Best possible PC for rendering and animating with DAZ
ladywolf1
Posts: 123
Hello,
I'm in the process of buying a PC for rendering/animating with Daz mostly and Blender. Can you please suggest me the best possible pre-built PC I can purchase? I don't want bother with custom builds so I was suggested the Aurora MSI Infinite RS 13th or Alienware Aurora r15
Thanks! :)
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Both of those have serious issues with the amount of system RAM supplied vs the VRAM on the GPUs. Watercooling on a workstation? Errr... no. Utter overkill on the CPUs. Insufficient storage. They are gaming machines. You need a workstation.
You need a company that will build a PC to the specifications you supply if youre not prepared to roll up your sleeves. There are a myriad of companies who will make a system for you, the only effort on your part being supplying the specifications and a credit card number.
I can give you the specs for ours but it will set you back somewhere in the region of $16,000 depending on where you live. If you're in Australia, for example, it could be double that. Without a budget (you surely have one) or any indication of exactly what you're trying to do with it, this is not an answerable question.
OMG 16K, I live in Australia and that's actually more than my yearly income! (early retirement living on Superannuation)
main thing you need is a good Nvidia graphics card, more VRAM the better otherwise there is always Filament Render
(I have a Ryzen3 BTW which is very entry level, and I do animations, I do have an RTX2080Ti though a gift and 32GB of RAM)
That price was converted directly from British pounds to US dollars as that's usually how it works. What costs us £16k in Scotland would cost someone in the USA $16k. In Australia, having plugged it into a currency converter, it's closer to AUD 30,000. Everything PC based in Australia is horrifically expensive, which is why a lot of this is down to localisation. What's affordable or even cheap in the USA is ridiculously expensive in Australia.
We are, though, a British company. We can write off our investment in equipment against tax over a period of time and it's what we need to get our games out on time. It's utter overkill for the average person. The original question was 'what's the best PC for Daz?' It's essentially asking 'what is the best length of string'. Depends what you need it for and what your budget is.
You produce some amazing stuff on a lower-end PC using not a lot of money. Effort, skill and dedication can often trump an open wallet! I'm happy to help with hardware recommendations (it is my job, after all) but not to such an open-ended initial question.
As I've specified, animations and renders mostly in DAZ.
I know the Aurora doesn't have good ram but It's upgradable so guess that would be the solution. The aurora has the best gpu/cpu on the market so I can't really see the issue with it being not good??
I don't wanna spend 16k on a pc lol my biudget is around 4k
How is daz working especially in viewport, when real-time rendering for posing and stuff with your specs? Could you share your specs please for comparison? Ty!!
well I would never use the viewport realtime with iray to pose figures, I guess of you want to do that you need a very top end PC
I wasn't recommending mine BTW just saying the main thing is a good Nvidia card and mine also on the lower end now too (but I couldn't fit a better one in my rig if I wanted to)
I already said what I have and made the point one can still render animations with it, obviously better is faster etc
a gaming PC with a beefy card would do
You still haven't really specified what you want to do with your machine or where you live but a budget of 4k (USD?) is much more helpful! Do you usually use lots of characters in your renders or are you just interested in single character portraits? Are you making games or VNs? Graphic novels? Comics? Pre-production art? We might be able to half your budget if you tell us exactly what it's being used for. 'Daz renders and Blender' is a bit... generic. However, if you want to animate, speed will be your friend here but so will longevity of your equipment.
RTX gaming cards really aren't designed to be run 24/7 outputting animation frames but if your goals are more modest then a 4090 is probably the way to go. The equivalent Quadro/A-series card blows your budget before you've even started but they *are* designed to be run 24/7.
You do not need a high-end CPU or a high-end motherboard but, typically, gaming machines will come with both. A lower-end 10xxx series Intel i-5 is more than you need. Cut those back, increase the system RAM to 96GB or even 128GB. You will rarely find these options on off-the-peg PCs.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the PCs you listed but they are gaming machines. You *could* use them for rendering but you've wasted money on things you don't need that could be better put to use somewhere else. Flashy cases and LED lighting?
I'm not going to produce a parts list here but the basics for a high end Daz machine in your budget are a 4090 and over 64GB of RAM. The rest, quite honestly, is pretty irrelevant. If you really won't build it yourself, I'd suggest a search for a PC supplier who will build to your specifications and won't oversell you things you don't need.
Not sure if you saw over at forums a recent thread on similar topic https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/630086/advice-for-an-iray-pc-2023#latest
You may get lucky and have someone own one of those 2 systems and comment.
Personally would suggest get best GPU you can. Choose or build your DS system around that. The faster and more vram the less you wait for iray viewport feedback and have less issue with optimising assets.
And arguably get at least 64GB of ram.
My specs are 3090xtreme 24gb vram, 128gb ram, and a cpu capable of operating at fast speeds. Number of cores so far doesn't matter much, as animation is single core and tied to cpu one core top speed.
The 4090 is still not fast enough for Viewport realtime. Maybe 5090 in 2 years or so- getting there. So as a benchmark for you to decide, would say 3090 is probably a decent entry for not waiting around too much. Whereas my 2080ti was too slow.
Today there still is no perfect setup for DS Iray-animations. But it is getting decent. Just get good parts if you want it to last a while.
In my experience DAZ figures are always "evolving" to take more and more resources it seems there's no limit what the PAs can do to bog down your hardware. So there's no best possible PC, in that what's now the best will be inadequate in a couple years.
The only solution is to use the scene optimizer to reverse back the "better quality" of the new products.
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
p.s. The Alienware Aurora R15 with the 4070-Ti and 32 GB ram will be good, but you also need the scene optimizer. The ram must be 2x the vram minimum.
p.p.s. For rendering you also need a good monitor, be sure it is a ips covering the full srgb gamut. Avoid lcd.
All depends what you are doing at same time. Ram is relatively cheap. And usually upgrade means get all new unless you still find a matching set (assuming you had 2sticks and upgraded to 4).
32gb feels like its cutting it close for me. And next step up is 64GB. But like PSUs, many like just the minimum. With possible effects down the road being at the edge. So choose wisely Luke. ;)
Just a heads-up that the new re-designed Alienware R16 was announced this morning...
ALIENWARE AURORA R16 GAMING DESKTOP
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/alienware-aurora-r16-gaming-desktop/spd/alienware-aurora-r16-desktop
Details here...
Alienware’s new Aurora R16 desktop sheds gobs of plastic for a 40 percent smaller build
"But its boxy new design ditches multiple pounds of plastic to make the entire computer 40 percent smaller in volume — shrinking all the way down from 60.7 liters to 36 liters in total."
"The result is “up to” 10 percent lower CPU and 6 percent lower GPU temperatures, and a 20 percent quieter system on average. It’s the quietest Aurora that the company has ever built, says long-time Alienware vet Eddy Goyanes."
"The new R16 comes standard with Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E, a 500W 80+ Platinum power supply and 12-phase voltage regulation, and two memory slots and two M.2 SSD slots for up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and up to 8TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage. You can fit a 3.5mm spinning hard drive in there as well. There’s also an optional 1000W power supply depending on your CPU and GPU."
"It’s available today starting at $1,750 in the United States (or $2300 CAD in Canada) with an air-cooled Core i7 13700F and Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics (12GB). You won’t get much higher in the GPU department for a bit: Asia and Europe can start with a RTX 3050 or upgrade to a RTX 4080 if you like, but in the United States the only other GPU option is the RTX 4070 Ti until later in the year. A 13th Gen i9 13900F is also available, though, and the company says the R16 will become its most powerful desktop by the end of the year."
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/22440712/alienware-aurora-r16-desktop-announcement
Not enough for the money.
A 500w power supply that you have only one upgrade choice with?
And space for a 3.5 inch hard drive would be much more useful.
Does anyone even make a 3.5 millimeter one?
It has all of the build quality, customer service, and purchasing traps
of a Dell. (Yes, I've had two of them, one is running as I type.)
Just search youtube for "Alienware"