Help with new Computer shopping - what do you think of these...?
Cybersox
Posts: 9,635
I've been looking at a new render & video editing computer, and these two on Amazon caught my eye since they're both built around a 24GB Titan. I would be adding more SSD and HDD storage either way, and yes, I know I'd pay buying this way than if I bought the components seperately and assembled them myself, but I also know that my skill level probably isn't up to doing these correctly while these both come with a three year P&L warranty.
So, that said, there's a roughly $1500 difference in price between the two, so my question is, for DAZ and 2K video editing, is the second one overkill or are the extra upgrades worth the price. ? Or is there something better out there in the same price range?
SYSTEM 1
Cooler Master MasterCase MC600P
· Front 3 x 120mm fan, Rear 1 x 120mm fan (11 dBA, 1200 RPM)
· 2 x USB 3.0 / 2 x USB 2.0 / Audio In&Out
· Bays : External 2 x 5.25” / Internal 4 x Combo 2.5" / 3.5", 2 x 2.5"
Thermaltake Smart 850W 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supply
· High quality Japanese main capacitor
· Ultra-quiet 140mm cooling fan with low noise level.
· Heavy-duty protection circuitry of Over Current, Over Voltage, Under Voltage, Over Power and Short-Circuit protections.
MB Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS Motherboard
· Rear: 3 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (1 x USB Type-C), 4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1
· Mid-Board: 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1, 4 x USB 2.0, 8 x SATA 6Gb/s (RAID 0, 1, 10), 2 x M.2 Port
RAM 64GB DDR4 High Performance Memory
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8GHz 12-Core Processor
Dual 120mm Quiet Edition Water / Liquid CPU Cooler
M.2 SSD 2TB NVMe Samsung 970 Series
· Read : Up to 3,400 MB/s | Write : Up to 2,500 MB/s
5TB Storage Drive SATA-3 128MB Cache
GPU nVidia GeForce TITAN RTX 24Gb
12X Asus SATA Blu-Ray
Realtek ALC S1200A 8-Channel HD Audio CODEC
· Audio Shielding, Dedicated audio PCB layers
· Premium Japanese audio capacitors
Realtek L8200A, Intel Wireless-AC 9260 Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0
MS Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
SYSTEM 2
· Front 1 x 140mm fan , Rear 1 x 140mm fan (1200RPM, 24dBA, 55 CFM)
· 2 x USB 3.0 / Audio In & Out
· Bays : External 2 x 5.25” / Internal 2 x 3.5”, 2 x 2.5”
Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W 80 PLUS Gold Power Supply
· High quality Japanese main capacitor
· Ultra-quiet 135mm cooling fan with low noise level.
· Heavy-duty protection circuitry of Over Current, Over Voltage, Under Voltage, Over Power and Short-Circuit protections.
Asus ROG Strix X399-E Motherboard
· Rear: 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 (Type-A, Type-C), 8x USB 3.1 Gen 1, 1x Optical S/PDIF out, 1x RJ45
· Mid-board: 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2, 4x USB 3.1 Gen 1, 4x USB 2.0 6x SATA 6Gb/s (Support Raid 0, 1, 10), 3x M.2 x4 Socket 3, 1x U.2 port
RAM 128GB DDR4 High Performance Memory
CPU 24-Core AMD Threadripper 2970X 3.0GHz (4.2Ghz Turbo)
240mm Quiet Edition Water / Liquid CPU Cooler
Intel M.2 2TB NVMe PCI-Express SSD
5TB Storage DriveSATA-3 128MB Cache
GPU nVidia GeForce TITAN RTX 24Gb
12X Asus SATA Blu-Ray
ROG SupremeFX 8-Channel HD Audio CODEC S1220
· High quality 120 dB SNR stereo playback output 113 dB SNR recording input
· ESS ESS9018Q2C, Supports up to 32-Bit/192kHz playback
Intel I211-AT 1x Gigabit LAN
Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth V4.1
MS Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
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Comments
The first system is a better choice unless you need lots of RAM or PCIE lanes.
The second system is an older generation of CPU and would perform much worse.
Price isn't always evidence of being superior. If you feel like you absolutely have to have 128Gb of ram get a 4x32Gb kit for around 4500 and sell the 64gb kit on eBay and make back $150 or so.
I'd say based on your criteria the second system is not worth considering for a price premium much less a $1500 one.
As to are there better systems in that price range? I'd have to know the precise price range (well over $5k US?) but at that price you could likely find someone local to build a system to your exact specs. If you live near a microcenter you could buythe parts there and they will build the system for a fee as well. You might also want to check the high end SI's like Origin and Maingear.
Very useful information, thank you! FWIW, the first computer is $5,800, the second is $7,300. I just started seriously looking, and I do have a MicroCenter nearby BUT the problem with them is that, from what I understand, they DON'T warranty custom builds for compatibility, so if there are any issues you have to go from part manufacturer to part manufacturer and hope they don't all say that it's not covered for some reason. By comparison, the ones I listed come with 3 years P&L and they're sold via Amazon, who will happily double protect them with a "will replace if cannot repair" policy for another $50 bucks.
If you want a prebuilt and a warranty, I fully understand wanting that when you're spending that much, then you should definitely buy that system. I'm sure it will do DS and Premiere great, and Premiere will get better over time as Adobe updates the program to work better with more cores.
For that price range, it might be worth looking into custom speccing something out from somewhere like Digital Storm or somewhere else that specializes in workstations and such. I love me some Micro Center, don't get me wrong, but for that kind of cash you can buy a LOT of flexibility in your build if your not in a huge rush.
Edit - realized I didn't answer your question. Between the two, I'd also buy the first, but I personally am waiting on a custom workstation to replace my laptop, so you see where my advice comes from. Good luck!!
...yeah I'd agree with the first one. you can always upgrade memory later if you need to, but 24 GB of VRAM is pretty rockin'.
The one difference between Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs though is with a Ryzen you are limited to 2 memory channels whereas the Threadripper supports 4 memory channels. Having more memory channels tends to spread the load across the sticks more evenly and efficiently.I just noticed a difference going from dual to three channel memory when I built my system 7 years ago.
I've been going through a couple of those, including Digital Storm and Bison-Tek, and so far similar builds have come out more expensive... not to mention that in the case of Digital Storm, it seems that the only way to get warranty service seems to involve shipping the entire computer back to the factory, which takes 5-6 weeks. In any case, when one factors it out, the biggest chunk of the cost of these machines is in the Titan RTXs and there's not a whole lot of savings to be found on those by shopping around.
..pleased with the fact they finally put a decent amount of VRAM in a prosumer card.
Ironically, I'm going in the other direction. My current rendering system was built by the old head of IT at my old company. It's a fantastic system for when it was built, but he moved to Ireland 2 years ago and getting anything upgraded since then has been a constant hassel as there''s no "road map" for new IT guys to follow. Since this system is built on WIndows 7 Ultra, it's days of MS support are coming to a close, so my thought was to get something that has a lot of speed and power, but won't be a nightmare getting support for.
Nol kidding. I'm sure that I'll find a way to max it out eventually, but after running with a GTX-1070, moving to a Titan RTX would be a crazy jump up.
? Upgrading a PC is trivial even if you don't know anything about the components. HWinfo, CPU-z and GPU-z will give you all the infor you can't get from the BIOS.
BTW there is zero reason to get a new system just because you need to move to Win 10.. Win 7 Ultimate should directly upgrade to Win 10 pro, for free assuming you own Win 7 Ultimate.
...if you have the financial resources, tripling your VRAM and adding RTX /Tensor cores is not a bad idea.
Oh and I intend to continue with W7 Pro as I have a hefty firewall, VPN router, excellent AV and and malware software, and am careful when online.
So, are you going to sell the old system?
Then why was it so hard for the IT guys my old company hired tor fix the intermittent issues with my RAID? I'm fine swapping out drives, memory and grapuic cards, but once you start getting into liquid cooling systems and things like that, it's a disaster waiting to happen. Not to mention that, having had friends and coworkers who've been royally hosed when compnent hardware manufatures all started playing the blame game on custom sisytems, I don't mind paying a bit extra when the end result is just one vendor to go to for service.
I'm not getting rid of the old system, but I am taking it offline so that I can keep using all my old XP software and games, as well as all my Japanese software. 7 Ultimate does fun things like that. Windows 10 Pro doesn't.
No, but it's not going to be connected to the internet any more. There are too many things you can do with Ultimate that can't be done with Pro to retire it completely.
Custom water loops should not be put in systems meant for others. I build PC's as a side gig and will not touch a loop built by someone else. Too many pitfalls.
As to RAID issues, a lot depends on which RAID level and whether it is hardware or software based. For most desktop systems HW RAID is implemented in BIOS so the first place to look is at the motherboard vendor. Updating the BIOS frequently fixes issues with RAID. If that doesn't improve things then you start getting into all sorts of diagnostic issues. Are the drives really working fine? You could have a flaky cable or SATA port.
But your initial claim was about uopgrading not servicing. You're having issues with RAID and want new drives? No, problem. You clear the old RAID and build a new array (If you want to add drives to an existing RAID 5 IT pros will look at you funny and then back slowly away).
No idea what XP software you want to run but I run things from that far back. IME Win 10 has even better compatibility mode than 7. No idea what Jaspanese SW you have that runs on 7 but not 10. I do know I have heard those complaints quite a bit and as far as I've been able to track down there have been only a handful of programs that ran on 7 and not 10. Generally the issues always came down to issues with individual systems not the OS.
You can use a locale emulator to run japanese software on win10
..I feel the same about 7Pro. For one I don't have to worry about a feature update I don't want or need rebooting my system in the middle of a big render job or causing instabilities because of a buggy driver update I couldn't avoid.
Also part of my remaining with W7 is that I have hardware that is not supported by W10 which I really cannot afford to replace.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about servicing my existing computer due to any current problem. The RAID issue was finally solved but they had to call the original IT guy in Ireland to figure out hat was going on. No clue as to what the issue was because that's why we paid IT guys.
I have a LOT of XP and older software on this computer and while some of it MIGHT work on newer software, it's not worth my time pulling out every single bit of that and testing it before turning this one into a stand-alone station an the chance that I may need to access those for whatever reason. I KNOW that all the old Serious Magic virtual set software, my Monkey Island, Infocomm and Monty Python games, plus a zilliion other things work on it, not to mention that that's where my old DAZ Studio 3.0 soft and archives are stored and I doubt that I'll be installing a firewire card on the new system. But except for the GTX-1070 and some of the drives, it's seven years old and the system memory is maxxed at 32mb, so it doesn't make any sense to spend much time or effort updating something with as many miles on it as this one has. The fact that Microsoft is completely pulling the plug is simply a good a reason to bite the bullet now and upgrade to something with a llittle more teeth.
As far as getting a pre-built versus building - I've run the numbers and 3 years P&L on everything, plus the ability to get service just by calling Amazon seems to trump most of the savings I might see by assembling from pieces. Not to mention the amount of time. I AM wide open to suggestions as to other systems out there in the same $5-7K price bracket.. or even a little higher if there's something really mind-boggling out there in the $8K bracket.
I would really, REALLY urge you to just go with a configuration from a review site or something, for at least the motherboard, GPU, and RAM (model as well as quantity/configuration). Just make sure that there are at least other people on the planet who have encountered and fixed any inexplicable, gee-it-should-have-worked-but-it-doesn't-work problems you might encounter. You'll never feel so lonely as you will if Google returns zero hits for your symptoms.
I'd also suggest that you read the support forums for all the components you're considering, and value that over the theories of people who don't even own the hardware on which you're considering spending your hard earned cash. I don't know how you came upon your component lists, but was known compatibility a criteria? Minimize your risk by going with as many knowns as possible, and know what you're likely getting into BEFORE you spend your money.
Good luck, and I hope you enjoy your system... either's a real monster.
...I only have half that amount of VRAM (older Titan-X) and it makes quite a difference.
_ also BOXX
and thanx