Looking at PCs
VIArts
Posts: 1,526
in The Commons
What's a good, safe place to rder a high end custom desktop PC? Not too worried about price as long as it's reasonable. Suggestions?
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scan.co.uk
PCspecialist, again in the uk.
I second that one - although not a lot of use to you as I seem to remember you are on the other side of the pond.
I just built my own PC using the advice and tutorials on this site:
https://www.cgdirector.com/best-computer-3d-modeling-rendering/
I'm a video/animation guy who went to art school, not a gear head, so I had my doubts, but I decided to go for it and it was actually not that hard, just had to take my time and be methodical and careful. The guy who runs the site is pretty responsive, too, and can answer your questions. I bought pretty much all the parts from Amazon, and I ended up with a pretty fast machine (3x faster than my 2012 Mac Pro) for probably about 1/2 the price if I had bought one off the shelf.
Good memory there. lol But I thougt Jaderail got his "Monster" from somewhere o'er th' pond?
Too bad i don't know anyone who's willing to help me
you can pick up this for £33k https://www.overclockers.co.uk/8pack-orionx2-dual-system-extreme-overclocked-pc-intel-core-i9-7980xe-and-intel-core-i7-9700k-fs-006-8p.html
UGH! I'll psss! lol
Think it is more of a case where not to buy one.
or some dubious Ebay site unless you can return it.
Don't look at Wish for example
A known retailer is likely your best safest choice, anything cheap is likely suspect, look on sites like Techpowerup forums and Tom's Hardware and you will see all the scary stories of fake GPU's etc and probably get some more idea of what is safe locally.
Ibuypower.com , you can have PC or laptop custom built to your budget or specs which ever you prefer . I have used them for a number of builds and have never been disappointed. plus they ship world wide.
https://www.ibuypower.com/
Not Ibuypower, uggh.
For a serious high end machine, if you have the money for it,
https://www.originpc.com/
https://maingear.com/
https://www.digitalstorm.com/
Those are safe bets. They all package andship their systems very well and build very high end systems.
If you're in the US or Canada and are ok building it yourself, pcpartpicker is a nice site to get prices and configure your system.
https://pcpartpicker.com
Okay, i feel dumb.
I'm looking at an RTX 2080 TI, BUT I'm just now seeing there's different brands. Does Iray onl work on ones from NVIDIA?
No, it will work on the other branded ones too, I recommend MSI and EVGA personally. Always have good luck with their GPU's. Basically the other brands, are gpu sold to them from nvidia, and they customize it with their own cooling systems and stuff.
I'm running an Nvidia GTX 980Ti made by EVGA. As long as the chip is nvidia, it doesn't matter who makes the card.
Laurie
NVIDIA sells their actual GPU chip to other manufacturerers. These will each have differences in the housing design and support circuitry, but they should each work on the same things.
Oh joy, EVGA has a ton of editions... You know waat they say when there's a ton of editions? "Which is better"
Fisrt thing I would check on, measure how much room you have in your case. Make sure you are buying a card that will actually fit. My old build I had ordered one without considering it, and ended up having to cut a hole in the side of my case to fit it lol.
I'm listing up parts to build my own, so...
In your shoes
a) you should search Amazon in your local country from a pre-built PC that has included the specific video card you want.
b) Then search for those with that card that most closely match the rest of the specs you want. Buy that one that in your price range.
c) Absolutely can't be satisfied with one spec or another on that PC but absolutely don't want to attempt upgrade yourself? Search for and buy the best part(s) you want on Amazon and then take it to your local Office Depot or similar and pay them a one time fee to change out all the parts you bought. Use PCPartPicker website and enter in all the parts in your PC and save as "Original", copy that "Original" to a new name, say "Upgrade" and when you search for parts to upgrade on your "Upgrade" PC, PCPartPicker will tell you if it will work. Now actually use Amazon to find those compatible parts you want to use and buy them.
As a note I thought I could build a new PC for about $650 but because I don't see the point in not maxing out system RAM to 64GB the MB supported and the system disk to a 2TB SSD that price quickly shot up to $1000. Of course it's likely I can use the SSD indefinitely now, the RAM will probably have to be upgraded in 5 years or so though with a new MB & CPU.
If you primarily render get the cheapest you can find. The differences are primarily in clock speed, which is mostly irrelevant in iRay, and how powerfukl the cooler is, also not terribly important if you onmly have one and decent airflow through the case. Even if you game, unless you really really need every possible frame, still get the cheapest that will fit in your case.