The right build computer for a aspiring 3D artist

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Hi this is my first post on Blender Artist hope I’m in the right section and hello to every one!

I’m a aspiring 3D artist going though a certificate in 3D modelling and animation and I’m wanting to get into the gaming industry and its getting to the time my computer (a crappy acer laptop) is in need of a upgrade, I’ve goggled the hell out of this but all of you I need to know what PC or MAC / necessary hardware I need to consider buying to take my aspiration further.
All opinion is welcome I just want to know what I don’t know.

(budget is not a worry)

Thanks

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Hello !

Blender uses the available hardware that You have.
So the more powerful hardware the better probably it has no borders.

The hardware depends on what you want to focus -on rendering or animation and so on …
RAM is wellcome if you use particle system or simulations of smoke, liquids and so on -the more RAM the calculations (processing) is stable and quicker -the computer does not hang.

But RAM only gives you stability and some speed
truly CPU is importand when you do simulations and things I wrote, the more powerful CPU the quicker processing is. Using CPU you can also render things as well, but in nowdays there are powerfull graphic cards with CUDA which are faster in rendering than CPU’s -but they only render things.

Last thing is Hard Drive.
You can have fast CPU and graphic but the hard drive needs to be fast to read/ wrote data given from those hardware.
Also hard drive is important if your work professionally -results of your work must be secured in case of a malfunction.
People have got few drives in their computers -now popular and fast are SSD dvives and normal drives combined into RAID -this gives possibilities of having a very fast read/ wrote and works as a backup in case of malfunction.

Is good to have a good CPU (like Intel i7 or AMD as example) for calculations and baking; powerful graphic card with CUDA for rendering/ postprocessing; RAM as much as you want (I didn’t heard someone having more than 32 GB).
All depends if you are a patient or not but you have the money for hardware :wink:

My only dilemma for now is question what is better
motherboard with 2 CPU’s 1,5 GHZ: 100 cores (like in servers)
or
single CPU with 4,8 GHZ: 6-8 cores…

Maybe one day someone with cash will try both and give me an answer ;}

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That’s because the i-serie LG1155 socket cpu (i3, i5 and i7) that most people use support 32gig of ram maximum. You have to get a Xeon on a LG2011 socket to be able to address more than 32Gig of ram.

The LG1155 is also limited in PCIe lanes available which also restrict you in setting up a multi-GPU workstation.

But for someone starting out, a good i7 based PC with 16gig of ram (it’s really affordable) an SSD hard drive and one or two good nvidia based gaming card (try to get the 4Gig models) will do the job great. Later, if you get a good job or a lucrative contract, you can always upgrade to a workstation or use a render farm service ro render your most complex pieces.

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Thanks for the awesome replies so far I got a continuing question now.

Mac’s VS PC’s. for being a artist that wants to get into doing 3D for games which would be a better tool?

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Not only. If you do tracking, more RAM gives you the ability to handle bigger video size. And just for modeling, RAM is used to handle more polygons. Import a hairball like this http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/data/meshes.xml#9 and duplicate it, you see the RAM raises in taskmanager ;).

For rendering, NVIDIA cards with the max VRAM available is advised for big scenes : GTX 780 6Gb version, GTX Titan or Titan Black and soon, GTX 980 8 gb.