Please Can I Have Some Advice/Help on a New PC Build
MelanieL
Posts: 7,815
First of all, the disclaimers:
- I am in the UK.
- I'm reliant on a custom build because I don't have the ability/confidence to do a self-build - I'd be terrified of spending 100s into 1000s of pounds on parts only to damage them or blow the whole thing up!
- Hence I can't use parts that the custom build supplier doesn't actually offer.
- I want to be able to run the last version of DS4 that supported 3Delight and all my purchased plugins and scripts. (I saved the installers before the recent "upgrade" to remove 3Delight) - for this I need an "old-school" GPU (while they are still available) for dForce simulations and Iray rendering.
- I also want to be able to run DS2026 (or whatever its final name will be) when it becomes the General Release.
I'm attaching a potential spec from PCSpecialist and would really appreciate comments and criticisms. Especially if Richard H could give me the benefits of his wisdom, though anyone with some expertise is welcome.
ETA: The spec has some optional extras that are not specifically to do with the new PC - I want the external optical drive and memory card reader to support my other hobbies.
Thank you in anticipation!
ETA2: My current PC I use for DS is still Windows 7 and my GTX1030 GPU can no longer be used for Iray rendering, so I have been limited to CPU renders for a long time. My PC is over 13 years old and was great in its time, but recently has started to have odd disk errors and strange behaviour like losing my profile data. I could waste time and money patching it up, but I really need to upgrade asap - If my next can last over 10 years again I will be delighted!
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Comments
Your RTX 5070ti will not work the the present release of DAZ Studio. You can only use it with DS 2026, which is now an Alpha release. Why a second graphics card? The RTX3050 is unnecessary. What graphics card are you using in your present system?
What are your storage requirements? 1TB SSD, 8TB HD, 2TB HD seems a bit strange. I would prefer 2TD SSD, 8TB HD. I have the 2TB P310 in my system. I think it is a good SSD.
My current graphics card is a 2GB GTX1030 - it is no longer supported by DS for Iray, etc. That's why I want the RTX3050. But that has limited VRAM, so for future-proofing I would like the 16GB RTX5070, to use with DS2026 and hopefully for a few years to come. I plan to setup DS4 to use the RTX3050 and DS2026 to use only the RTX5070. Not sure what to use for driving the monitor.
The 1TB SSD is for programs - my current elderly PC has a 500GB SSD which has been enough so far, but I chose a 1TB to allow for future expansion to install extra software - and I may choose to put part of my Content Library on that one. I'm pleased to read that you've had good experience with the P310. I may look into how much extra a 2TB would cost over the 1TB.
My old PC has 2TB hard drive (that was considered quite large when I bought it) but is virtually full with about a third of my Content Library on it - the other two thirds are on a 2TB external HDD, which is a bit slower to use. Hence my thought of going for an 8TB this time on which to put all my DS library and other 3D-related stuff. The other small internal HDD I'm planning is for non-DS stuff - my extensive photo and video storage and editing space. I store backups of all my DIM downloads on a 6GB external so don't need to keep online space for that.
I'm particularly uncertain about whether my pick has adequate cooling and sufficient power supply unit. I have almost no idea about those things. PCSpecialist's configuration checker suggested the PSU was more than enough.
I just had my guy put one together for me. I am doing a 3delight render right now to see how it works (4.10) I also have 4.24 and the Alpha on this machine. One thing to note, if you decide to get a secondary drive installed DO NOT get a network drive. Daz doesn't work with them
These are my specs
nvidea gforce rtx 5060 ti
I have a secondary drive installed in the machine that is also 2tb where I keep all of my content.
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700F (2.10 GHz)
Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
There are 5 fans in the console
Pen and touch Pen support
Scan offers insurance against build disasters, it is not usually too pricey (but of course covers only the parts you buy from them, so not necessarily a better option than you are currently looking at)
So I had no problems rendering in 3delight with my current build with the nividea rtx 5060ti card
Thanks for your input.
The GPU has no impact on 3Delight
I just got a new system with similar specs, except I opted for an RTX 4000 Ada Generation. It can handle DS4 and DS6 Iray, no problem. Low power (130W TDP), single slot, 20 GB VRAM, at comparable prices to the 5070Ti, but you only need the one card...
I have bought from Scan, and found them reliable, plus I was able to talk to someone who understood the technical details and options. I had a query about approptiate memory, and he was able to tell me exactly what the available options were.
a network drive should work with the content folder
I had my Win7 PC in a different room using wifi and sharing enabled on its external drive and my Win10 PC could use that drive in D|S4 quite easily if added to my content management
cannot now because that PC won't boot up but it certainly worked before
only drive it could actually use as the internal ones wouldn't
Living in the UK & having a recommendation from a gaming colleague I bought mine from PC Specialist. It was not cheap, nor trouble free, but it's not a bad machine. In fact it's quite a good machine.
I now know of four failures of PC's with SSD drives for the OS and the motherboard has also failed as the SSD died (or vice versa). That's in 3 years and accounts for 100% of the PC failures in people I know in person in the last 3 years. I regret to say I'm one of them, and my wife's laptop is a second. So, I am growing more dubious about the benefit of having a SSD OS drive at the moment. On my machine I have since gone to a Gigabyte Z790 MB and 512Gb SSD.
Would I recommend the machine? Yes, without doubt. Would I recommend PCS? Yes, if the price is the best you can get for that spec, otherwise no. PCS offer a decent machine that's fitted together well and you are warned if the power supply is inadequate etc.
Beyond that.. I haven't looked enough to offer more comments.
Regards,
Richard
I don't enough about cooling to say more than Fractal Design is a reputed brand, regularly recommended by the French magazine I'm reading when I want hardware tips.
Looking at Corsair website, for your CPU+GPU (not taking into account the 3050 but more on that later), their recommendation is a 750W PSU and they are confident a 650W should be enough:
https://www.corsair.com/fr/en/s/power-supply-calculator
A 3050 can require up to 130W of power from what I can see.
Using the worst case scenario, you're looking at a 880 W power consumption with everything firing at all cylinders, well under the 1000W your PSU is rated for and you'll likely be below that worse case scenario during a render.
I would keep the 1000W PSU though, because AFAIK:
Now that's an interesting thought - 20 GB sound pretty good. I checked it out at PCSpecialist and it works out about 100 pounds more than the 5070/3050 combo, but may be a cleaner solution.
Are you saying you actually rendered with it successfully in DS4.24.xx?
That's quite a worrying fault rate on SSDs - mine in my 13-year-old is still going strong (fingers crossed) - it's the HDD that is having age problems.
When you say "nor trouble free" what sort of trouble? I've seen a few bad reviews of PCSpecialist build quality since I first started spec-ing.
Thanks for the input.
Thank you. That was my thinking on the power supply - bigger may be better for the long term.
Did you buy parts for self-build or a have them do a custom build? Was the talk via phone or a live chat?
I'm too nervous and underskilled! In the past (long in the past) I have managed to install extra RAM to a desktop PC, but that's as techy as I ever got. I wouldn't know where to start with a pile of components - and I don't do well with Youtube videos though I'm sure there are thousands out there showing "How to build your own ..."
By the way, I was following the thread you started last November about your planned new build - did you eventually do it?
It was (well, they have been) self-build
I sympathise, and this last oen I did have to go digging for some information as a couple of things had no printed manual (the motherboard) or gaps (the case). Still, it is pretty much Lego - and these days memory is about the only thing that needs a degree of force to install.
Yes, as I said above it did have a couple of points where i had to pause to double-check things but it is working - and Scan did help with one of the points of doubt.
Yes, no problem. Here is the same scene rendered on 4.24.03 and 6.25.2025.35308.
Corsair power supplies are excellent. 1000w should be plenty. An RTX 2060 12GB might be better for DAZ rendering than an RTX 3050 8GB. Video memory is important. I am not sure how the prices compare in the UK.
The failure of the SSD/Motherboard was a fair bit of trouble...
I ordered mine end of November, got a mid December delivery date (think they normally say 4 days). Was OK with that, given the time of year. Then it actually arrived between Christmas & new year. OK, it was a busy time, but the tracking through their assembly process failed utterly, showing the PC stuck at the burn-in station in PCS. The DPD tracking failed utterly too, with them saying it hadn't been recieved even immediately after delivery. I only got an e-mail update from PCS 4 days after delivery to say it would arrive 'soon'. It's why I was rather luke warm about recommending PCS.
Having said that... My daughter bought a slightly lower spec one from them for gaming & has had no problems whatsoever, and I got a PCS one for a new designer at work. That has gone 18 months as a 35hr/week work machine without issues (so far). Went for a PCS machine for this work PC because it had a good bit more grunt for the CAD work than the machines we were being offered, for only slightly more money. In fact, a moderate DS machine is a pretty good spec machine for CAD, and I specced what would be a moderate DS machine for him.
My wife's laptop was a Lenovo one, not a PCS problem child. There is no commonality between the 4 PCs where MB & SSD have failed that I know of, other than the type of simultaneous failure of both parts.
Regards,
Richard
Thanks for all the info folks - now I have to cogitate a while.
I have bought parts, where I was confident I knew what I wanted and how to install it. I have also bought complete systems when I needed a new build, while I could ahve bought parts and put them together myself it's a big risk if you pay £xxxx and then it doesn't work. With a complete system you can go back to one place to resolve any issues, if you buy parts then you take that responsibility on yourself. I seem to recall the conversation was over the phone, but it's a while ago. I didn't feel pressured to buy, so it was a good experience.
Something that I don't think I have heard mentioned in any advice about system building is this:
At my day job, before the let you in the lab with millions of dollars of equipment in it, they make you take 4 hours of training on Electro-Static-Discharge. Please use an anti-static wrist strap. A catastrophy will most likely come not from a misconfiguration, the power supply is smart enough to shut itself off if it senses an over volt and the connectors itself physically don't allow putting the wrong cable somewhere, but from you damaging a component simply by touching it. The voltage that can make a component unreliable, not stop working but just be flaky in ways that will confuse every effort to diagnose, is about one tenth the voltage that you would actually feel as a shock; you won't even suspect that you killed your $3300 GPU.
So, don't worry about putting the legos together incorrectly, you generally can't. The real risk is ESD, and it is easily mitigated.
Don't be like me, and kill a not necessarily expensive but rather difficult to come by NVidia Jetson TK dev board just because I was excited like a kid on Christmas Day and didn't do what I knew I should have done. I actually felt the shock, but, as my training pointed out, most of the time, you won't.
Edit:
I'd also add that knowing about this silent killer might be the difference between a professional who you would want building a system for you, and an amateur who is only slightly more qualified than you are and is just praying on people's ignorance of the fact that given the right components, building a system is really not difficult...
This is of course very good advice, and applies to upgrades as well as full system builds.