CyberPower PC for DAZ Studio?
vonHobo
Posts: 1,648
I need a new gaming desktop to replace the one I use primarily for DAZ Studio.
I got a flyer from Costco and saw this gaming desktop, so I was wondering if this is a good choice?
I've run out of space on my 6-year old Alienware with 1TB HDD and NVIDIA GeForce 1070 card, so I was thinking 2TB would be better and obviously the upgrade to GeForce 4060 would be a real improvement??
The CyberPower has a Solid State Drive rather than a Hard Disk Drive and I'm not sure what the difference is between HDD and SSD and which is better?
Any insight would be really helpful.
CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme Gaming Desktop - 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13400F - GeForce RTX 4060, Black
Item 1760290
Model GXi2000CST
Your Price
999.99$
Shipping & Handling: $14.99*
Features:
- Intel Core i5-13400F Processor
- NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060, 8GB
- 2.0TB Solid State Drive
- USB Gaming Keyboard & 7 Colors Gaming Mouse
- 32GB DDR5 Memory
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Comments
That 8GB VRAM would be a deal breaker. 12GB Nvida video based should be considered the minimum for Iray rendering IMHO. If you are inclined toward building you own system I suspect it can be done cheaper.
OK I will look for something with 12+ GB Nvidia. Thanks for the tip.
I agree. I use two computers for daz, one with a 3090 (24GB) and one with a 2080ti (11GB) - more often than not I have to delete anything slightly out of the camera shot, and run decimator on out of focus objects, etc. to be able to offload renders on that computer.. I can't imagine 8GB..!
...I remember when 8 GB (1070) was "the bomb"and 12 GB (Titan-X) was like going "Plaid"..
I remember being impressed that a friend had a computer with a 4x CD-ROM drive.
....I had one of those.
I recently got a PC from these guys with almost exactly the same specs, and DAZ runs and renders very well on it.
About HDD vs SSD: SSDs are basically like flash drives and have no moving parts, so they can't mechanically wear out or malfunction like HDDs can.
That PC would definitely be a big improvement from what you currently have.
A GPU with 12GB VRAM would indeed be better in the long term or if you plan to render big scenes with lots of figures in them, but with a bit of scene optimization 8GB is definitely usable.
Thank you for all the suggestions! Much appreciated.
I will go with 12 GB on the graphics card or higher based on the feedback. I get by with my old Alienware Desktop, but I can't wait to see the speed increase on renders with the 4060.
And the SSD sounds much nicer than the HDD.
When I purchased the Alienware Desktop 6 years ago with the Nvidia GeForce 1070 8GB and 1TB HDD, upgraded to 32GB RAM, it was basically amazing. But times have really changed!
It's still grinding, but Dell recently sent me a message saying that the memory has reached it's useful life and may be time to upgrade. And most of the PCs I've owned in the past never made it past 7 years (dead disk drive, motherboard, etc.) so I would rather upgrade to a new desktop now rather than wait for a catastrophe.
I got 6 really good years out of this machine and the hard drive is now filled up too. I spent way too much money on DAZ purchases! LOL
I have a 24 gig card now (not the fastest, but it gets the job done) and I normally don't have to delete anything, shrink textures and so forth. Before this, I had a 6gb and constantly had to do all that. So, my advice would be to get a card with as much vram as you can afford. It's sad that that's what's needed nowdays, but it is what it is. :/
One thing I forgot to mention, but you should be aware of, is that there are numerous reports that the PSUs in these machines can be hit-or-miss. If you get one, it might be worth investing soon-ish in an A-tier PSU from this list (ideally one that is ATX 3.0 compliant or better):
https://cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/
I'm looking at the Corsair RMx Shift for my own PC. If you get a better PSU, go with one of at least the same wattage as what they sent you.
I'd be slightly wary about this:
-No information about the motherboard
-No information about the powersupply unit
Both are probably near the maximum capacity for what's advertised already. Especially not mentioning the powersupply in the specs is worrysome, as you'll have no idea how the system responds to peripherals (phone charging etc.) drawing power from this system, or additions like extra hard drives.
Another thing I dislike is the lack of external bays. Any photos or old software you may have on CDRoms or DVDRoms become useless. It's sadly a very common trend these days, to not have any external bay options, not even in the case.
For what is mentioned in the advertisement, it is very decent of though, if you were to buy all the components seperately, you'd have to find some really good bargains to get noticably below that, and still have to assemble it yourself.
The one in mine is a Gigabyte B650M, and Best Buy says the one in this is a B460M. Cyberpower seems to use Asus and ASRock motherboards, as well.
I agree with you on the PSU issue (that it's weird to not specify what it is), but the one I got, while not a name brand, was ATX 3.0 compliant and rated well above what was necessary; there's definitely room to absorb power spikes.
i had a cyberpower bought direct, but I have to say their customer/tech support was pretty bad. I've had my system from them for 4 years, it may have improved since I bought it. I had problems with my MB/Bios early on, 2 months and all they said was send it back for repair at my shipping expense, which was $125. I left it and finally bought a new system couple months ago from Lenovo.
I bought an 8TB external which does the trick. I also have a 4TB HDD which I installed in my new system. The thing with SSD, its very fast, a marked difference than HDD. Its great to place your OS and maybe the programs themselves on, and the data on an HDD. There are SSD now though with pretty big capacities, although more expensive than HDD.
One thing with the SSD, even 2TB is small with all the DAZ content you end up with, unless you have will power to not buy much
Thanks! All the info really helps.
As far as power spikes, I don't add peripherals. Never did with the Alienware.
I do use the USB ports for USB Drives for backups or transferring files from camera to PC, and for charging my bluetooth headset or my Kindle e-reader, and that's about it. So not much in the way of anything serious.
I guess I will go with this CyberPower system and keep my fingers crossed. My Alienware was $1500 six years ago. This one being $999 leaves me some room to purchase a new monitor which I need as well, because the old Alienware monitor is developing tiny black pixels where the LEDs have burned out.
Yes I agree; but, unfortunately all the custom ones I can find don't have them. So,, I am thinking of having my next PC gustom built locally using my old case and CD/DVD drives.
I've been happy with support from Dell on Alienware and I've had no problems last six years. But I'm nervous about CyberPower, iBUYPOWER, etc. as you pointed out.
Maybe I will go with another Alienware Desktop. I do like their products. But I think the newer desktops look like Dyson fans. Yuck!
The danger of spikes doesn't usually seem to come from that, it mostly seems to be from GPUs or overclocked CPUs, from what I've read. But it also seems like that's not a real concern unless they're run really hard continuously for a while. It's one of those things that I'm not fretting about, but I also want to be safer than sorry.
....I would consider a 2 drive setup with a smaller boot drive (which could be an M2) and larger content library SSD if you could. Also don't forget an external backup.
My current 12 year old system has a 240 GB Boot and 2 TB Content library SSD (both SATA III) I also have a 2 TB storage HDD (for rendered scenes other graphics,photo and document archive) and a 4 TB external backup.(partitioned for two machines).
It is also not recommended to use the "defrag" utility on an SSD as it reduces cycle life of the drive. SSDs have what is known as "TRIM" which is managed automatically.
Thank you for the advice. I'm not a professional 3D artist who creates lots of complicated scenes. I just use DAZ for my art reference. I'm a painter.
So I don't have an elaborate setup, and I don't have a lot of content compared to most people and can get by with what I have purchased already, nearly 2,500 products. But I cringe when I add up the amount of money I have spent at DAZ. But it's helping my art and that is what is important. Almost every single painting I've done using DAZ as the reference has sold. So it's worth it.
I just want a 2TB drive because my 1TB is full now. Not only from DAZ but from the images of the paintings stored as PNG files.
And of course the more advanced graphics card would mean quicker inteface speed and renders, which will be a time saver.
If I was a 3D artist primarily, then I would definitely go for the setup that you have. Sounds nice!
Well, it is like this, your 1070 has 8GB of VRAM right now. So ask yourself, aside from the speed, is that 8GB enough for what you typically want to do? That is the vital question here. If you never run out of VRAM building your scenes, then hey, maybe 8GB is actually enough for you. However, if you have a desire to make larger scenes than you do now, then you will want some more memory.
Because while a number of people will scream for more, at the end of the day, it comes down to what you do (and of course, budget). Still, I would look at what your options are for VRAM and what your budget is.
Sadly, the options are not that great. The 3060 has 12GB, and has been a value leader of sorts. But it is older now. Even so, this card is 3-4 times faster than what you have right now.
You can play with the Iray Benchmark scene we have in this thread.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/341041/daz-studio-iray-rendering-hardware-benchmarking/p1
Follow the directions, and render the scene. With that you can get an idea of how your 1070 stacks up against what is out now. Here are some rough numbers for iteration counts with current cards in this benchmark:
Iterations counts
3060 - 6.6 (12GB)
4060ti - 7.23 (8 or 16GB) There are two versions of the 4060ti, they perform the same, but one has 16GB of VRAM.
4070 - 12.71 (12GB)
4070ti - 14.175 (12GB)
4080 - 16.5 to 19.6 (16GB)
3090 - 16.7 (24GB)
4090 - 28.5 (24GB)
A5000 - 14.36 (24GB) (Professional GPU) (**Corrected VRAM amount)
Titan RTX (Turing) - 8 (24GB) (Semi-Pro GPU)
Just a note, supposedly a future version of Iray will improve the speed of the 4000 series, too. No idea how much, or if this is even true. But it could be something to keep in mind. This new Iray is in the pipeline now for Daz Studio, but has no ETA on when it will arrive.
So you can compare your 1070 to these. You will be in for a surprise, because new GPUs can be a lot faster than you 1070. There is one more thing, this benchmark is not an absolute, because every scene can be different, you will not always see the same performance difference from one card to the next, but it does offer a general guide. Also, some different versions of Daz Studio will perform a bit differently, too, it is best to compare to the same version if possible. You can look at the VRAM and price and decide what to do. The GPU is the most important part for Iray. Everything else is secondary. You just need a CPU good enough to run Daz Studio ok. Your storage drive is not a huge factor, certainly SSD can help load faster, but SSD makes no impact on render speed. RAM can be important, and the more VRAM you use, you will also need more RAM as well. Again, this is entirely up to you because only you know how big your scenes are. Maybe 32GB is fine for you. But again, the GPU is the ONLY thing that renders, so while having cool stuff in your PC would be nice, the GPU is the ultimate decider on how fast you can render, and VRAM decides what your limit is.
Basically you do not need balance here. Unless you plan on playing video games, too, you don't need the best CPU to match with your GPU. If money is an issue, put the extra money into the GPU and skimp on the CPU some. You can also add more RAM to your PC at a later date if they leave empty RAM slots. Like if you get 32GB of RAM, they could use two 16GB sticks, that would leave 2 more slots on most motherboards (which usually have 4 slots). So that would let you save a bit of money instead of running out for 64GB at the start. With some of these system builders, you may be able to talk to them and get a custom build.
..this is why I suggest a multi drive sysem particularly one that includes a storage drive for items like finished renders, pictures, and other files.
I would also suggest doing this, too. Having a dedicated drive just for Daz content provides many benefits. One easy one, you can take that drive and pop it into any other computer and have your library. No downloading everything, and no worries about the possibility of Windows screwing something up. Like if Windows fails really bad, you could lose everything. With a drive dedicated just for Daz content, that is less a concern.
SSDs are also at their cheapest point historically. So right now is a good time to grab a large capacity SSD and add it to the PC for something like this. You can get 2TB drives for less than $90 now. 4TB SSDs used to cost a ton, but you can find them for less than $180, even decent M.2 drives. These may not be the fastest SSDs in the world, but you don't need that speed for Daz Studio. It can help a bit, the difference versus standard old harddrives is pretty big. But beyond that, the differences between a decent SSD and the fastest SSD are fairly small in scope. Like a second or so, sometimes fractions of a second. You are still loading in a few seconds even with a slower SSD (Daz loading may vary, as Daz software is your bottleneck, not the hardware, as 4.21 and 4.22 prove.)
...just a note:
The RTX A5000 has 24 GB of VRAM. The A6000 (more expensive) has 48.
I wish I could afford one of those
the RTX A5000 card alone is around $2500. I didn't even look up the price of the A6000. 
"Like if Windows fails really bad, you could lose everything."
Yes that has happened to me in the past but that was before I used DAZ Studio. That's one of the reasons I want to be proactive and get a new system now, rather than waiting for a disaster. The drives being so cheap sounds like a good idea to me! I will do some shopping. :)
Lack of an internal drive bay for optical drives isn't really an issue. All of the PCs in my home have been purchased within the last two years and none have an internal CD drive. We have an external BluRay drive that is shared between the systems as needed. Has rearely been used...
I forgot the VRAM, I was thinking of the A6000 when I posted it. But the A5000 is slower than the 3090 that also has 24GB, not to mention the 4090. The A5000 is in fact the professional version of the 3080 12GB. The professional versions almost always double the VRAM of the gaming version. Pro cards are neat, but for Daz Studio Iray they offer little value. Iray does not benefit from any of the pro features, so VRAM is the only thing they offer. Plus they are slower than their gaming counterparts. So they cost a lot more for little actual gain.
I know you didn't ask, but I wanted to explain that a little bit. You might see some of these pro cards pop up in Microcenter if you happen to live near one. They run a spectrum as well, with surprisingly small pro cards that are sort of cheap (sort of). You don't need to shed any tears over not being able to buy the pro cards. The 3090 and 4090 may not be cheap, but they are still thousands less than their pro counterparts. The pro cards are usually at least double the price or more...while being slower.
...the advantages may be few save for they are standard sized dual slot rather than gigantic 3 slot cards as well as draw less power. They also employ "blower" cooling which exhausts the heat out of the back of the case rather than into it.
However, yes, more pricey than the gaming cards which is why they were not sought after during the crypto mining rush of a few years ago and the one that preceded it when the Pascal generation was state of the art..
One other advantage that is no longer available was the ability to pool VRAM via NVLInk which Nvidia recently discontinued.
I will keep that in mind. So I guess I did the right thing purchasing the Alienware gaming desktop when I started using DAZ. I will make sure that whatever I upgrade to is made for gaming.