Building a PC. Whats your thought on these parts ?

Hey there

I am about to build a new Pc. And was wondering what the best parts are to use for blender.

I am thinking of using a
Gigabyte Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX770 Windforce Overclocked 4 GB GDDR5-RAM PCIe x16 DVI, HDMI™, DisplayPort

and as a processor a:
AMD FX 8350

Did anybody used these parts before and can share their thoughts on them that be great :slight_smile:

PS: I am pretty sure (based on the research I done) that these parts will work good with blender but I am about to spend quite a bit of money one this build, at least for me, so I just want to double check :slight_smile:

Theyll work just fine. Whats your main goal though? Do you want to render huge scenes with Cycles, do low poly modelling or something else? Depending on your needs, the build could be tweaked further.

I have your AMD FX 8350 4Ghz 8 cores cpu, very fast with Blender internal and Yafaray renders, both support cores.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-Core&id=1780

Best parts depend on your budget. So, first thing’s first: what is the maximum amount of money you are willing to spend for a new PC?

First of all thanks you for your answers.

@Bloodwork
My main focus right now are big photorealistic scene (using cycle), physics simulations and motion graphics.

@swene
My budget sits at around 1000 euros for this build.

If you’re going with AMD processor then you can probably afford to get a gtx780, or you might want to think about 2 gtx 760’s instead. Having 2 cards will almost double the rendering speed. 2 760’s are about the same price as a 780 or you can do what I did and get 1 760 and 1 770. My rig cost just a bit above $1000 US and I have a I7 4770 @ 3.5ghz, 16gb ram, GTX760+770 (@ 2GB gddr5).

Photorealism can require quite the memory, especially if you don`t have time for optimisations, therefore you should aim for GTX 780 6Gb GPU rendering.

For physics simulation CPU and RAM will be more important though because in Blender GPU can be utilised only for rendering. So you have to decide between photrealistic Cycles scenes and phys sim - better GPU for rendering or better CPU/more RAM for physics simulation.

Thanks guys :slight_smile: Your comments helped out a lot. They definitely gave me some great new ideas to think about.

Hi! I’m new with blender ( a year so far learning all on my own!), and i’m looking to build a new computer. I might need phys sim with really nice rendering (close to photorealism). So, i was wondering if blender works fine if I build my computer with multi cpu motherboard? What is the limit? No budget so far, I’m just gathering information!

I’m sure other people’s mileage has varied, but I’ve never had good luck with anything I’ve bought from these guys. As a result, I don’t buy anything from them any more. I’ve had two motherboards go tits up and a graphics card go south. Two strikes, fine. Three? You’re outta there. (as they say)

Considering the fact that a GTX 770 is basically an overclocked and rebranded GTX 680, that’s more or less my setup you want to get there (including the Gigabyte WindForce).

Don’t be too optimistic concerning the CPU performance. Yes, the 8350 is a decent CPU (especially in that price region), but it is no match for Intel’s i7. The FX-8350 beats an i5 in multi-threaded processes, but is even slower than the i5 in single-threaded processes, which you will still find a lot under Blender’s hood. Don’t get me wrong, from my hobbyist’s perspective the 8350 has a very decent price-performance-ratio and has never let me down, but if you’re after raw power, all ways lead to Intel.

I quite like the Gigabyte card, until now (knocking on wood) it’s very stable and the WindForce thing is both silent and cool. Mind you, though, that if you want to add a second card later, the WindForce might cause trouble. The fans on that card blow the hot air back into the case - and with two (or more) of those cards in close proximity, they will severely block each others’ airflow. So, if you think of expanding later, get a card with nVidia’s reference cooling design, which is blowing the hot air out of the case.

Not sure if I would still buy the GTX 770/680, though. That line of cards was a bit of a disappointment concerning the CUDA performance. Maybe a GTX 780 is indeed your best bet today or wait a little for the GTX 8xx line up. What ever you do, I for myself would not buy cards with only 2 GB of VRAM. The sparse amount of VRAM has always been the Achilles’ heel of GPU rendering, so, get as much as you possibly can. 2 GB is IMHO very limiting.

Hi, just for info, the GTX 600 series got a significant speedup with 2.71.
Look at my benchmarks (770 profits too):

http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?342000-The-new-Cyles-GPU-2-71-Benchmark&p=2686216&viewfull=1#post2686216

Cheers, mib

Hi Martin,

with 1000EUR you could buy something like this:

Edit: (Mainboard: AsRock B85m pro4 So. 1150 -> 53EUR) Actually this board needs a newer Bios to support the Xeon E3-1231. Possible Solutions:
-Buy an E3-1230v3(3.3Ghz) which is supported in all Bios-Versions instead of the E3-1231V3(3.4ghz) cost is the same
-Buy another Mainboard for example: MSI H97 PC Mate(has even 2x PCIe 16x slots instead of one) -> 66 EUR
-Know someone with an supported CPU and use this to flash the bios

RAM: crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3-1600mhz cl9 -> 115EUR
-> 16GB Ram + 2 Free Slots with the possibilty to upgrade to 32GB RAM later

CPU: Intel xeon E3-1231v3 4x3.4Ghz -> 202EUR
-> basically a cheaper i7(Hyperthreading but no graphics unit), stock cooler will do it and can be upgraded if you want

GPU: Zotac GTX 780 OC 6GB -> 456EUR
-> Fast Card + a lot of VRAM for Cycles GPU Rendering

Power Supply: Be quiet! E9 Straight Power 450 watt -> 68 EUR
-> Efficient + high quality -> enough power for this build

That are roughly 900 EUR. I don´t know if you own older parts that you can reuse else you would additionally need:

Sata-DVD-Drive -> 15EUR (or install from stick if possible?!)
Case -> 30EUR (just watch out that there is enough room for the graphics card, the matx mainboard has to fit in + the atx power supply + a 2.5" slot for an SSd would be nice, but these can be adapted + maybe some fans for better airflow to keep things cool while rendering)
3.5" Sata-HDD 1000GB -> 45EUR (If you want to trade a bit of money+storage-space for more speed: an crucial Mx100 256 GB comes in at 85EUR)

That would be around 990 EUR then. If you still need a copy of windows:

+70 EUR -> 1060 EUR

I think this is still “around 1000”. If it is too much you could go with 1 8gb stick of ram in the beginnig ending up at 1000EUR.

Only thing you can´t do with this machine is overclocking the CPU.

Hopefully i didn´t forgot anything as i write this the third time now…

Granite_skull´s is pretty optimal. You should add 100W to that PSU however.

@anaho the powersupply with 450 Watt is enough for the mentioned setup, but one could argue that you could get a bit more efficiency while rendering with CPU+GPU with a few Watt more as the powersupplys are typically most efficient at 50% load.

Also if you decide to go with the MSI H97 PC Mate mainboard you would have 2xPCIe Slots. Now if you would want to upgrade the GTX 780 later down the road(as graphics card seem to advance faster than the CPUs it is very likely, or you want to simply buy another one later), you could use both cards with this mainboard. Then the 450Watt PSU would´t be enough anymore, but buying 700-800 Watt PSU now is maybe a bit overkill(maybe +30EUR and relativly low efficiency at idle).

Great build, granite_skull. I would definitely jump on that or something very similar if I was in the market for a computer in that price range (someday :yes:).