Hi guys,
I’m curious to know what you would build or focus on in a computer build of $4000 budget.
Things to use this for would be: Blender, Adobe Premiere/After Effects, and a few other various movie making stuff like music production. (but mainly blender/adobe)
Also, need to have 1 small SSD for operating system, and 1 tb SSD for computer programs , and another 1TB SSD for project files.
Cheaper to build, or buy from a company?
Cheers!
Mr D
I’d definitely build. Intel-based, quad core or better (HT nice, but not critical), 16GB RAM or more, multiple 16x slots (for multiple video cards), beefiest Maxwell based GPU(s) that makes sense for your needs.
Are the quadro cards maxwell based? And to run multiple cards, does blender do that? For example, two quadro 4200 cards. Although I believe the two cards would not work with the 4k budget. Probably need 5k for that.
Nope, no Maxwell-based Quadros right now… and if you got two Quadros, you wouldn’t have much left for a decent system. You could get 3 980’s for around $1700 though (check out the reviews, they appear to be as impressive as the 750 ti was as a midrange card). You can definitely run multiple cards (for compute, not for interactive Blender use).
So that leaves me to wonder why the quadro cards are normally suggested for “workstations”? What are they supposed to be good for? Or is it just that two 980s out do the quadro?
( Two 980 cards in SLI would mean 4k cuda cores. )
Also, I wonder what you mean by compute vs interactive blender use. Are you referring to rendering vs just using blender to build the scene?
Thanks!
Most of what I’ve seen (reviews, benchmarks) about the high end of GPUs ($1k and up) indicates that they have specific features for CAD/CAM (specific OpenGL features used by CAD apps, double precision floating point performance) or server-based GPU (designed for 24x7 operation, ECC memory) usage depending on the particular card. They often don’t even offer significant performance improvements vs the midrange cards vs. the price delta. Just think of ‘workstation class’ or ‘enterprise grade’ as being code for ‘money is no object’ without many benefits for the average or even power user. Unless you have a specific need for the features provided, they’re usually not better from a price vs. performance standpoint.
Re: compute vs. interactive… it really boils down to Cycles rendering (which can take advantage of multiple GPUs, the only part of Blender which can AFAIK. Assuming you’re doing Cycles rendering, that’s going to be the majority of your time in Blender.) vs everything else (actually editing your model/scene/animation/whatever, BI rendering, rendering OpenGL previews, etc… which can only use a single GPU for rendering or are run on the CPU so its irrelevant) Also, Blender doesn’t run the cards in SLI… Cycles uses them as separate GPUs similar to how it can use multiple CPU cores (just faster due to the parallel nature of each GPU)
That’s great info. I appreciate that. I found another site which talks about what you mentioned.
http://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page/92-what-video-card-to-use
I guess the question now remains… two 780 ti cards, or one titan card?
Oh, and I’m leaning towards least investment in the CPU, as I’m reading most the stuff I am doing will require a lot of ram and video card capability, and esp hard drive capability. Am I wrong by thinking this???
Glad it helps. Your call between those two cards… personally, I wouldn’t look at anything other than a Maxwell based card right now as everything else is fast approaching or at end of life. Without fire sale pricing to blow out the old models, I don’t see a compelling reason to go with them. Given your $4k budget, I’d start with a single 980 card and just add more as needed. That way if it turns out you don’t need them now, you can hang on to the cash until next years mid-range hotness comes out. Just make sure the mobo/power supply you get now can handle the type and quantity of GPUs you plan to eventually have in there.
I wouldn’t cheap out on the CPU too much. At a minimum, get dual core with HT and at most get quad core with HT (realistically you’re only talking about a $200 to $400 expense and it really matters if you need to fall back to CPU rendering for a complex scene. You’ll also want more cores for video editing esp. encoding/transcoding) I wouldn’t bother with AMD CPUs right now… they’re in bad shape from a performance per watt standpoint vs. Intel right now.
I would build the monstrous tier from Logical Increments 
well I’d like a sparc (sun systems)
but 4 grand wont even get me a 4th hand one 
that monstrous tier looks fun but I reckon you could do better for less if carefull buying floats your boat 
instead of spending it all on one comp, you could spend part of it on a computer for working in blender, and part on one that was a dedicated renderer.
One 780 ti, the 780 ti is not much slower than the Titan and with the money you save, save up other software and gadgets you’ll need. (secondly, blender, as far as I know, only uses one GPU at the time SLI won’t do you any good)
A Few Examples:
…and there are more, but I don’t feel like naming all of them,
My few cents,
Jim
$4,000 what computer would you build?
I would spend around 1500 in the pc itself, since you get a high end machine for that money already. And the rest in peripheral equipment like a good keyboard, two high end graphic monitors, etc. The best pc makes no fun with just a single 200 dollar low end monitor …
For that kind of money, 12-core with HT is minimum.
Here’s a system I would build, if going for rendering speed, for around $4000 AUD, probably closer to $3.2k USD or less since our pricing is generally terrible.
That’s pretty much what I would build 
Plus the CPU will overclock nicely.
Do you mean a 6C/12T CPU then, or an acutal 12C/24T CPU?
Getting a Xeon E5-2670 is the cheapest 12C CPU, and with the higher Mobo/RAM cost, wouldn’t leave much room for good GPU’s, which I presume the OP would wan’t.
Some of you guys confused me! Someone says Cycles can use two GPU and someone says no?
I also see the 980 Nvidia card released, but no one has bench marks on it that I found in the blender forums.
@mrd777, Cycles can certainly use multiple GPU’s, as many as your system can fit Hence why I added 3 in my build
Got it. So based on phil’s reply, the 980 gtx is the way to go. It seems to be out of stock on NewEgg. That’s wierd…
It’s a new card that’s getting rave reviews so that’s to be expected for a while. If you’re ready to build this machine soon, probably best to get an order in as soon as you have the cash to get your place in line in the backorder queue.