Gaming PC for DS rendering?
daveso
Posts: 6,794
I've been looking at systems for awhile. My current, with 16gig ram, i7 [email protected] is fairly fast fast, but it has an onboard Intel 4400 graphics system...so I use CPU rendering.
Getting something powerful is not an inexpensive task. I thought about buying a graphics card, but anything other than 1050Ti is out of my price range really ... just for a card ... plus I would have to upgrade my power supply. A GTX 1060 or higher is really needed .. and I've noticed the price of the 1050Ti has gone up about $50-60 in the last month or so.
I started looking at systems, and most that meet my specs are about $1600 and up ..
Then i found one to build for a bit over $1200. it is considered a gaming PC, but most that I've looked at are considered that ... or you get basically the same specs for a regualr desktop PC. This one only has 16gig ram ... but ... 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 RAM 2x8GB 3000MHz dual channel pair, CL15.
VIDEO: EVGA GTX 1070 SC Black 8GB GDDR5, 256-bit memory
then the CPU I was a bit wondering .. AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6 core 12 thread. The benchmarks are decent and faster than what i was looking at Intel i7 7700k
also has 250gig SSHD and 1T 7200rpm HD ..was thinking of upping that to 2Terrabytes ... I have 2 in my current system and it is 2/3 full.
550W power supply .. EVGA 550 G3 80+ Gold 550W fully modular gold-rated power supply, up to 92% efficiency
Also a decent case --- Phanteks P400 "Tempered Glass" Edition .. so you can see all those beautiful lights 
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https://pcgamehaven.com/amazing-1200-dollar-gaming-pc-build-1440p/
What is your budget and are you US located?
EDIT: That isn't a bad build for rendering. I got along fine with a GTX 960 for a long time. I'd suggest putting a Ryzen 1700 though, it has two more cores for very little extra cost and can hit basically the same speeds as the 1800X.
I have virtually the same system I bot here - look at my gallery, no pic took more than 15 minutes to render - but then again I am new and don't know what I'm doing. Maybe my renders should be a higher resolution or something (I still don't understand what people are talking about when they say they make hi resolution renders). I enjoy playing Ark on Ultra settings and Dishonored 2 and Witcher 3 were pretty great looking to play on ultra. I think you will enjoy your new system. Just put DAZ and all files on your E drive; don't want to fill up that SSD.
awesome... good to know ..it takes me 2 hours sometimes to do simple portrait render ...your renders look fine to me
I was thinking of putting the app on the SSD ... for faster there ... and the rest of other drive. but the way DS uses paths and stuff, might not be a good idea.
$80 difference..I could probably swing that for sure. yes, in U.S. ... the build was pre laid out for Amazon ... $1234 right now ... a nice number
would stiull need keyboard, mouse, and monitor, unless I use what I have ... but when new, you need new 
too bad I spent so much cash for that PC+ sale ... need to finance this anyway, but those long renders make me crazy.
A small DAZ Iray benchmark scene renders on my GTX 1080ti in about 2 minutes. It renders on my GTX 1070 in about 3 minutes. It renders using my 8 core, 16 thread Ryzen 7 1700 in just over 20 minutes.
If your main concern is fast Iray rendering, CPUs are, IMO, fairly irrelevant compared to GPU's. However, if you have some software that takes advantage of your CPU (though those apps are becoming more and more rare nowadays, usually limited to stuff like video editing and engineering apps and maybe some video games, etc.), then a new computer with faster CPU might be worth it. Otherwise, if it was me, I'd save my money and just get a new GPU, like a GTX 1060 or something. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I just did with an old backup Dell desktop I have. Just $500 US and I had a new case, SSD, and GTX 1060.
Likewise, IMO all of those RAM speed specs you mentioned are also somewhat irrelevant for most users. And you mentioned the power supply efficiency. Again, I think that's also somewhat irrelevant for most users. The reason? Electricity probably costs you something like 10-20 cents for 1,000 watts usage for 1 hour. So if your system is using, say, 300 watts continuously, doing renders or whatever, for 24 hours a day for an entire year, it would cost something like $1 USD per day, or $365 per year. And that's if you're rendering continuously every day for a year.
Now if you power supply is 10% less efficient (say 80% efficient instead of 90% efficient), you'd use 10% more power a year, or 10% more cost. So another $40 per year. But if you only use your computer "flat out" at 1/10 of that (maybe 3 hours every day), it might be just a few $$ per year difference.
So assuming few if any of us run our computers flat out, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, the cost difference for different power efficiencies is pretty much negligible. Unless you're paying exhorbitant electricity prices and use your computer at full power most of the year.
But it all depends on how you use your computer.
I wouldnt go with i7700k or ryzen now... Id go with coffee lake i8700k. Brand new just released, and its a hexcore. It bests even the ryzen in benchmarks Ive looked at.
My son just bought a cpu at ibuypower (during a huge sale) for 1709$ with these specs (and u can customize if its too high, and add other things that u need):
Processor(Intel® Core™ i7-8700K Processor (6x 3.70GHz/12MB L3 Cache))
Processor Cooling(Asetek 550LC 120mm Liquid CPU Cooler)
Memory(16 GB [8 GB X2] DDR4-2400 Memory Module - Certified Major Brand Gaming Memory Free Upgrade to DDR4-3000 Memory)
Video Card(NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 - 8GB (GDDR5X) (VR-Ready) - Single Card)
Motherboard(MSI Z370-A PRO -- White LED, 2x PCIe x16, 4x USB 3.1 Gen1, 2x USB 2.0 [Intel Optane Ready])
Power Supply(600 Watt - Standard 80 PLUS Bronze)
Primary Hard Drive(120 GB WD Green SATA-3 SSD -- Read: 540MB/s, Write: 430MB/s - Single Drive)
Data Hard Drive( - [FREE] 2 TB HARD DRIVE 7200RPM - Today Only)
Optical Drive(ASUS 24x Double Layer DVD Rewriter Optical Drive - Black)
Operating System(Windows 10 Home - (64-bit))
Speaker System(Logitech S120 2.0 Speaker System)
Wireless Network Adapter([802.11b/g/n] ASUS USB-N13 Wireless USB Adapter - Up to 300Mbps)
I've been looking at similar systems ... there were some good deals , but I moved past most as they were a bit over my budget... and it seemed every adjustment took something away I wanted or added something that ended up too expensive. Dell has a couple that are right in there too..one thing though, I was looking at 32gig ram ... but backing to 16 propable wouldn;t matter all that much. the 1080 also adds quite a bit tot he price....
I'm at 1200-1500 tops, and the morst bang for the buck is for sure in order.
I bought an MSI laptop this past spring that was just about $1500 when I ordered it from Newegg.
ZBrush! Terragen! World Machine! Filter Forge! Photoshop! These all still need decent CPUs and that doesn't seem likely ever to change. CPU use is not dead, not going out, not nearly, not even in the 3D world, still.
Yeah, its always such a delicate balance. It took us like an hour to customize his (and he needed my help, coz Im the geek of the family) I would have upped to the ti, but it would have added over 300$ on and noooo lol... you can totes be more than good with just a 1080. His is going to be for gaming, anyway... so not a rendering rig. He honestly prolly wont even need the extra cores (no, sadly, Im the one that could use them lol)
My machine (which is for content making of course) is an i7700k, 1080 geforce with 8 gb ram, and 16gb of ram. I dont honestly feel any losses, unless Ive used way too much poly in a scene and my system screams uncle and makes me reboot (and we're talking gross amounts normal people would not use lol) so I think u can def get by with 16 for now, and if u need to, just add more later.
I told my son when he gets his system, I am so totally benchmarking it with mine lol Ill be interested to see how much faster it is.
And that's fine, if the OP uses those then by all means consider a powerful CPU, as long as those apps also use the CPU for the particular stuff the OP does.
I know my Photoshop CS4 recognizes my GTX 1080ti, so I assume it uses it over the CPU for some filter stuff. Again, it depends on what you use it for.
Yes Photoshop has a couple gallery filters that use GPU.
Well ...
Even if CPUs are more inportant again....
If i was you i would upgrade my ram to 32gb ... buy a new powersupply and something like a 1070ti or above.
I mean, what is the point abput upgrading the whole system. How much would your overall workload benefit from it? Even photoshop does run partial on GPU these days.
In my opinion your 4 core intel will be enough for the next years to come if you dont dream of doing crazy stuff on CPu you should use a gfx card for. And lets be honest guys ... nobody cares if winrar runs 10% faster or not or PI performs better ;-)
If you do this "small" upgrade gaming performance will be fantastic and DAZ will run much quicker than on a ryzen 6 core or a new intel 6 core with a 1060ti or less.
Another thing to consider about power supplies...
There's a lot of hype in the tech community about how you need these monster power supplies. Right now if I run my Ryzen 7 1700 system, doing a render with both a GTX 1070 and GTX 1080ti running flat out at the same time, I can BARELY get my total power usage of the entire system (measured with a meter to see how many watts being drawn from the wall outlet) up to 420 watts. But guaranteed you'll hear people online getting all excited about how you need an 800 watt power supply or some nonsense like that. The 750 watt power supply I have is total overkill. Maybe if I was overclocking then yeah, it's a totally different story.
I'd recommend if you really want to decide what kind of power supply you need you go to pcpartpicker, and I think they have an online calculator where you tell it what components you have and it sizes your power supply for you, based on actual requirements. And if you're really worried spend a few bucks on a Belden power meter and it will tell you exactly how much power your system is using.
I was running a 1080 and a 1070 together with a intel 6 core with a good 550Watts power supply... was absolutely stable.
Its true that many tech ppl out there are absolutely crazy about powersupplys these days.
However, what is really true is that you shouldnt try to run a cheap unit at its max.
I agree.
Rule #1: Don't buy junk
This! I have a 980ti and a 1080ti - and a 1200 watt psu. It's all hooked up to a 1350 VA ups, and I'm using the APC monitor to track what is going on. With the cpu at 100% and both gpus at 98% usage my ups reports less than 650 watts power consumption. And, of course, some of that power consumption is being used by the 6 case fans and the cpu fan . . .
Huh? How do you get 650 watts??
A fan is generally a few watts. Most fan headers handle like 1 amp max at 12 volts, and each fan draws only like 0.2 amps at 12 volts. That's less than 3 watts each. Negligible.
Are you overclocking or something? I couldn't get even close to that with both a 1070 and 1080ti running at 100%. And the TDP of my CPU is only 65 watts, but that almost never runs at 100% when the GPU's are running. Even so that would only give me 500 watts total.
thats where i started, but found I'm at leaqst half way to a new system ... now I find my MB is maxed at 16meg ... but the card and power supplky will still set me back over $500 ... it might be worth doing.
App on SSD, runtimes on HD. I once had only a 1 TB SSD in one of my notebooks: there wasn't so much speed gain over my usual config of SSD for programs and HD for data. And DS copes absolutly perfect with runtime-paths elsewhere then c:\user. You only have to set it up once correctly (disclaimer: not sure with "connect").
One thing to consider about keeping the same motherboard....
I'm a big fan of upgrading components rather than spend for a whole new system. However, keep in mind that if you have like a Dell or HP, they tend to use components that are custom, and they may not work well with upgraded components.
A recent example I encountered:
I kept my Dell motherboard and i7 processor, but bought a new power supply. Why? Because when I put the old power supply (non modular) in a larger case, the motherboard power cable was about an inch too short to reach the MB connector.
Also, the Dell MB connector for the front panel stuff (power switch, audio, etc.) was a special/custom connector, and no pinouts were published anywhere. So it was a guess which of the 8 pins to connect the power switch to, etc. I did find one post a few years old on a forum with handdrawn sketch, but I had to take a utility knife to slice the old connector to make it work with the new case.
And there was also a wireless card in the motherboard with antenna wires soldered to the case, and I had to cut the wires to move to the new case.
Yeah, upgrading is good, but especially if you bought it from a Dell or HP or similar, they do a lot of custom stuff that can make upgrading a pain. They are certainly NOT made with upgrading in mind.
I'm going a bit from memory, since the beast is at home and I'm not - but at full use, the 980ti was pulling 77% of the rated 250 watts (per gpu-z) and the 1080 (not a ti at the time) was eating 85% of the rated 180 watts, and as near as I could make out, the cpu was pulling 80% of the rated 250 watts - so that's 545 watts. And the beast has 2 1TB drives and 2 2TB drives as well as a 512 GB ssd, plus a gtx 740 driving my two 27 inch monitors . . . and I may have been high with the 650, but it was over 600. And 7 fans at 2.4 watts starts to add up. I am making the assumption that the gpus include the fan draw in the reported power use (that would be another 4 fans . . .)
And no, I'm not explicitly overclocking - but both gpus are factory-overclocked from the reference standard. I cannot get past 97 to 98% gpu utilization because I don't play with the clocks or voltages, and gpu-z tells me that both cards are being voltage-limited when they get to that point.
Wow. A 1200 watt power supply and 7 fans? Heck, the hard drives running full out are only like 10 watts each or something, and I doubt they run full out for more than a few seconds at a time. And I really doubt they're all going at the same time.
And my 1070 is driving 3 monitors, but those have their own power supplies. I assume yours do too.
I don't want to say you're going way overboard with a 1200 watt power supply and 7 fans, but.......................
It's nice to know you could power your room air conditioner too if necessary.
It's actually smart to run a bigger power supply than you need, simply because that supply will run cooler than one that closer to the power load being drawn. And the cooler the power supply runs, the longer it will last.
Most power supplies have a watt rating that is "continuous rated load", which means you can run it continuously at that load. So unless it's a piece of junk without a continuous rating, then, for example, a 1200 watt power supply can be loaded at 1200 watts continously and meet it's "design life".
So are you saying if you load a 1200 watt power supply at, say, 50% it will last longer? How much longer?
Yeah is see it the same way ebergerly does.
However, Daywalker is not wrong with what he has mentioned. A Power supply that runs at 50% of max might run longer ... but if you compare prices of good 600W and good 1200Watt models you will see that its not worth thiking about lifetime. Based on my experience i can say that good powersupply dont die a quick death. At least they wont i they are not damaged in some way...
Honestly, as has been stated above:
If your primary focus is getting Iray renders completed faster, go for just upgrading the GPU and Power Supply.
- I would not purchase a system with a GTX 1050 ti or a GTX 1060 3GB card. This is because of how Iray works. The entire scene needs to fit into your avaliable video card RAM and a 3 or 4GB card is just not enough for much more than a portrait render.
Before I upgraded, I was running a GTX 1060 6GB card and even then I often run out of avaliable video card ram and the render would drop to CPU only.
In your position I would get a good name brand power supply in the 600-700w range, and a GTX 1080 ti 11GB card for now. This would leave you with $350 or so left of your proposed budget that you could put away and plan a computer build later when system RAM and SSD prices come back down to where they belong...
*** In an Iray render when rendering with the GPU, the entire render job is performed on the Video Card. (it acts like a self contained computer while rendering)
Just a note, a good gaming computer doesn't make a good rendering machine; having said that, they do have stuff a rendering machine needs, so can fulfill that role fairly well, particularly in everything prior to rendering.
The main differences between the two is, there can never be enough resources available for a render - it can always be quicker.
A rendering machine can run at max for hours continuously, gaming rigs aren't designed for that.
It's about throwing (carefully) as much cash at the problem as you can afford, or chose to afford.
Don't scrimp on a good PSU.
Because if one does fail, it can take other items with it; it probably wouldn't but it could.
I would certainly get one that has some spare capacity. It can be good to chose one that will provide what you need, whilst running at no more than 80%; above that there is going to be a reduction in afficiency, and you're starting to push them beyond their designed tolerances.