i could use some help picking the parts for my computer.
i’m aiming for blender performance and rendering more than any sort of gaming… though with Unreal 4 and Unity 5 now being free their performance may be a consideration as well.
$2500 US is my max budget for parts and while i could cannibalize parts off of my current pc it isn’t always good to work where you play. that said i don’t really game much anyway and it would mean that i could spend that money on the internals rather than building a whole new computer… and with the currently chosen parts in the list that adds up to about $400.
also, i’m a little iffy about water cooling i don’t know if i should be or not but i don’t have the cash on hand to replace an expensive graphics card should one (or more) kill over due to a leak.
I’m certainly no hardware expert but nevertheless here are some thoughts of mine.
The solid state drive is nice but I’d guess not really necessary. But that may be because I’ve never had one and I’m already used to slow loading times.
The GTX 980 is considerably more expensive than the 970 but the performance isn’t that much higher. You could knock off $200 on each card if you went with the 970. Going slightly below the highest end also makes it less painful to upgrade when something better comes out. (Again, I know nothing about hardware and how this stuff affects Blender.)
Make sure that the motherboard doesn’t do wifi; if it does then you can delete the wireless adapter. Or see if there’s a version of that board that includes wireless and if it costs less than the wireless adapter. It’s only a measly $18 so not a big item, I guess mainly it frees a slot. I noticed this item because my motherboard has wifi.
I’m assuming you’re planning to use Cycles with the dual-GPU setup? I don’t think you need a water cooler, or even the CPU cooler, as your CPU ships with its own. You also don’t need the thermal paste, unless you want to apply more than what’s already on the CPU when it ships. What’s going to run hot are your video cards, but it looks like the case has proper ventilation. I put the M5A99FX mobo in my recent build with two GTX 780Ti’s. The two cards overlapped the PCI slot. If the same thing happens for you, you won’t be able to get that wi-fi card in anyway. The small SSD boot drive is a good idea, though you might want to bump up to the 250 GB range. 100 goes fast, even if it’s just your boot drive, and it’s better to keep more space free. Unless you’re set on the 980s, I would also recommend dropping down to the 970s and put the money you save into better monitors. Get 24" with better color accuracy. It will make your workflow much more enjoyable. Are you committed to Windows? If your rig is primarily for Blender, you can(and should IMHO) install an Ubuntu distro.
All minor details, you’ve got a great rig in the works.
Cheers!
i would concentrate on the cpu not the gpu. you can always add more ram while gpus are limited to 4 gigs and even thats really expensive. look at all the cuda out of memory posts in the tech support forum. and there are things th cpu can do that the gpu simply cant. get a good power supply with more power than you think you’ll need so you dont have to worry about upgrades later putting you over your limit. get a good mother board, hard to recommend one because different processors use different mother boards. get plenty of ram.
you are spending over 1000 on gpus but less than 200 on the cpu? gpus are relesed every year, they become out dated quickly and much cheaper compared to the cpu. make the cpu the heart of your system. cpus dont drop in price as fast or become out dated as fast. use the gpu to assist your cpu if needed. its much easier to swap out gpus if needed than cpu. upgrading the cpu could require another motherboard because the sockets are different.
Hi, if you need the system for heavy CPU usage too it is no way around Intel, old AMD user speaking.
Intel setup is more expensive but you can save a lot with GTX 970, as lumpyoatmeal mention.
Look to my benchmark:
The SSD is may to small for Windows, btw. I would buy Windows 7 cheap and upgrade to Windows 10 costless. @lumpyoatmeal, SSD was the best hardware buy for me, you think you got a new PC.
drop the motherboard to as rock 99 extreme 4
go for 16 gig on the ddr4 ram
the cheapest windows (unless you have a disk and license you can move over to the new pc, then none)
liquid cooling if you might want to over clock later (and to keep it cool rendering)
3tb hdd give you plenty of space for downloading tutorials etc…
120 gig ssd
bluray rewriteable so you have plenty of room for your rendered movies or backups.
gtx 750 gpu, you’ll be doing your rendering on the cpu
700 watt zalman case
that would hit you $2378. you have 3 pcie X16 incase you want to add gpus later.
or you can drop the hdd to 2 tb and a dvd rw drive and bump the ram up to 32 gigs. $2496
its the fastest cpu on the market, the liquid cooling will let you push it to the limit safely and even over clock. and its ddr4 not ddr3. you could be rendering long after your dual gpu system has given up and crashed. if mib has a different opinion go with him, hes the benchmark guru.
if you want to game on it you could go for the 16 gigs of ram and get a better gpu doping the 750 and adding a 970 would be $2521 just a bit above your cap. if you drop to a 1 tb hdd it would be $2490. and i seen a 2tb usb3.0 external hdd at sams club for $59 if you need more storage later.
that includes shipping a 2 year replacement warranty. you can get a 3rd year for $10.
Thanks, I’m glad you said that. Next time I upgrade, which is getting closer and closer, I’ll put in an SSD.
I’ll be the bad boy sh*t stirrer and say it: stick with Windows. Linux is great for a server but for a desktop Windows still rules. I worked for 30 years as a system administrator and towards the very end as a web applications developer and our servers were always unix; BSD, Solaris, and all Linux towards the end. For servers it’s no contest; Linux rules. I love unix/Linux. But I had Windows on my desk computer. For many years I had a unix workstation on my desk. When I switched to Windows (NT) it was much better and I never looked back. No two ways about it, Windows sucks in a lot of ways, but in the long run it just makes things less of a hassle on the desktop.
Hi again, you could really think about to go the CPU way, you get no GPU memory limit and you can use all features of Cycles, smoke/fire for example.
But, there are other GPU accelerated applications, video editors, image editors, other render engines and even browser use it today.
You can beat the i7 8 core easy with two 970/980 in Cycles performance but it has its limits.
For a GPU system a small i7 quad core, for a CPU system a i7 6 or 8 core depends on budget.
Not a special board but I would not go for DDR4 boards, still to expensive and not much better performance.
Btw. the link from rdo3 is interesting, the 8 core is 20% faster but cost 500$ more.
Not really a good deal.
thanks everybody!
i’ll rework my list with all of this input later tonight. probably am going to end up making the jump to intel and drop the 980s.
also, i’m a linux user by default i just have to use windows to open AutoCAD .dwg files since i haven’t found a way to open them on linux… at least not one that i thought was worth remembering. leave it to proprietary software and file formats to force people into using windows though.
I’m curious as to how you’ll determine what’s a decent cpu. I did a search on Amazon for “Intel i7 6 core” and one of the results was “Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.3GHz LGA 2011-v3 140W Desktop Processor BX80648I75820K” for US$ 385. Is 140W high or what? I’m wondering why they mention that when with the other processors they don’t mention the wattage.
All of the other 6 core processors that the search came up with are about or at least US$ 200 more.
ended up going with ddr4 because there wasn’t any choice in the matter with the given cpu. it’s a lga2011-3 socket and even the cheapest boards for it were ddr4.
that cpu seemed like a good choice for it’s price point so while i did pay more for ram and such it does mean more room for expansion/upgrades later on up to the 8 core i7 if i have the cash to blow or i feel like i need it.
i do tend to upgrade rather than replace my whole rig if i can avoid it so it’s not really out of the question if i do upgrade i’m sure my brother would be happy for a cheaper upgrade to his comp at the family discount of free… technically he’d just need the mobo and ram then.
went with win 8.1 since 10 isn’t due out until later in the year and i’ll still get a free upgrade to it… plus 8.1 is actually lighter weight than 7 and they sell for about the same price everywhere i looked.
when i was searching around i found that 120g should be enough for windows (windows itself should be about 20gigs or so provided you clean out the temp windows files regularly. mostly i read that it’s the windows update .msi installer files that start eating your space)
i’m still a little on the fence about the monitors though. i have a 23" ips and a 21.5" tn on my current setup. i use the ips for any sort of color work and the tn is mostly just for extra stuff where color isn’t as important but extra screen space is very handy. the slightly smaller size isn’t really a big deal to me especially since side by side theres maybe a thumb width difference in actual screen vertical size total.
i’m likely to swap my current ips over to the new rig anyway so i may even drop a monitor out of the list considering that.
I wonder why nobody ever mentions Lian Li cases any more. They used to be the Rolls Royces of computer cases. All aluminum so they’re light, and since they’re all metal they’re built to last. Mine is about 10 years old and still going strong. It has 2 fans, one in the front and one on the side; the side one blows onto the motherboard and cpu. It looks similar to the 8E except that the 8E only has 1 fan.
I got a question…Im looking to get a new PC soon… The one I want is upgradable to 32G ram Comes with a card…maybe a 750…now if the cards only have 2g ram…the PC can do 32G…which is great would there be any noticeable affect when rendering using CPU with a good graphics card compared to no graphics card…Im just wondering if the cpu gets a bump in boost with the card then without one…Also is it a no brainer to use CPU being the graphics end is so limited?
I am not sure if you have purchased your new system or not (“here’s the reworked list”, followed by “ended up going with”?), but on the chance you have not I will give my two cents. Whether the CPU or GPU/GPU’s are ideal for you depends on what kind of projects you will be working on. If you will not be using much of the memory-heavy features then you may have no issue with the GPU route, otherwise you may find the render speed to be of no advantage due to lack of memory. Personally I will have nothing to do with water cooling, any chance of a leak in my workstation is unacceptable. I only use Noctua coolers, pricey but to me totally worth it.
I definitely recommend an SSD for the primary, regarding games I have 3 games on a second SSD only for that purpose, but remember (as I found out) some games do not like being installed on any drive other than C, so for the small amount extra cost a 250 GB is a good idea. If you are going to build a new system yourself, make sure the case is roomy enough to comfortably install the parts, and upgrade parts in the future if needed (my mid-tower is not as roomy as I thought it was). Unless you really want it I also recommend passing on the new Intel CPU & mobo, insufficient improvement for the steep price & new expensive ram requirement.
