Custom built computer - advice please
sensorychaosdesign
Posts: 1
in The Commons
HI All
I'm looking to buy a new computer and have come up with two custom builds (one intel and other AMD). Could I ask your advice on which one you think would be best (there is £300 price difference). I only render simple images, usually one figure with hair/clothes or background on its own and then take them through to photoshop. I'm still learning Daz so might do more complex images in the future.
Intel one
- Intel Core i7 9700K 3.6GHz 8 Core CPU
- Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x 16GB) 3000MHz DDR4
- MSI MPG Z390 GAMING PLUS Intel Motherboard
- Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite 120 Liquid CPU Cooler
- Seagate BarraCuda 1TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive
- ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Phoenix 6GB Graphics Card
- Corsair RM650 650W Modular 80+ Gold PSU
AMD one
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2GHz 8 Core (Socket AM4) CPU
- Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x 16GB) 3000MHz DDR4
- ASUS PRIME X470-PRO AMD Socket AM4 Motherboard
- Cooler Master MasterLiquid Lite 120 Liquid CPU Cooler
- Seagate BarraCuda 1TB SATA III 3.5" Hard Drive
- ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Phoenix 6GB Graphics Card
- Corsair TX650M 650W Modular 80+ Gold PSU
- Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 256GB M.2-2280 NVMe PCIe SSD
Thank you
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Comments
My first thought was if the AMD system costs $300 less, maybe you could spend the extra $300 to get an AMD processor with more cores. But I haven't actually checked prices. If I were to do a custom built computer right now, I would definitely go with AMD for ideological reasons.
Go with the cheaper system and spend the difference on an RTX 2060 Super and an SSD. The SSD will drastically improve load times (and just about everything else you do in Windows).
The RTX 2060 Super is much better for Iray rendering than a GTX 1660 TI and the exra 2G of RAM will come in handy when you start creating more complex scenes (and sooner or later you will
)
IMO, 6GB VRAM is enough for 2-3 figures, hair and clothing, and a set with props. The big issue with running out of VRAM is actually the textures, not the geometries.
I would consider those two CPUs equivalent, since they both do 16 threads. The only thing I'd say you're short on is disk space. 1TB is not enough these days.
Go for a 4 core CPU, rather than 8 core, which is overkill.
Spend the money you save on a bigger hard disk, and a more powerful GPU. An SSD is also a good idea, for the reasons stated above.
Cheers,
Alex.
Hi,
a hint from my side related to the Corsair power supplies.
Those who work with semi-active cooling tend to overheat, if your HW does not exceed a minimum electrical power limit to start the internal fan.
My PC works with a 12 core Ryzen (ca. 85W). Everytime my render falls to CPU-only render, the Corsair powersupply shuts down after some time and its housing is that hot you can't touch it with your fingers. But the internal fan of the power supply didn't start.
I found out that for electrical power below 350W the internal fan of the power supply unit doesn't start. It is shown on the characteristics charts.
Andy
Are you suggesting to stay away from Corsair power supplies? Or that you will be replacing your Corsair? Seasonic is a highly rated power supply company and actually manufacturer alot of power supplies for other vendors which are re-badged as Corsair or Cooler Master, etc.
I have a Seasonic 750W in my main computer I7-4770 and two Corsairs (a 550W in my Linux file/print server and a 650W in my I5-2500K pc). Corsair, Antec and Thermaltake are my second choice. I have an Antec 620w in my AMD 8320 used as a render node when rendering in Vue.
If his new board supports it, I would highly recommend a NVME drive over a SSD. NVME are like 20 times faster then SSD.The new MSI X570 board I ordered from Newegg for my Ryzen 3700x supports NVME. I need to purchase one soon.
The fan doesn't start because the ambient cooling is supposed to be sufficient. Your PSU is badly defective if it causes shutdopwns without the fan ever spinning up. Contact Corsair, they'll either walk you through correctly setting the fan curve or RMA the unit.
4 cores is woefully inadequate for most professional uses, include PS. The 2700 is $160 today. The 2600 is $120 and the 3600 is $195. You could save $40 getting the 2600, which is a very good CPU, or spend $35 more to get the awesome 3600.
But there is nothing at all wrong with the 2700 and if the system is $300 cheaper than the Intel rig I'd get it and put the savings into the 2060 Super. It's not just the 2 Gb extra VRAM. The RTX card will render anywhere from 20% to 50% faster than the 1660ti (As a matter of fact the 1660 Super will be equivalent to the 1660ti for $40 less).
Thank you everyone for your very helpful suggestions. I'm going to make some changes to my original specs
...I've been running a Corsair 750W Gold+ in my main system for nearly 8 years with no trouble.
You didn't say wether you would be rendering with 3Delight or IRay which really makes the biggest difference on what hardware you want.
I get good results in 3Delight with an i9-7980XE as 3Delight really likes cores wheras iRay demands Nividia GTX or RTX GPU's, the more the better. Even if you only use Iray , you still need CPU power as it is needed to "feed" the GPUs. I don't expect you can afford an Intel 18 core CPU as they are stupidly expensive compared to the new AMD chips (which are also faster!) - but get the mostest and fastest you can and then maybe get a better GPU later, since anything decent should work okay - unless you want Iray which needs Nvidia grunt, and plenty of it.
Hope this helps
Your AMD PC specs looks pretty good already.
I just built an AMD Ryzen 7 2700 desktop for $534 but used an AMD GPU instead of an nVidia GPU. I used a 2TB Seagate hybrid SSHD that I already had on hand unused. It will be upgrated to a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD in February and that will raise the price to $734. Finally, since you want to use a realtime raytracing nVidia GPU (the Zoltec RTX 2070 8GB Mini was about $400 before Black Friday sales in November) add another $200 for an awesome PC that will cost about $950.
If you buy the MB (cheapest Gigabyte B450 available with WiFi but only one M.2 NVME slot) I bought you'll need to upgrade the bios to the newest so that it will support AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. Now I don't recommend you spend an extra $650 just to get the about 25% single thread performance gain the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X offers over the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 but it does offer 16 core and 32 threads and is worth considering in the future if it drops to $425 or less money. That is unless AMD offers even better new model CPUs that will work in the motherboard that you already have.
I'd use PC Part Picker to find the target cheapest components and then do manual searches on Amazon to find the same of similar components even cheaper because PC Part Picker doesn't always find the cheapest price or get availibility correct.