering beast you first need to decide if you're doing iRay or 3Delight. iRay is far better on an Nvidia GPU while 3Delight is strictly CPU.
If you want quality and are able to spend that kind of money do not go to Dell. Or HP. They use no name parts wherever they can and the quality is substandard, to be nice about it.
For $4000 go to OriginPC.com. They have support that should be able to help if you cannot configure a system that meets your needs.
I suggest an R5 3600 workstation with a 2080ti, 1Tb gen 4 NVME boot drive, 4Tb HDD for storage of assets and 1000W+ PSU to allow for adding a second GPU if you want one later for iRay
That specced out for me at around $4000 even.
That will also render in 3Delight very well but if you choose to go to 3Delight exclusively you can bump up the processor signficantly and bump down the GPU.
I think right now I am ~2TB of Daz Assets. I do not expect it to continue to grow exponentially though. When I first got into this a year ago I thought I had a lot of catching up to do since this was all new to me. My purchases have slowed down now that I have a good collection to work with. I'd rather not split them up though so I was aiming to buy a 4TB SSD which I think should last. Right now the assets are on a portable USB harddrive and when I try to pull in a G8F figure the time to load it into the viewport is laughable. Honestly, this bothers me more than render times and crashing at the moment. I'd like all my assets to be readily accessible. When I first started I kept everything on my SSD and it loaded so fast. But it quickly got to be too much space.
I do 90% of my rendering with IRay. I haven't considered any video card except for a GeForce. When I checked Dell's website one of the best models I found was the Alienware Aurora R11 Gaming Desktop. That has Dual NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2080 Ti 11GB GDDR6 each (NVIDIA NVLink SLI® Enabled) and when building a PC on OriginPC I was able to select two RTX 2080 Ti 11GBs as well. It kicks the price up a lot though. Would having a second RTX 2080 be a game changer?
Most of the PCs I come across only seem to offer 64GB DDR4. How important is this? Should I focus on trying to find ones that offer 128GB DDR4? Is it really double speed, or would the difference be negligible?
Thank you again for answering my inept questions.
Your questions are not inept. Inept is spending that kind of money uninformed.
Decide for yourself: Would rendering iRay scenes that are twice as large be a game changer if you didn't have to worry about optimizing them? Would rendering iRay scenes nearly twice as fast be a game changer? If so, then yes, a second 2080 would. Consider that you'll try more ambitious things and your imagination will expand when you know it'll take nearly half the time to render.
As far as 64 vs 128 gigs of RAM, if you are animating, there's a trick that I do with Blender, which I would see if is possible and to what degree on Windows/Daz before making that decision, and that is to get true linear speedup with multiple GPUs by running a different instance on each GPU, rendering every fourth frame. In that case, 128 gigs of RAM gets me an actual 4x speedup instead of about 3 that I normally would with just one instance using all 4 GPUs. So in that sense, RAM can atually make a big difference in rendering speed. It's worth it to find out if this is even possible, and how much RAM running two instances would require.
Dual cards does not gain much. A still render will be faster, but DAZ IRAY is unable to utilize two cards for animation and multiple cards does not multiply the size of the scene you can make - you would still have only 11 GB of VRAM.
Doubling your RAM does not double the speed ... it might help your viewport a little and overall speed a little ... but CPU cores and GPU cores are primary for speed.
UMM ... 64 gigabyts of RAM will do a lot. Check out this video (beware 44 GB video) - when the people and horses are added halfway through, it maxes out my system ( 64 GB ram and 24 GB vram).
I'd say the second 2080 is a game changer then.
As for the RAM, I do not animate anything. Everything I render is still images and it's usually single characters. I don't often do scenes with backgrounds or anything like that. Admittedly, most of your second paragraph lost me with linear speedups and running instances on GPUs. I think your surpassed my middling technical expertise, lol.
This is incorrect. Iray now works with Nvlink to expand memory.
I'm sorry, Pi, you are incorrect on both counts about dual GPUs. An animation is a series of still frames and so the former being faster implies the latter is as well. After I started animating with dual 2080s, the speedup was so compelling that I opted for two more. And 2080s support NVLink, and so the VRAM is doubled.
Okay ... I see I am a little outdated due to the NVLink which I was not aware of. But the choice seems limited in the models that have that option so far. I look forward to when I can make my next computer build to see if I can take advantage of that. Hmmm, I have not seen yet where it says the NVLnk allows Daz IRAY to do animation with multiple cards ... that has been a sticky issue - it may speed up rendering on a single frame, but there was something else that prohibited two cards in animation I thought.
Nothing I'm aware prevents iRay animation from working. Just ran a few frame test. It rendered great. Would a pair of cards make it faster? Yes. I got the performance I expected and my system has a 1080ti and 2070. Will VRAM pooling work? I have no idea. Reports of it actually being used in DS/iRay are few and far between.