Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Just noting that the 3950X 16 cores should be arriving next month, as well as the new Threadrippers.
You had 3900X in your specs, hence my mention. Really, the main advantage of more cores is for those times when renders drop to CPU only, IF Daz Studio can take advantage of larger core counts. Otherwise, if you avoid CPU only renders like the plague, really the 3700X should be plenty fine unless you have need of more cores for other things, like video editing.
Personally, I'm planning on an Asrock X570 Creator motherboard. It's pricey, but has Thunderbolt 3 support. Thunderbolt 3 options aren't all that common in AMD land. I'm wanting the Thunderbolt support for other things that aren't Daz related. I have a Threadripper build planned as well, but may hold off on that one and focus on the AM4 biuld for now. Nvidia graphics card prices are still rather insane, so that multi GPU Threadripper build isn't as much of a priority at the moment. I need lots of VRAM for my scenes, but spending $2500 plus for a RTX Titan is just a bit too painful...
Anyways, back to your build, looks pretty good, and it looks like others have a lot of good suggestions.
Thanks, I'll check them out tomorrow.
1GB is fine for docs, although I have had a decentish camera for a couple of years now and the (other kind of) CR2 files are mounting up at 24MB a pop. But content, I have over 1GB in DIM zips (and that excludes the Genesis 8 stuff) so SSD isn't really an option (yet).
Another possiblility when considering drive cost vs. speed for asset storage is the Seagate Firecuda. It is a 1- or 2- TB mechanical HDD plus a small SSD that basically acts as a big buffer. The speed and cost is between that of a sata SSD and a HDD. The 2 TB drives go on sale periodically for about $85. I have several, and have been been happy with them so far, just wish they made one larger than 2TB.
Thanks, 2TB might be workable for just DS content (I usaully also dumpt stuff like video tutroials on my "content" drive), worth a look.
If you go with a hybrid drive make absolutely sure you put your computer on a UPS. My employer has had to get a large number of hybrid drives replaced when the SSD cache drive and the platter main drive got knocked out of sync by a power failure, resulting a loss in the drive.
I see. Fortunately I do have a UPS, assuming it can cope (it runs the current system for a good twenty minutes if it's idling, I think it was slightly overspecified).
All you really need is enough power to do a controlled shutdown. It's the abrupt shutdown that's hosed our systems. Temper that with my employer has several thousand computers and most of them are just fine. And you can't ever have a UPS that too high capacity. :)
A power failure may have killed some drives by the heads crashing. You could lose some data if the caching was somehow setup for writes, it should be a read cache only. But losing drives due to some "out of sync" issue between the two? That just not how drives work.
Similarly, Crucial has a software product they call, I think, "Storage Executive" that among other things provides a RAM buffer of writes to your spiffy new SSD to minimize excessive small writes to the SSD and provide much quicker service in some situations. They grab about 500MB to 1GB+ of RAM for their buffer and HIGHLY recommend that you run your system on an UPS power safe system
. After getting my first SSD I thought about using their buffer app, but it gave me a little bit of grief trying to install it, but that gave me time to finally come to the conclusion that I'd live without it.
I don't want to think about losing a GB of diskwrites to my SSD.
As an alternative, shadow.tech (cloud computing) is soon upgrading their systems to RTX.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ShadowPC/comments/dorchd/recap_shadow_keynote_october_29_2019/
For me 2TB max storage is not enough, but the rest of the max specs are nice (RTX GPU, 32GB Ram).
It's proably a Quardo GPU, after they are not allowed to use in server farms the normal gForce GPUs... so it's very likly more than 11GB VRAM.
With so many good laptops these days that have NO DVD/CD internals, they have been making some pretty decent external DVD/CD readers and/or writers. I go with external harddrives for backup - even with all the best of care, etc. those little flashdrives tend to be very unreliable dying hard and fast for no particular reason. One has lasted YEARS but others start popping up those 'need to be reformatted' warnings and they were no where near the filled line. [and the soft textured types of any drives MELT [go all sticky gooey] in the summer heat]
the 1660ti is a great card, low power, runs silent. The research I did before I bought it showed performance vs price it was one of the best all around cards.
Off topic, but yes, whatever that plastic concoction is that gives a nice velvety feel to plastic devices for the first 6 months of its life, does not stand the test of time
. I have a pair of really nice binoculars that degraded into sticky hell
. I tried cleaning it with alcohol and a great amount of hard rubbing which had a small measure of success but the gooey sticky feel would comeback shortly
. The problem is not a coating on the surface of the plastic, it's the plastic itself degrading
. I finally solved it by coating the outside with talcum powder
. I figured if it wanted to stick to something then, HERE, stick to this!
Haven't had a problem since
. But once in a while I touch up the powder coating as it wears off
.
Vinyl plastics are known to disintegrate and become sticky with time. The chemicals in it react with so many things it can hardly avoid being exposed to. Ever wondered why dolls are usually the dirtiest toys in the box?
Yes, I ddi see that there were stand-alone units - and not having the internal bays would probably improve aitflow. Haven't yet had tiem for a good look at other cases, though, and I still want to avoid upward-facing ports.
Having done some brooding I'm fairly happy with where I am - which is pretty much the original build with a bigger PSU, more RAM, and a 1650 Super instead of the 1650 Ti as the display GPU. Just a few dot-the-Ts-cross-the-Is to finish, if I may:
Does Windows 10 need additional software for Bluray burning? It looks like yes, in which case the stand-alone drives (which come with software) may work out cheaper than the internals (which don't). On the other hand, from past experience, the big burnng suites tend to do a lot of stuff and try to spread their tentacles everywhere, and of course an external is an extra bit of clutter.
Does anyone have experience with the case? It appears to have a mesh top - good for ventillation, possibly less good when the cat sees a nice flat area on top of a warm, humming thing. Most of the other cases have the upward-facing ports, or are really weird shapes, or both.
The stock cooler doesn't need additional thermal paste by the look of it - is that correct? I'm pretty sure ken Shaw, at least, has said theya re fine for our uses (since I have no plans to overclock).
The motherboard has plenty of USB ports, except that there are no PS/2 ports so the mouse and keyboard will need to use two of them (plus five others that are currently in use in this system) - that will just leave a couple of the USB 3 ports free - and once the budget recovers I could do with new speakers. I suppose the obvious answer is a hub (or perhaps plug the camera cable into the monitor's ports), the other motherboards in this price bracket seem to have fewer ports rather than more.
How much clout do you have nagging the DAZ product managers? You can say you want Radeon Pro Renderer plugin to be integrated into DAZ Studio and buy a Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon RX Vega 11 graphics [$150 so...£100?) and bid your time till summer when the super-unbeliebably good new nVidia cards come out even cheaper than the 20xx series that you need only one. You run your monitor on the Vega GPU and renders on the nVidia GPU. Course then your 3400G CPU might seem lacking compared to the CPU you original listed as the 3400G is the best Ryzen APU available is it's only 2nd Gen Ryzen.
I'm going to cough up $250 and get me AM4 Socket X570 MB beginnings of my new system soon as I see if it winds up on some sort of Black Friday special (or not - I'm still buying it). Exciting.
Well, if I nagged them I'd probably get clouted - not sure if that would help. Even if they did decide to add ProRender, in response to a clear and reasonably-argued set of requests from a range of users, my life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if the PAs suspected I was linked to their having another render engine to support.
Oh well. can't have that. I don't think the DS users need make an argument to support Pro Renderer, Intel & AMD especially have made a pretty good argument to do so, they just need to write in in what's it called? openCL and it'll be supported and likely expand hardware GPU support to Intel HD Graphics in the next couple of years to boot. They could drop openGL Intermediate to offset the added support labor..
I have no experience with that case but it looks pretty decent.
Yes, you need additional software to burn a bluray.
The AMD stock coolers have pre applied thermal past, most cooolers do. I'm just not sure the 3900X comes with one.
On the subject of too few USB ports. You might want to check into getting either a keybord or monitor with additional ports. I plug my mous into my kb. A friedn runs speakers of the ports in his monitor.
The issue is that shaders for iRay and 3Delight don't work in ProRenderer and vice versa. Just as basically no PA's support either Octane or Lux Render it is unlikely any would be rushing to support Pro Renderer unless the adoption rate made the expense and time worthwhile. Since Nvidia owns something like 90% of the GPU market...
This sounds crazy to me but this is life ... you need one software to burn the Blu-Ray AND additional software to read Blu-Ray, same company of course will sell both. The DVD/Blu-ray burner I bought came with the lite version for burning Blu-ray. To actually make movies though I use another software altogether [Pinnacle], the additional plugin for making Blu-ray was less than $10. {but one has to have a proper Blu-ray burner drive of course, not just the plugin}
Thank you.
The 3900X iss descrbed as coming with a cooler, but I will double-check.
I thought it was the case that extra software was needed - fortunately I'm not planning to do any movie making, just data discs.
Yes, my monitor does have ports so that would probably work for speakers. I thought keyboards often had USB ports for the mouse but the ones I looked at didn't - obviously need to look harder..
Seems like an overall solid build to me. Speaking as a fellow "only every ten years or so" pc updater relatively fresh from a new system build, custom watercooling (plus a case worthy of keeping around for 10+ years like my personal choice - the Tower 900) is absolutely something to seriously consider. Assuming budget/living space allows for it, of course. Clearly it's a whole additional can of worms to get into. But there's something to be said for a comprehensive cooling system that can be so loosely coupled to specific system hardware as a WC loop when your talking about a computing system expected to last 10+ years.
I'm a little wary of water-cooling, and have seen mixed reviews, so at least initially I think I will go with air and see how that does. That's a very different looking case, it needs some fancy edging and it could be steam-punk.
custom water cooling isn't worth the effort except for hobbyists and people who want to overclock heavily.
The chances of the loop leaking when built is not zero and increases when an inexperienced person does the fitting. That means a rather tedious process of packing the rig with something absorbent that will show drips, finding the loose fitting tightening it, letting the entire system dry out then going through the whole thing again.
Maintenance is also a PITA. draining the loop has to be done every 6 months of so (Even distilled water and a biocide will pick up enough stuff off the inside of the tubing to allow bacteria to grow). You'll need to drain the loop, flush the system and then refill which is at least a couple of hours even if you built the loop to facilitate it and know what you're doing.
Doing a full loop including the GPU involves disassembly of the card and installing the water block. This is another tedious procedure that has to be redone regularly as the thermal paste degrades and has to be redone.
For keyboards with USB hubs, it tends to be a feature on the higher end kb's. You might be better off, unless you're a mechanical kb snop like me, to buy a usb hub and just plug your kb and mouse into it. Probably be cheaper tbh.
It always comes down to the basics. The one thing I learned (the hard way) was the case is of the utmost importance. Hot cards (even with a water cooling system) need room to breath. My 10K system from Falcon (who supposedly make servers for google) died within a year because the cage was too tight. Make sure the case has room for what you need and what you may need in the future.
Ha ha ... I too had one of those back in dem der days!
Had the same opinions about water cooling and went about things pretty much the same way when I started my new build around 1.5 years ago (only exception was that I had a zero-rpm capable CPU AIO in there pretty much from the start.) What I learned during that process is that my two major design requirments:
Were virtually impossible to achieve in a modern fan/heatsink machine since:
So then it occurred to me: Why not have a case where all the things that unavoidably generate noise (like VRMs) go inside a (relatively) sound proof chamber, whereas noise sources (like fans) that only need to be on some of the time get exposed to open air?
Enter the Tower 900 with its solid steel and glass (two of the most effective sound blocking materials btw) twin compartment design featuring fans/radiators in the ventilation friendly back and constant noise-generating VRMs/pumps in the relatively noise-isolated tempered glass front. Based on my recent experiences this case - and this case specifically - plus watercooling equal one of (if not The) ultimate solution if low-noise and maximum cooling performance are BOTH of the utmost priroity for whatever it is you do.
And as for the catastrophic failure factor - take another look at a picture of this case and notice the layout. Apart from the waterblocks on motherboard components themselves, everything liquid related is either in front of or in front of/below everything else. Meaning that potential leakage is pretty much a non-issue. And also notice how the inverted motherboard layout means total elimination of GPU sag (again - a pet peeve of mine.)
This is how it looks in its current native habitat:
Believe it or not, this is an incredibly accessible/upgradeable/maintainable - dare I say it - practical system (no idiotic things like hard tubing/colored liquid solutions/massive overclocking to be seen here...) And the looks are entirely secondary - even the RGB you see is entirely practical (individual components get bathed in different shades of light depending on what realtime temperature/cooling performance stats indicate.) As is the slightly unusual pump placement (behind the glass for sound deflection rather than down at the bottom where there's direct ventilation.) Barring obsoletion of the ATX standard itself, I honestly can't see myself ever needing to move past this case and its dual 560mm raditaor loops for whatever my main "power" computing system is unless parking space becomes an issue (it currently lives on a 12U rolling rackmount unit.)
If longevity, noise and performance are your priorities I honestly can't recommend a system based around this case and its dual watercooling loop topology enough. Even if it is something that you would need to accomplish piece-meal (for the first 5+ months everything you see here was just air/aio cooled.)
VRM's are not noisy. Defective ones may produce coil wine, which can be hella annoying, but coil wine on inductors that small is always a symptom of a poorly wound coil. The only inductor or transformer large enough to produce audible coil whine in a PC, when not defective, are the ones in the PSU and even then most of the time they don't. A properly put together system with good components is always quieter without watercooling. A pump is always the loudest part of a computer when everything is functioning properly and the fans aren't above 50% or so. You may be sensitive to higher frequency sound, coil whine is high pitched while pumps produce lower frequency noise, but that is a matter of personal sensitivity not absolute noise.
Just checked my rig, room ambient is 19C, CPU 40C, 1080ti is 57C and the 2070 is 54C, 18 inches from the front right corner of the case, my head position, ambient sound is 42 Dba. I'm running a render and surfing the web.