How Does One Choose a Windows PC Computer ?

nicstt · December 2018

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+ paperweight.

Jeez, which country do you live in? In the UK we have standards suppliers have to conform to; they even seem to do a decent job of doing it. (With the exception of the trains - they suck.)

To expand on the PSU theme, a good one is certainly valuable - so too is surge protection - including the phone line; a lightning strike took out my system via the phone line; many years ago, I've had said protection since.

DarkSpartan · December 2018

nicstt said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+ paperweight.

Jeez, which country do you live in? In the UK we have standards suppliers have to conform to; they even seem to do a decent job of doing it. (With the exception of the trains - they suck.)

To expand on the PSU theme, a good one is certainly valuable - so too is surge protection - including the phone line; a lightning strike took out my system via the phone line; many years ago, I've had said protection since.

Would you believe, the United States? Most civilized countries bury the electrical grid with the exception of high-voltage power lines. Most of the time they do that here, or they do nowadays. A fair part of the grid over here is old infrastructure on poles-- which means power outages and associated spikes are more common in inclement weather.

nicstt · December 2018

DarkSpartan said:

nicstt said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+ paperweight.

Jeez, which country do you live in? In the UK we have standards suppliers have to conform to; they even seem to do a decent job of doing it. (With the exception of the trains - they suck.)

To expand on the PSU theme, a good one is certainly valuable - so too is surge protection - including the phone line; a lightning strike took out my system via the phone line; many years ago, I've had said protection since.

Would you believe, the United States? Most civilized countries bury the electrical grid with the exception of high-voltage power lines. Most of the time they do that here, or they do nowadays. A fair part of the grid over here is old infrastructure on poles-- which means power outages and associated spikes are more common in inclement weather.

Damn! But every country has its issues, and I expect burying all those cables will cost time and money so will take time.

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+

You buy over 1200, and build a system that draws that much, and you will trip breakers. While a wall outlet is rated at 15 amps and 100 volts, therefore 1500 watts, components degrade over time and assuming you can safely hit 1500 is foolish.

no idea where you think found a 1080ti but there are none on Newegg or Amazon at costs that do not make the 2080ti a better option. Pcpartpicker also doesn't know of any.

Intel? Really? You are telling people to spend hundreds of dollars more for at best marginal performance gains? A render box doesn't need that sort of performance. Get Ryzen.

Power supply rated for spikes? WTF? You get a good power strip or if you live somewhere where the power is really bad a UPS. Beyond that the only rating on a psu is the 80+ cert. which has nothing to do with ripple.

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

Apple stopped building Mac's with Nvidia graphics cards at least 5 years ago. The ones that do exist are only just barely able to render in iray. Most people doing iray renders on Mac's are doing cpu only.

Richard Haseltine · December 2018

kenshaw011267 said:

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

Apple stopped building Mac's with Nvidia graphics cards at least 5 years ago. The ones that do exist are only just barely able to render in iray. Most people doing iray renders on Mac's are doing cpu only.

or using external GPU boxes.

Richard Haseltine · December 2018

And can we please try to have a hardware thread that remains civil?

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

Richard Haseltine said:

kenshaw011267 said:

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

Apple stopped building Mac's with Nvidia graphics cards at least 5 years ago. The ones that do exist are only just barely able to render in iray. Most people doing iray renders on Mac's are doing cpu only.

or using external GPU boxes.

I guess. Paying hundreds of dollars on top of the cost of the graphic card just strikes me as a bad idea. For that sort of money you could pick up a cheap refurbished PC and put the graphic card in that. Plus I've seen claims that Apple is ending support for Nvidia drivers in the newest version of the MacOS.

AllenArt · December 2018

DarkSpartan said:

nicstt said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+ paperweight.

Jeez, which country do you live in? In the UK we have standards suppliers have to conform to; they even seem to do a decent job of doing it. (With the exception of the trains - they suck.)

To expand on the PSU theme, a good one is certainly valuable - so too is surge protection - including the phone line; a lightning strike took out my system via the phone line; many years ago, I've had said protection since.

Would you believe, the United States? Most civilized countries bury the electrical grid with the exception of high-voltage power lines. Most of the time they do that here, or they do nowadays. A fair part of the grid over here is old infrastructure on poles-- which means power outages and associated spikes are more common in inclement weather.

I am one of those people that live in an area of "dirty" power and have lost a TV and a monitor to it already. Better to spend a bit more and better safe than sorry. I'm also in the US and rural also...

Laurie

AllenArt · December 2018

kenshaw011267 said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+

You buy over 1200, and build a system that draws that much, and you will trip breakers. While a wall outlet is rated at 15 amps and 100 volts, therefore 1500 watts, components degrade over time and assuming you can safely hit 1500 is foolish.

no idea where you think found a 1080ti but there are none on Newegg or Amazon at costs that do not make the 2080ti a better option. Pcpartpicker also doesn't know of any.

Intel? Really? You are telling people to spend hundreds of dollars more for at best marginal performance gains? A render box doesn't need that sort of performance. Get Ryzen.

Power supply rated for spikes? WTF? You get a good power strip or if you live somewhere where the power is really bad a UPS. Beyond that the only rating on a psu is the 80+ cert. which has nothing to do with ripple.

I also agree that 800 to 850 should be fine. The newer Nvidia cards actually draw less power than their former counterparts anyway ;)

FWIW, I render on a USED workstation that I paid less than a thousand dollars for....2 Xeon 8 core processors, 64 gigs of ram, 850 watt power supply. I tossed a new graphics card in it and away I went. Has been working well ever since.

Laurie

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

AllenArt said:

kenshaw011267 said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+

You buy over 1200, and build a system that draws that much, and you will trip breakers. While a wall outlet is rated at 15 amps and 100 volts, therefore 1500 watts, components degrade over time and assuming you can safely hit 1500 is foolish.

no idea where you think found a 1080ti but there are none on Newegg or Amazon at costs that do not make the 2080ti a better option. Pcpartpicker also doesn't know of any.

Intel? Really? You are telling people to spend hundreds of dollars more for at best marginal performance gains? A render box doesn't need that sort of performance. Get Ryzen.

Power supply rated for spikes? WTF? You get a good power strip or if you live somewhere where the power is really bad a UPS. Beyond that the only rating on a psu is the 80+ cert. which has nothing to do with ripple.

I also agree that 800 to 850 should be fine. The newer Nvidia cards actually draw less power than their former counterparts anyway ;)

FWIW, I render on a USED workstation that I paid less than a thousand dollars for....2 Xeon 8 core processors, 64 gigs of ram, 850 watt power supply. I tossed a new graphics card in it and away I went. Has been working well ever since.

Laurie

I am extremely reluctant to recommend used hardware. If you know what you're looking for and get reasonably lucky you can get a good result. But you could just as easily be out hundreds of dollars.

Fauvist · December 2018

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

I do render iRay on my MAC, without an NVIDIA card. But it takes a LOOOOOOOOOONG time, and it can't handle too much content in the scene.

Fauvist · December 2018

Richard Haseltine said:

kenshaw011267 said:

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

Apple stopped building Mac's with Nvidia graphics cards at least 5 years ago. The ones that do exist are only just barely able to render in iray. Most people doing iray renders on Mac's are doing cpu only.

or using external GPU boxes.

What's a GPU box? I can render on a MAC with a GPU box?

Fauvist · December 2018

I understand the passion/hositility people express when it comes to what works for them - it is exactly the same kind of emotion that comes up when vocalists discuss the "best" technique for singing. I've come to realize that what one person understands, may be impossible for someone else to understand, and what works for one, may not work for another. Different ways of doing something my be equally "good".

I am handicaped, because with a MAC, the ony decision I have ever had to make was which credit card to use.

AllenArt · December 2018

kenshaw011267 said:

AllenArt said:

kenshaw011267 said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+

You buy over 1200, and build a system that draws that much, and you will trip breakers. While a wall outlet is rated at 15 amps and 100 volts, therefore 1500 watts, components degrade over time and assuming you can safely hit 1500 is foolish.

no idea where you think found a 1080ti but there are none on Newegg or Amazon at costs that do not make the 2080ti a better option. Pcpartpicker also doesn't know of any.

Intel? Really? You are telling people to spend hundreds of dollars more for at best marginal performance gains? A render box doesn't need that sort of performance. Get Ryzen.

Power supply rated for spikes? WTF? You get a good power strip or if you live somewhere where the power is really bad a UPS. Beyond that the only rating on a psu is the 80+ cert. which has nothing to do with ripple.

I also agree that 800 to 850 should be fine. The newer Nvidia cards actually draw less power than their former counterparts anyway ;)

FWIW, I render on a USED workstation that I paid less than a thousand dollars for....2 Xeon 8 core processors, 64 gigs of ram, 850 watt power supply. I tossed a new graphics card in it and away I went. Has been working well ever since.

Laurie

I am extremely reluctant to recommend used hardware. If you know what you're looking for and get reasonably lucky you can get a good result. But you could just as easily be out hundreds of dollars.

The trick is to find a reputable dealer and certified refurbisher. I've had this computer for 3 years and have been running it hard and it's been like a champ.

Laurie

nonesuch00 · December 2018

nicstt said:

DarkSpartan said:

kenshaw011267 said:

Some really horrid advice being given in this thread.

First if you live in North America do not buy a power supply rated higher than 1200 watts. Household circuits cannot handle it. As a matter of fact unless you want to put your monitor on a different outlet from your PC don't go for 1200 either. There is no reason to go over 850 watts unless you plan to go to a multiple gpu setup or have lots of hard drives.

Second do not buy any Intel cpu. The only reason to buy Intel is if you're a gamer and absolute top gaming performance matters to you. Everyone else should buy AMD. While you can certainly get the R7 chips this an area where you save some money. The R5 2600 is a great cpu at a great price .

Third case absolutely does matter. Get a case with terrible airflow and that high end graphics card you just spent a lot of money on will thermal throttle and cut its performance significantly.

Fourth there are no new 1080's or 1080ti 's left. There are lots of benchmarks of the released 20xx cards. They are truly great rendering cards. Get one of you can.

Fifth there is no reason to buy a new kb or mouse as long as they are in good shape, assuming they are USB. Although if you're coming from Mac you might a real mouse with the proper number of buttons, a scroll wheel and other features rather than that useless thing Apple had been trying to sell recently.

I do live in NA, and you underestimate what a 15A breaker is capable of.

Your point is half-taken with the case- You do need good airflow, but in my experience, you can still do that easily under $100.

I don't find many Mac peripherals on USB anymore- Most are firewire.

The 20xx card benchmarks I've seen don't seem to be giving much of a performance boost over the 10xx series, of which I found NEW 1080Ti cards available in less than five minutes. Spendy, but they can be found. Easily.

As for the Intel v AMD wars, don't go there. There are ups and downs to both setups, and in my experience, modern Intels can still edge out an AMD chip. Particularly when the AMD isn't paired with an AMD video card.

In the use case where you do get CPU and video card from AMD, you do see an improvement in performance. Problem is, he needs to us Iray. Therefore my suggestion (and admonishment) to get more than one opinion before making a decision.

The thing you did NOT disagree with, it seems, is buying off-the-shelf.

One more thing on the power supplies that I missed the first time around: Regardless of wattage, you will want to make sure it's rated for power spikes. If you're in some strange place where the power is "dirty", or is prone to power failures if a flea sneezes near a transformer, it'll be the difference between being able to reboot your machine and having a $2500+ paperweight.

Jeez, which country do you live in? In the UK we have standards suppliers have to conform to; they even seem to do a decent job of doing it. (With the exception of the trains - they suck.)

To expand on the PSU theme, a good one is certainly valuable - so too is surge protection - including the phone line; a lightning strike took out my system via the phone line; many years ago, I've had said protection since.

In the USA, after decades of infrastructure neglect, we've had transformers blow up nationwide in high rent places like NYC and remote but no longer so cheap either places like both my mom's and my cousin's yards, or at least the right of way cutting through their land. Transformer blowups tend to easily fry electronic devices even with fused power strips made for electronics and in buildings with modern fuse breakers. There is not really much you can do except unplug such sensitive devices when not in use. My mom and my cousin didn't unplug their electronic and despite fused power strips and modern fuse breaker boxes every electronic device plugged in at the time of transformer blow up was fried.

Richard Haseltine · December 2018

Fauvist said:

Richard Haseltine said:

kenshaw011267 said:

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

Apple stopped building Mac's with Nvidia graphics cards at least 5 years ago. The ones that do exist are only just barely able to render in iray. Most people doing iray renders on Mac's are doing cpu only.

or using external GPU boxes.

What's a GPU box? I can render on a MAC with a GPU box?

It's a unit that connects to the system via a cable (I forget which connector is used - Thunderbolt?) and into which you can plug a GPU. I'm not sure how easy they are to use, and as kenshaw011267 says driver support may be an issue, but some people do use them (and indded, use them on Windows boxes to get even more GPUs).

outrider42 · December 2018

nicstt said:

outrider42 said:

nicstt said:

outrider42 said:

Well I'd argue you don't need the best CPU to render Iray as it basically does nothing when the GPU renders. The GPU is KING for Iray. You can dump on other things, but your GPU choice will ultimately decide how fast you render. You could stick a brand new GPU into a piece of junk and it would render almost exactly as fast as that same GPU in a totally top of the line machine. Period. The only exception being that the power supply is enough to handle it.

You can browse the benchmark thread in my sig for a general idea of just how fast different machines can be. You can take the benchmark yourself so you can better grasp just what those numbers mean. Iray scales pretty well, so if a certain machine is 10 times faster in this bench, odds are high it will be 10 times faster in most other scenes. Then it is a matter of deciding on VRAM and what your budget is. But the GPU is your main concern first, design everything around your GPU first.

I'm going to disagree over the statement of the GPU being king.

It is certainly vitally important; but until scenes always fit on the GPU other factors come into play.

A well balanced system is best, although I certainly agree that a fairly crap system will render about as quick as a top line system if they have the same GPU - although there are caveats; the scene takes longer to load, the computer becomes unuseable; and a more extreme possibility the piece of crap system is being pushed beyond its limits and takes the graphics card down with it.

Yes design everything around the GPU first, but not to the total expense of other considerations

It depends on what you do, but in many cases the other parts are quite trivial in the overall scope of rendering and using Daz Studio. Even if it takes 1 minute to load a scene to the GPU, is it really worth dropping the extra cash on the balanced build if money is tight? Different people have different limitations, and I think what so very many people here completely forget is that many people have limits to what they can purchase. Obviously if cash is not an issue, then spend the money on a better all around machine, that should be a given. But if money is tight, which it probably is for many people, then focus on the one part that will save you the most time, and that is the GPU.

Like this, if you drop down from a 1080ti to a 1070 to save money and get a better CPU, your renders will take almost twice as long and you lose 3GB VRAM. So is that really worth it? IMO not really. Its only worth it if you plan on doing other things besides Daz Studio Iray. And if you talk to people who have done these junk PC upgrades, some will tell you that the PC is in fact still usable during renders even with an old CPU. Just don't use the CPU during renders. I've only got 4 CPU cores on an i5 that dates to 2012 myself, the i5-4690K, and no hyper threading. I have no issues using my PC when rendering. In fact, ever since I upgraded to the 1080ti my PC has become more usable. You have to consider all the things that the GPU does just to to run Windows. My CPU was never the bottleneck, my 970 was. I have built my PC literally piece by piece over several years, swapping out junk for newer (at the time) parts, and I can very safely say from my own experience that the GPU is King for Iray. The hard drive might load the data, but it cannot render it. And you'd have to purposely be buying crappy hard drives to give yourself a real problem. Storage is cheap and it is only getting cheaper. You can also add new storage any time. The same applies for RAM. These are easy upgrades, you don't need to buy it all at once...this is the beauty of PC. So you don't have to drop it all at once. I also only have 16GB RAM. I had planned on getting more, but then RAM prices doubled, so I put it off. And now at this point I figure I'll just put off that upgrade and build a new machine anyway. Even so, I have not felt oppressed by this 16GB of RAM. I have had far more constraints on VRAM first, like the 970 has

And as my 6 year old CPU is only 4 cores, I think it is easy to assume that nearly any newer CPU would be far better suited. AMD Ryzen has made many great strides, and as such you would have to dig real low to get a truly bad one. You can spend just $200 and get 8 cores and 16 threads, which would be more than enough to handle most tasks, instead of trying to convince somebody they need a $600 i9 which also needs motherboards that cost more. I spent $200 on my i5 back in 2012, it is incredible to think how far Ryzen has pushed the market in just 2 short years. But GPUs have become more expensive, at least the Turing cards have.

Don't get me wrong. I am planning on building a new machine in 2019, and I plan on it having a nice base. I am waiting to see what AMD does, and it might be wise for other people to at least wait until AMD announces their next Ryzen lineup. There are many wild rumors about the next Ryzen, and if they are even partially true, then some exciting things are coming next year. CES is just around the corner, so let's wait until then to see what they have. I do play games, so I for me I do want something that can do that well enough, but at this stage of my life I think the rendering comes first. Since I do game, that does require a little more balance. However my machine is more than fine for everything 1080p, so that's not an issue until I move to 4K.

An extreme example if you like; a system without a nvidia graphics card will render; it might be slow, and a poor experience. Go out and buy a couple of 2080ti, or a hell even a couple of Titans or more hell still, Quadros. Sit them on the desk as they wont 'fit/work' in the trivial components. Very, very expensive paperweights - the other parts are far from trivial and are essential to the system. It is important to ensure the components will work together and support the system you are building now; it is also well worth considering what upgrades might be done in the future. Budget constraints have a baring, and can if not careful cause issues.

I have no idea, what is of value to the OP; it is up to us to give the OP options, and explain our reasoning.

Personally I would recommend avoiding Intel if your main concern is rendering, with or without some gaming. (If you're primarily a gamer, maybe there is an argument.)

Totally agree; I might upgrade my Threadripper - which incidentally does a decent job of rendering when my 980ti becomes the previously-mentioned paperweight.

OT, but somewhat relevant: I've had scenes drop to CPU, swap back, then drop to CPU again - amusing (and annoying).

I never said not research if the GPU would fit or not. It would only be a paperweight if you had no idea what you were doing. There are multiple people in this forum who have installed 1070s, 1080s, and even a 1080ti into machines that were 10 years old with no issues. These posts are all in the benchmark thread, and their render times matched that of the same GPUs installed in brand new machines. I even asked a couple about how usable their PC was during rendering, to which they replied yes, it was totally usable.

You just need to be sure your case is big enough, and that your power supply is big enough and has the connectors. That's not so hard and so far fetched to achieve. A couple of these machines didn't even have pcei 3, they were running 2.0, that's how old some were. Even that did not effect render speed. These are the "extreme" builds I refer to when I say the other parts are mostly trivial. It has been proven to be true.

Additionally, that external GPUs might even be an option also furthers hammers home the point of just how trivial the rest of the PC really is for Iray. However I would never recommend external GPUs either. There are too many complications, especially for Mac users, to really make this worthwhile. Enclosures are crazy expensive, and there are potential driver issues on top of that, again, more so for Mac. But if you do get it working, you can render pretty much full speed, while trying to game on an external would most certainly lose performance, which is my point.

To be clear I am not advocating that someone should go out and buy a piece of junk PC and a 2080ti for rendering. All I am saying here is that you can actually do this, not that you should. If you were gaming it would be terrible, but for Daz Iray it is not quite so bad. If you already own a PC you can upgrade it quickly with a GPU if it fits like I talked about above. You can benefit right away while saving up for the rest of the machine to buy later. I never said this should be your "forever" machine. There is no such thing with PC and computing anyway.

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

Richard Haseltine said:

Fauvist said:

Richard Haseltine said:

kenshaw011267 said:

esha said:

I suppose I need a Windows PC with an nvida card just to do iRay renders

I know several people who work with DS and render in Iray on a Mac. It seems there are Macs with NVIDIA cards. If you don't like Win and don't really want to use it, why not research the various Mac options?

Apple stopped building Mac's with Nvidia graphics cards at least 5 years ago. The ones that do exist are only just barely able to render in iray. Most people doing iray renders on Mac's are doing cpu only.

or using external GPU boxes.

What's a GPU box? I can render on a MAC with a GPU box?

It's a unit that connects to the system via a cable (I forget which connector is used - Thunderbolt?) and into which you can plug a GPU. I'm not sure how easy they are to use, and as kenshaw011267 says driver support may be an issue, but some people do use them (and indded, use them on Windows boxes to get even more GPUs).

Thunderbolt 3 for the Razer X. The boxes have mostly been marketed as a way to add a gpu to a laptop without one. On Windows they're pretty easy from what I've seen. No idea about using them on a Mac.

wolf359 · December 2018

Plus I've seen claims that Apple is ending support for Nvidia drivers in the newest version of the MacOS.

These claims are true it seems
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2018/12/11/apple-turns-its-back-on-customers-and-nvidia-with-macos-mojave/#533b045737e9

I was an exclusive Mac user for 20 years in the Print industry as Graphic Designer..
I now have two PC's (and my older Mac for Adobe CS and Final cut pro editing)

If indeed GPU rendering is the undeniable future that it seems to be,
then anyone involved in 3D rendering will be better served with windows PC
in terms of both hardware and driver support.

and into which you can plug a GPU. I'm not sure how easy they are to use, and as kenshaw011267 says driver support may be an issue,
but some people do use them"

Driver support is THE issue.
If you "upgrade" to OSX "Mojave",only two aging
“Mac Edition” discrete NVIDIA GPUs, the Quadro K5000 and GeForce GTX 680, are officially supported.

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

Apple continues to make business decisions that make no sense.

Producing machines with few if any user upgradable parts at the price points Apple is selling hardware at is baffling. Who is really going to spend $8k on a machine with no upgrade path at all?

$8k per box is getting into the low end of the datacenter world and if I tried to convince my bosses to buy a box with no upgrade options they'd laugh at me.

nicstt · December 2018

outrider42 said:

nicstt said:

outrider42 said:

nicstt said:

outrider42 said:

Well I'd argue you don't need the best CPU to render Iray as it basically does nothing when the GPU renders. The GPU is KING for Iray. You can dump on other things, but your GPU choice will ultimately decide how fast you render. You could stick a brand new GPU into a piece of junk and it would render almost exactly as fast as that same GPU in a totally top of the line machine. Period. The only exception being that the power supply is enough to handle it.

You can browse the benchmark thread in my sig for a general idea of just how fast different machines can be. You can take the benchmark yourself so you can better grasp just what those numbers mean. Iray scales pretty well, so if a certain machine is 10 times faster in this bench, odds are high it will be 10 times faster in most other scenes. Then it is a matter of deciding on VRAM and what your budget is. But the GPU is your main concern first, design everything around your GPU first.

I'm going to disagree over the statement of the GPU being king.

It is certainly vitally important; but until scenes always fit on the GPU other factors come into play.

A well balanced system is best, although I certainly agree that a fairly crap system will render about as quick as a top line system if they have the same GPU - although there are caveats; the scene takes longer to load, the computer becomes unuseable; and a more extreme possibility the piece of crap system is being pushed beyond its limits and takes the graphics card down with it.

Yes design everything around the GPU first, but not to the total expense of other considerations

It depends on what you do, but in many cases the other parts are quite trivial in the overall scope of rendering and using Daz Studio. Even if it takes 1 minute to load a scene to the GPU, is it really worth dropping the extra cash on the balanced build if money is tight? Different people have different limitations, and I think what so very many people here completely forget is that many people have limits to what they can purchase. Obviously if cash is not an issue, then spend the money on a better all around machine, that should be a given. But if money is tight, which it probably is for many people, then focus on the one part that will save you the most time, and that is the GPU.

Like this, if you drop down from a 1080ti to a 1070 to save money and get a better CPU, your renders will take almost twice as long and you lose 3GB VRAM. So is that really worth it? IMO not really. Its only worth it if you plan on doing other things besides Daz Studio Iray. And if you talk to people who have done these junk PC upgrades, some will tell you that the PC is in fact still usable during renders even with an old CPU. Just don't use the CPU during renders. I've only got 4 CPU cores on an i5 that dates to 2012 myself, the i5-4690K, and no hyper threading. I have no issues using my PC when rendering. In fact, ever since I upgraded to the 1080ti my PC has become more usable. You have to consider all the things that the GPU does just to to run Windows. My CPU was never the bottleneck, my 970 was. I have built my PC literally piece by piece over several years, swapping out junk for newer (at the time) parts, and I can very safely say from my own experience that the GPU is King for Iray. The hard drive might load the data, but it cannot render it. And you'd have to purposely be buying crappy hard drives to give yourself a real problem. Storage is cheap and it is only getting cheaper. You can also add new storage any time. The same applies for RAM. These are easy upgrades, you don't need to buy it all at once...this is the beauty of PC. So you don't have to drop it all at once. I also only have 16GB RAM. I had planned on getting more, but then RAM prices doubled, so I put it off. And now at this point I figure I'll just put off that upgrade and build a new machine anyway. Even so, I have not felt oppressed by this 16GB of RAM. I have had far more constraints on VRAM first, like the 970 has

And as my 6 year old CPU is only 4 cores, I think it is easy to assume that nearly any newer CPU would be far better suited. AMD Ryzen has made many great strides, and as such you would have to dig real low to get a truly bad one. You can spend just $200 and get 8 cores and 16 threads, which would be more than enough to handle most tasks, instead of trying to convince somebody they need a $600 i9 which also needs motherboards that cost more. I spent $200 on my i5 back in 2012, it is incredible to think how far Ryzen has pushed the market in just 2 short years. But GPUs have become more expensive, at least the Turing cards have.

Don't get me wrong. I am planning on building a new machine in 2019, and I plan on it having a nice base. I am waiting to see what AMD does, and it might be wise for other people to at least wait until AMD announces their next Ryzen lineup. There are many wild rumors about the next Ryzen, and if they are even partially true, then some exciting things are coming next year. CES is just around the corner, so let's wait until then to see what they have. I do play games, so I for me I do want something that can do that well enough, but at this stage of my life I think the rendering comes first. Since I do game, that does require a little more balance. However my machine is more than fine for everything 1080p, so that's not an issue until I move to 4K.

An extreme example if you like; a system without a nvidia graphics card will render; it might be slow, and a poor experience. Go out and buy a couple of 2080ti, or a hell even a couple of Titans or more hell still, Quadros. Sit them on the desk as they wont 'fit/work' in the trivial components. Very, very expensive paperweights - the other parts are far from trivial and are essential to the system. It is important to ensure the components will work together and support the system you are building now; it is also well worth considering what upgrades might be done in the future. Budget constraints have a baring, and can if not careful cause issues.

I have no idea, what is of value to the OP; it is up to us to give the OP options, and explain our reasoning.

Personally I would recommend avoiding Intel if your main concern is rendering, with or without some gaming. (If you're primarily a gamer, maybe there is an argument.)

Totally agree; I might upgrade my Threadripper - which incidentally does a decent job of rendering when my 980ti becomes the previously-mentioned paperweight.

OT, but somewhat relevant: I've had scenes drop to CPU, swap back, then drop to CPU again - amusing (and annoying).

I never said not research if the GPU would fit or not. It would only be a paperweight if you had no idea what you were doing. There are multiple people in this forum who have installed 1070s, 1080s, and even a 1080ti into machines that were 10 years old with no issues. These posts are all in the benchmark thread, and their render times matched that of the same GPUs installed in brand new machines. I even asked a couple about how usable their PC was during rendering, to which they replied yes, it was totally usable.

You just need to be sure your case is big enough, and that your power supply is big enough and has the connectors. That's not so hard and so far fetched to achieve. A couple of these machines didn't even have pcei 3, they were running 2.0, that's how old some were. Even that did not effect render speed. These are the "extreme" builds I refer to when I say the other parts are mostly trivial. It has been proven to be true.

Additionally, that external GPUs might even be an option also furthers hammers home the point of just how trivial the rest of the PC really is for Iray. However I would never recommend external GPUs either. There are too many complications, especially for Mac users, to really make this worthwhile. Enclosures are crazy expensive, and there are potential driver issues on top of that, again, more so for Mac. But if you do get it working, you can render pretty much full speed, while trying to game on an external would most certainly lose performance, which is my point.

To be clear I am not advocating that someone should go out and buy a piece of junk PC and a 2080ti for rendering. All I am saying here is that you can actually do this, not that you should. If you were gaming it would be terrible, but for Daz Iray it is not quite so bad. If you already own a PC you can upgrade it quickly with a GPU if it fits like I talked about above. You can benefit right away while saving up for the rest of the machine to buy later. I never said this should be your "forever" machine. There is no such thing with PC and computing anyway.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying we need to give the OP options and information; a few people saying their old machine is 'fine' is not useful information; it isn't a large enough data sample to garner information from. It is interesting, and it is something the OP could elect to make a decission on, but they need to know all the info - not just what has been filtered by us.

wolf359 · December 2018

"Producing machines with few if any user upgradable parts at the price points
Apple is selling hardware at is baffling. Who is really going to spend $8k
on a machine with no upgrade path at all?"

The same affluent consumers of Luxury brands that pay $1000
USD for an IPhone.

There is ethicly nothing wrong with strategically postioning your product line in the market
as luxury brand if you can succesfully do so.

The OP of this thread and any other buyer of consumer level CG rendering hardware
just needs to understand the technical reasons why Apple/Mac OS is no longer a good choice for this endeavour.

There is a similar thread right now, in the C4D forum over at CGsociety,

Most longtime Die hard Mac fanbois have accepted reality ... move to
Windows PC's for their GPU based 3D/CG production or be left behind.

nicstt · December 2018

It seems that Apple have a elected to market their products as luxury items that have phone/computer functionality; this is as an alternative as marketting it as a luxury computer or phone item. It is a luxury item first, that is its raison d'être.

DarkSpartan · December 2018

LIke I said originally: Huge amouts of money for "pretty". With MacOS ending driver support for nVidia, that's one more reason NOT to get a Mac if you want to do any real work that isn't Excel.

As for some of the other information out there, I wouldn't recommend an external video card either, even on Thunderbolt 3. You're looking at some nasty bottlenecks compared to a card that's on the physical bus. Same goes for most anything else. External hard drives, same thing (says the guy that's using more than one of them). CPU and RAM is another potential bottleneck issue, so take care.

As for me, I'm currently on a 1060 with 6GB, and whilst it doesn't render innstantly, it's a whole lot better than what's in the laptop I was using before.

Fauvist · December 2018

wolf359 said:

"Producing machines with few if any user upgradable parts at the price points
Apple is selling hardware at is baffling. Who is really going to spend $8k
on a machine with no upgrade path at all?"

The same affluent consumers of Luxury brands that pay $1000
USD for an IPhone.

There is ethicly nothing wrong with strategically postioning your product line in the market
as luxury brand if you can succesfully do so.

The OP of this thread and any other buyer of consumer level CG rendering hardware
just needs to understand the technical reasons why Apple/Mac OS is no longer a good choice for this endeavour.

There is a similar thread right now, in the C4D forum over at CGsociety,

Most longtime Die hard Mac fanbois have accepted reality ... move to
Windows PC's for their GPU based 3D/CG production or be left behind.

I am the OP. I never considered a MAC computer a luxury brand. I bought them because they each lasted between 8-10 years without ever having to be upgraded in any way, and never had to be serviced, and almost never crashed or froze. I have been using the same 27inch iMac for 9 years, and considering I paid less than $3000 for it, that works out to about $300 a year. I am an artist, and not interested in tech stuff. (although I DO consider the iPhone and the Apple Watch as luxury goods, and a waste of money). I would absolutely buy another new MAC if it was not for iRay. I resent the fact I have to pay thousands of dollars extra now just to render a DAZ scene, and I have certainly even considered just abandoning DAZ instead.

kenshaw011267 · December 2018

Fauvist said:

wolf359 said:

"Producing machines with few if any user upgradable parts at the price points
Apple is selling hardware at is baffling. Who is really going to spend $8k
on a machine with no upgrade path at all?"

The same affluent consumers of Luxury brands that pay $1000
USD for an IPhone.

There is ethicly nothing wrong with strategically postioning your product line in the market
as luxury brand if you can succesfully do so.

The OP of this thread and any other buyer of consumer level CG rendering hardware
just needs to understand the technical reasons why Apple/Mac OS is no longer a good choice for this endeavour.

There is a similar thread right now, in the C4D forum over at CGsociety,

Most longtime Die hard Mac fanbois have accepted reality ... move to
Windows PC's for their GPU based 3D/CG production or be left behind.

I am the OP. I never considered a MAC computer a luxury brand. I bought them because they each lasted between 8-10 years without ever having to be upgraded in any way, and never had to be serviced, and almost never crashed or froze. I have been using the same 27inch iMac for 9 years, and considering I paid less than $3000 for it, that works out to about $300 a year. I am an artist, and not interested in tech stuff. (although I DO consider the iPhone and the Apple Watch as luxury goods, and a waste of money). I would absolutely buy another new MAC if it was not for iRay. I resent the fact I have to pay thousands of dollars extra now just to render a DAZ scene, and I have certainly even considered just abandoning DAZ instead.

I have no idea what sort of artist you are but I've built PC's for digital artists who could no longer afford Mac's and for their associates who saw their new machines and were impressed by the performance and price.

The fact is that even when taking into account the premium I charge to spec, order and build a computer the PC's I build are still cheaper for superior performance compared to any Mac on the market. The only component I cannot procure at a reasonable price that is found on Mac's is the 5k display. But there are plenty of great 4k displays.

To me, and a lot of others, that certainly makes Mac's seem like a luxury brand.

Fauvist · December 2018

I found this site that makes it look like you can now use NVIDIA cards with new MACs. I don't understand what they're talking about, but it looks promising. https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/05/nvidia-egpu-thunderbolt-macos-script-video/

WendyLuvsCatz · December 2018

you don't need to spend thousands though

it can be done for under a thousand stick to an adequate power supply for now, everything is replaceable down the track,

just get 16GB of RAM, or even just 8 in a pinch if more slots are available for upgrade and leave yourself open to upgraging to 32 if desired in the future, while 8 not much it will get you off to a start until you can add more.

Honestly if an i5 mobo is dirt cheap 16 is all it can use but I'd strongly advise getting i7 as multithreaded and better for other programs like Carrara, you get twice the render tiles as your cores, mine 4core I get 8

the graphics card the main thing for iray, get a nice one

get a shop to build it for you, many that do postal orders will do bespoke builds too.

nonesuch00 · December 2018

The new CEO of Apple has stated that Apple products are being repositioned as a luxury brand although anybody on a budget or that needed their electronics to be top of the line capable or at least upgradable to top of the line computationally knows that that spiel was just veiled language hinting that the already expensive luxury Apple products are going to be made even more expensive. Why? I imagine because they were already so expensive that the average consumer couldn't afford the yearly or bi-yearly upgrade cycle costs already anyway so Apple may as well discourage those that couldn't afford that completely out of the market and offset the revenue losses in higher prices with folk that can really afford that.

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