Computer Recommendations
maatauset
Posts: 33
in The Commons
Hi All,
I'm in the market for a new computer with the required specs to handle Daz Studio and Poser. Any recommendations?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.
Enjoy your weekend.
Cheryl
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
yes, I recommend you tell us your budget, otherwise for $57,000.00 I can sell you an Iray rendering farm or for $400 I can tell you to go buy something that will be fun for about two days before you realize you just threw away 400 bucks.
LOL. Sorry. My budget is $2500-3000.
For that much money, you can assemble (or have someone assemble) a nearly pro-level machine.
Core i7 6700 CPU, High-End motherboard, 32GB DDR4 RAM (about $700)
2x Titan X 12GB video cards (About $2000)
Case, 1200W 80+Bronze/Gold Power Supply (About $250)
Blu-Ray burner, 4TB HGST NAS Hard Drive, 480 GB SSD Boot Drive, Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers, etc. (About $400)
That's about $3400. You could drop a few things down and easily hit $3000. If you drop the two GPUs down to 2x 980Ti cards and a 1000W power supply, you'll save about $800, but you'll lose some Iray rendering speed.
You can re-use your existing monitor, but if you want a new one to go with, expect about $150-$200. And if you need a new copy of Windows to go on it, that'll be another $100 roughly. And any build/ship costs.
I've heard you should wait for the new nVidia Pascal cards with 32GB RAM onboard with that kind of money. Such a card I imagine will take most of your budget.
She'll be waiting a while yet, then. The first Workstation cards are projected for April/May of this year. Those start at prices outside her budget for thhe whole system (Workstation Quadro M6000 cards right now run about $5000). The consumer level Pascal cards aren't expected before August/September at the earliest, and they'll be premium priced to start. I'd expect it to be Dec/Jan before we'll see reasonable Pascal-based consumer cards at normal prices.
if the dual 12 GB Nvidia cards are still $4,500.00 how cheap are these 32GB Cards going to be? AMD has an actual 32GB card already the low end one is $4,000.00.
also Poser is in her mix so high end Nivida is not going to help her as much if Iray is not the exclusive rendering engine of the build.
at the $2.5, 3K spending platform and provided you don't want to build, There is nothing wrong with not building or not wanting to, the $100 or $200 you saved could be hours of mistakes you made like failing to properly seal a cpu with thermal paste, or applying too much and your system overheats and you have a really cool looking doorstop. Simply put if you don't have the aptitude for it you could get yourself into a tight squeeze, dont let ANYONE tell you building is for everyone, I've seen people either take to it or destroy systems trying to do something that someone else feels is very simple because they did not understand it, or they did not embrace it with the passion that someone else has. It's an individual persuit, not a universal one.
If you don't feel you want to because you dont have the right tools or aptitude or you just don't want to be bothered, my $0.02 from building and teching systems for decades is go with that first thought and I highly suggest at pre-built AlienWare desktop, these are made by Dell, they are the Mercedes/Mack trucks of the PC world - and in the event of the a problem there is one phone number to call and they are responsible for the system. You build, you have an issue with corsair PSU and a MSI GPU and you call one and get through to somene and they tell you two days later to call the other - NOT worth it - i've been there.
Thanks everybody for the input. I intend to purchase a custom-built machine and was quite lost on what I needed in terms of motherboard and video card. Now, I feel can make a more informed decision. Thanks again. ;D
There are plenty of reputable system builders out there. IBuyPower.com, for example: Just did a test configure:
Gamer Paladin Z897
Came out to a total price of $2950.
Comes with a 3-year warranty, has twice the SSD space, a faster mechanical HDD (7200 vs 5400rpm), Blu-ray burner instead of just a DVD-RW, a high-end motherboard, 1000W 80+Gold Power Supply, and lots of extras. The only improvement the Alienware has is the 6-core i7 CPU, where this one has the i7 6700k, which is 4-core, but faster (4.0GHz without overclock).
4/8 core vs 6/12 core at render time with a CPU based render is a massive difference. If I drop that system to the 4core cpu and repurpose those funds I have something similar as well. I don't know iBuypower so I can't say good or bad (forums point to bad or 3rd rate PSU's and bad tech support), but I know Alienware builds tanks for systems, dell/alienware tech rates fairly high by tech trade and low by consumer (to be fair consumers only complain about tech support, they never rave about anyone) and does not skimp on components or the quality of their builds but that's my comfort zone. I've yet to know someone with an AW that regretted buying it - but as I stated I don't know Ibuypower, they may be amazing, and yes there are dozens of makers out there I would say I work in a corporation with thousands of deployed systems and I would say stay the hell away from HP, they make great printers and servers, but their laptops and desktops are poop, Lenovo makes garbage that is an embarrassment to the fact they USED to be IBM and anything from a brick and mortar store, check before you wreck it, their inventory is often old and their understanding of high end systems is very limited so prepare for being BS'd by a salesman. also I will never use newegg again after years of a trustworthy relationship they are no longer that same company that kept me going back.
Guess it depends on if it's a build for Iray or for LuxRender/3Delight. And the doubling of cores only is for integer pipeline, and most of the calculations done for rendering are floating point. So don't count on much help from that. So it's just 4 vs. 6 cores. Proper use of SSE2/3/4/5 extensions will make a much larger impact to rendering speed than the dual-integer pipeline ever will for rendering in-CPU.
IBuyPower is actually pretty reputable. Like you said, most consumers only complain, they don't bother to post reviews unless they're having a problem. So I always take reviews with a grain of salt.
And of course, before I'd drop that kind of money on ANY system, I'd be calling to company to verify the specs/brands of some of the components.
Yes, stay away from HP desktops/laptops. Lenovo laptops are hit or miss. Some of their models work well, most don't, some really suck.
And I tend to avoid Dell as well. Lots of bad experience trying to upgrade/support their hardware back in the 90s. They've improved since, but they still cut corners in what I consider areas that are critical. The Power Supply is one of those. Yes, even in the alienwares.
This is the place we have bought 5 computers from. You get to pick everything that goes into the system and name brand. Very nice people. Fantastic quality and service. I'm not sure where your from but they US based company so not sure if they ship over seas.
The HP laptops are always a problem, I know the HP tech guys by first name when they make visits to swap out parts.
if I had $3K to spend on a system (and not a guitar) I would build from the ground up with Corsair and ASUS parts so it would be a very different system. It would be an awesome system because I still use an i7 920 and a GTS 250
Are you sure about that? it doesn't match my experience, or my memory of benchmarks, comparing speeds with and without Hyperthreading.
Snap on the CPU - though judging by the CPU benchmark site posted in a recent thread on new machines doubling the performance of an i7 920 is only just becoming reasonably mainstream.
Quite sure. Realize that many operations on the CPU are integer based. However, rendering is inherently a floating point process, and while shuffling memory around, or handling text data, or many other tasks (some of which can be associated with rendering) which do benefit from the hyperthreading of the integer pipeline.
Many game engines often optimize cpu-based threads to utilize primarily integer ops just for this purpose...then convert the results back into floating-point for handing off to the rendering engine.
Also, the branch prediction for hyperthreading helps a lot too, but only on the integer pipeline. It's whole purpose is to handle out-of-order execution between the two hyperthreads.
Now, that said, it is possible to write a software renderer that is almost purely integer in nature. And much of many CPU benchmarks is based around specific tests, some of which benefit from hyperthreading, and some don't. You have to really get down to the nitty-gritty of the benchmarks to sort which CAN benefit from those that cannot.....and thus which ones will show actual improvements from the hyperthreading, versus the ones that don't, versus the ones that can but don't get much boost due to branch prediction cache misses.
Second that. LOVE my Alienware 51, ultra fast renders, runs quietly and I did my research before buying so far as reputation, repairs, durability. Worth every penny. Not cheap, and there's a reason for it. And yes, customer service is suberb. I called with a question and got assistance promptly. That is also extremely important. Dell stands behind what they do, I've had those for over fifteen years.
You guys are FABULOUS! Thanks for sharing all the information.
...If you are not into home building, a custom build is your next best choice as you can get closer to what you want without gatting stuff you don't need (like bloatware and limited trial versions of software). Both systems specified above do have their selling points The Alienware Area 51 does have 32 GB of quad instead of dual channel memory as well as the 6 core i7, but as hphoenix mentions the HDD in the custom build is faster, abd has a beefier power supply (something not to scrimp on). I also checked the two systems and the Area 51 only supports 32 GB while the motherboard on the Ibuyoower system will support up to 64 GB.
The other advantage of the custom build system (at least in my book) is it has Win7 pro instead of Win 10 Home Edition. YMMV concerning the OS, but I find Win 10 to have a couple undesirable features including a "digital assistant" (think Clippy on steroids) that continues to run in background even when turned off and a mandatory auto update policy that does not let you choose which updates to install.
You can go to Ibuypower any other custom build site and actually configure your own system.
I would definitely take the time to shop around a bit.
You can see my build here and maybe expand upon it because you can afford more (I'd add a second video card)
https://pcpartpicker.com/b/9FRG3C
my snarkiness aside that 920 has been a workhorse and the best CPU investment I've ever made. There are times it outperforms my Dual Xeons which are about the same age and it's been the backbone of my pipeline for years so I may try to prolong life with a new GPU and more RAM before I actually invest in making it obsolete.