Building a Gaming Computer for Blender - Need Build Advice

Want to build my own gaming computer with Blender as the priority. Looking for fast rendering. Looking to make games and movie animations with Blender. What is the perfect PC build for Blender right now (2015)? MMORPG friendly. Links welcome. Prefer advice from personal experience building PC’s.

The priority is to get a mouse with a scroll wheel so you can scroll down to the support forums

Moved from general Forums / Blender & CG Discussions to Support / Technical Support

For heavy heavy duty blender work… Basically…

RAM - I recommend 8GB @ 1600MHz+ absolute minimum. 16GB, great. 32GB fabulous.

GPU - if you are going to be using GPU’s to render, the more cores per GPU the better.

I can tell you that 2x GTX 980 SC’s will munch through your renders at a pretty fantastic rate, but I can also tell you that the stock coolers don’t like handling the heat - both my 980’s topped out in the high 70’s, in a cool room, on a relatively simple scene a couple of hours before I began to write this; So I wouldn’t recommend a stock cooled GPU.

You could use a single high end card, or multiple lower end cards to good effect.

COOLING - if your render times start stacking up; get ALL the fans. Pump as much lung candy as you can through that case. Or if you are feeling adventurous, keep it cool and quiet with a decent water loop.

CPU - pick your poison. It’s either going to be Intel or AMD right? I prefer AMD myself, because i’m weird. Go as high end as you can afford. I don’t recommend getting the very top of the line, usually not worth the pitiful performance increase over the one that costs $300 less.

If your rig can crunch those renders out, it will likely run anything you want to play, and run it shiny and smooth.

I’ve tried to be fairly straight to the point here, built my current rig with blender in mind first and gaming second… It does everything I need it to do and more… apart from stay cool. I need to fix that. Hope this is all of some help to you anyway!

Yes, thx. I read overclocking, which improves gaming, hurts rendering. I’m not tech savy enough to understand what I’m reading yet. I’m more of a programming geek than a builder.

Coolings been bothering me. My static charged carpet covered cat enhanced tiny apartment doesn’t make building a PC seem feasible. I’m a walking electrical storm and I don’t believe a plastic floor mat or the stupid wrists bands will help. Also the apartment’s electricity is old so I can’t build anything that drinks large cups of wattage. Add to that a “friendly” roommate who thinks I’m full of it and should buy the parts and build it already.

lol i love your style :smiley:

Well for your static concerns, a wrist strap sounds like a good idea. If you don’t want to buy one, you can use any piece of conductive wire to link yourself to any large metal object. You can also ground yourself directly via the pc case if the power supply is in place and plugged into a grounded mains socket (doesn’t need to be switched on). Simply touch the case, or even just the psu chassis before handling any components.

As for energy consumption, I don’t know how bad your mains wiring is, but if you really need to keep it down you will need to do some research; everything in your system is going to add up. If you don’t shop carefully, it could literally just be that second stick of RAM that tips it over the edge and trips out your fusebox.

You should probably start your build by looking at intel CPU’s. AMD cpu’s, in virtually any scenario (at this point in time) draw a good chunk more power. If the price is a problem though, that’s not to say you couldn’t of course go AMD - they DO have a few lower draw CPU’s on offer (look for the “E” tag on the model number) but there’s a fairly notable performance notch down from their headliners.

After you’ve made your CPU choice, then comes your motherboard. You should probably keep a few CPU choices floating around as you may not be able to find a motherboard with your desired spec - not enough SATA/USB ports etc. A little searching you should be able to get the two paired up, and from that point on-wards it’s relatively plain sailing.

One thing I will urge for you especially, and anyone else with dodgy mains wiring…

Power Supply: DO. NOT. SKIMP.

Make sure you get yourself a power supply with all the bells and whistles you can afford/think necessary. And your entire system should plugged into something with surge protection. I have seen too many PC’s die before their time because people failed at this hurdle.

The PSU should also be rated with a good 20-25% headroom over your total system requirements. The reasoning for this is that many components may be supplied with a power rating, but that rating is generally from a “real world” heavy usage scenario. (80% load or so). So the headroom I suggest covers for those 100% load scenarios.

As a last side note here, if you don’t think you’re comfortable overclocking - just don’t do it. There is plenty of material out there to study if you really want to give it a go though.

Provided your overclock, CPU or GPU is stable, than it most certainly helps rendering as well as gaming.

In terms of power usage, even a highly overclocked twin GPU system is unlikely to consume more than 800W, and highly unlikely that your going to be loading all parts to 100% at the same time.

In terms of a suggested build from me:
CPU: Intel. For both power usage, gaming speed and rendering speed, they are well worth the cost over any AMD CPU’s. An i7 6700k based system would do quite well for gaming and rendering (games generally prefer less, up to 4 higher clocked cores).
RAM: 16GB DDR4, at a decent speed > 2000 MHz
GPU: Either 1 or 2 of the GTX 980Ti’s, the 6GB is quite useful compared to the 4GB of a 980, and they are incredibly fast and cost effective compared to a Titan.
Motherboard: One that supports the RAM/GPU’s you want, possibly an M2 slot for a SSD
HDD/SSD: I would go with a 512GB SSD to store games and working files on, and a HDD of your preferred size for media files. I would recommend 2x HDD’s for redundancy if your work is important.
PSU: Something manufactured by Seasonic (not necessarily their brand) are some of the top performing PSU’s.
Case: Go for several you like the look of, and see which ones are large enough, and support good cooling.
Cooling: As JER said, get as many decent case fans as you can. If you want to go all air, a large Noctua cooler, or similar performance (check reviews) would be the way to go.
A full water loop will let you push your hardware faster, and quieter, but depending on your budget is not worth it (eg $$ on a second GPU would be better performance wise)

Depends on the PSU as well. With one R9 390 my system is going over 670 W because of a 4 year old PSU and all the fans to cool the cabinet down including CPU cooler.

It is much better to get a 1200 W PSU for two GPUs especially AMDs for it to work for few years, because every year the capacity of the PSU will come down.

So I need to be looking into setting Blender to use GPU not CPU? I got this info when looking it up -

Cycles only supports CUDA GPUs with a CUDA compute ability of 2.0 or higher. To use CUDA, check to make sure your GPU is on this list of CUDA capable GPUs and has a ranking of at least 2.0.

If anyone has anything to add to that let me know.

OMFG someone else who understands the merits of not going cheep on the powersupply!!! I thought I was the only one!

But if you are parting together a rig you could do worse then liquid cooling for your cpu. Say what you will there are some benefits to dumping all of your CPU heat directly outside of your chassis. It helps everything run cooler.

But yeah, Your powersupply is the part most likely to fuck you if you go cheep. Read some reviews and spend the extra 50. That paltry amount of cash will add years to your pc’s life span.

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Actually if you plan on doing renders you very well could load your CPU and GPU’s to 100 percent. It is unlikely everyday that you will be in an auto accident, But you buckle your seat-belt so that when you do you don’t get a face full of windshield on your way out of the car.

Spend the little extra for more powersupply, And make sure you have good cooling. This is not 2003, its 2015 and right now the pc you put together today could very well be a viable machine for over a decade.

Got it. But I wasn’t looking to cheapen the price of my power supply. I was looking to reduce the amount of wattage a computer pulls from an outlet. Keeping in mind that even in the united states (Britain and the Ukraine have this difficultly I believe) there are apartment buildings and other housing with poor electrical. Rather than having to rewire my entire apartment which I have no idea how to do I was trying to see what advancements in the PC market had taken this into consideration.


About GPU I may be getting slow for some of you who are in the know but this GPU situation for Nvidia is gawd important. In trying to figure out how to build a PC to get the best from rendering I’ve been using my old Dell 64bit with Vista OS as experiment grounds. I’ve added a newer graphic card, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti, that now lets me play with CUDA and the rendering has improved phenomenally. I don’t like that I have to choose to use GPU I think it should be the default and you should have to choose to use CPU.

(how to CUDA GPU settings if anyone wants - http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/)