New Computer Specs Needing Advice
RiverMissy
Posts: 300
in The Commons
I am configuring a computer at iBuyPower and am including them below. Let me know if you have any suggestions. I am very excited to be getting a new computer and want it to be awesome. Thanks
| Case | be quiet! Pure Base 500DX Mesh Front Panel ARGB Gaming Case - Black- |
| Case Fans | Default Case Fan- |
| Case Lighting | None- |
| iBUYPOWER Labs - Noise Reduction | None- |
| iBUYPOWER Labs - Internal Expansion | None- |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Processor (16X 3.4GHz/64MB L3 Cache)- |
| Processor Cooling | CORSAIR iCUE H150i PRO XT 360mm Liquid Cooling System- |
| Memory | 64 GB [16 GB x4] DDR4-3200 Memory Module-Certified Major Brand Gaming Memory [Free RGB Upgrade to 64GB DDR4-3200 G.SKILL Trident Z RGB] |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti - 12GB GDDR6X (VR-Ready) - MSI GAMING X TRIO- |
| Motherboard | GIGABYTE X570S AORUS ELITE AX - WiFi 6E, ARGB Header (2), USB 3.2 Ports (1 Type-C, 7 Type-A), M.2 Slot (3)- |
| Power Supply | 850 Watt - CORSAIR RM850 - 80 PLUS Gold, Fully Modular- |
| Primary Storage | 2TB WD Black 3D Series SN850 M.2 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD -- Gen 4 Read: 7000 MB/s, Write: 5100 MB/s, Gen 3 Read: 3600 MB/s, Write: 3300 MB/s- |
| Secondary Storage | 6TB WD Black Hard Drive -- 256MB Cache, 7200RPM, 6.0Gb/s- |
| Media Card Reader / Writer | None- |
| Sound Card | 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard- |
| Network Card | Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100)- |
| USB Expansion Card | None- |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home w/ Windows Recovery USB-(64-bit) |
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Comments
I have a shipping address I can recommend...
For future graphics cards down the road, you might want to get a larger PSU. I have an address for shipping it to also.
Swap the WD physical hard drive for a ssd. Speed matters.
Not as much as size
6TB's is a good start for a content library drive
....just make sure you have an external backup drive because if that goes you can lose all your scene files and have to reinstall your entire content library all over again. It's no fun, and I speak from experience.
Also if you are not going to do any gaming a 3060 (standard) will still be more then adequate for rendering (same VRAM) but lower the cost significantly.
I will keep that in mind.
I figure with the speed on the main drive and the sata for data, it will be fine. Once everything is loaded into memory from the data drive it is barely accessed usually.
Yes, that is what I am thinking. Thank you.
I have a few externals thank you. I want this computer to go 5 years so I am going with a newer video card. Good to hear that you are doing well with the 3060. I currently have to use cpu so Iray is a nightmare. I look forward to using Iray in realtime.
I am unsure what PSU is if you would please clarify. I looked it up and only get Penn State U. LOL
Power Supply Unit
That was my next guess. Thank you. I will take that under consideration.
I have kind of future-proofed my system. However, I can still upgrade my CPU and Graphics card with the 1000-watt PSU I put in my machine. The computer systems I have listed below have 1000-watt PSUs.
I reconfigured today and here is the updated. I guess I wasn't spending enough.
I see you went the Intel route. They both sound like screaming machines. Why 2? If I have to I can always replace the power supply. I don't foresee changing much in this computer during it's 5 year life span. That's the goal anyway.
I built one for a client; he bought one after I got all the parts. I have a non-refundable deposit in my contract. So I got that one with the 3060Ti for about six hundred. So these are my first Intel builds for myself. Big Fan of AMD
...I see you moved up to the 3090, better all around than the 3080Ti for the price.
I should have seen in the part description that this was also being set up for gaming, as then the 3060 isn't all that great. I only use my system for 2 & 3D work.
Actually my 3060 is "on ice" for now until I can perform an upgrade due to the fact my MB's BIOS doesn't recognise it (it's a 10 year old X-58 chipset board and the latest BIOS update was about 9 years ago) so still working with a Maxwell Titan-X until then.
Am considering revising my build plan to remain with W7 Pro after what I have been reading in the tech journals about W11.
Basically I've gone back to looking into a dual socket LGA 2011 ATX server board with two 12 Core Xeon E5-2697v2s, 128 GB DDR4 memory, and 3 PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots.
Prices just recently changed enough to do that - meaning like this week or last week.
No, I don't do any gaming. Just a need to get things done as quickly as possible. I work A LOT of hours. I wanted the 64G of RAM for reading in the large hard drive indices.
Sorry to hear this.
You aren't having problems running things in Win7? What bothers you the most about W11?
Unfortunately I am not familiar with some of those items and would have to look them up. Sounds interesting though.
Buy a copy of Windows 10, whatever version OEM. It's stable; just when you get to the screen when Microsoft asks if you want to send info to help better your experience and disable all of them.
...I know about the telemetry thing, it isn't just that it's all the useless and annoying (for my purposes) fluff that is already included, some of which cannot be uninstalled without hamstringing core OS functions.
Don't want to derail the thread with the side discussions though.
I would save a huge chunk:
Edit: Perhaps I'm a bit overly Daz focused. The 5950 excels in efficient video editing if you do that too. And if you live in Texas or somewhere south, then perhaps the 360 would be necessary at this time of year!
Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I guess I was hoping to hear more from people about the who they buy from, what they like and don't like, what's working or not than I got. Due to family problems my purchase is being pushed back for the moment. Funny how reality plays into one's life. Thanks again!
I think pushing your purchase back is probably a good thing at the moment because a lot should be happening in the tech world that will change the landscape and your buying choices.
Amd is supposed to be dropping info on their soon to be released Ryzen 7000 series. Nvidia has the Lovelace Cards (RTX 40x0) gearing up for a fall drop (and its the reason the the RTX 30x0 cards price are dropping to below MSRP as vendors want to move old product so they are not stuck with it.)
I kind of agree with jmtbank to a bit...
The 5950 might be a bit overkill for the price at this point... The New AMD line up should have a bit more going for it than the last generation, but with Daz/Iray you want the heavy lifting being done by Graphics card and not the CPU. I don't think you'd see a big difference between Daz on a 5950 and a 3090, and Daz on a 5600 and a 3090.
They say that the new 4070 should be about where the 3090 is now, but with less power consumption.... Rumors are that it will have 16gb VRAM. The 4090 is really supposed to be a beast though... and it has the 24gb Vram... So by the time you are ready, that might be the better option for you (and you will definately need more Watts from your PSU).
850 watts might be the minimum-ish for a 3090, but you want at least twice the GPU's power consumption and to future proof, you might wanna go 1000w to be safe.
Do you have a friend that builds computers? Its not that difficult really, but if you have a "computer" friend, you can save a bunch by purchasing the parts you want and assembling yourself.
Check out https://pcpartpicker.com/ ; you can see other people's builds and what they used/how much they spent, and it has a "virtual" computer build area so you can figure out what you want and where to get it pretty cheap.
Another good source is slickdeals.com if you are looking for bargains/sales there is a computer section.
And lastly, try https://camelcamelcamel.com/search?sq=RTX+3090 ; It tracks prices of things on Amazon. so currently, that link will take you to RTX 3090 and show you what the current price is for Items Sold by Amazon, Items sold by 3rd Parties, and Used Items sold by 3rd parties on the Amazon platform. A lot of times, somebody says XProduct is $100 at Amazon... by the time I go there, it might be $112. If you follow the link from Camel, you will get to a page that has that price on it.
Thank you Chumly. You have given me a lot to research and think about.
The tech world is indeed moving fast. Nvidia has finally announced that they will be...announcing the next GPU series soon. Yes...they announced they will make an announcement. LOL.
But that tells us just how close we are to getting new cards. The thing is, they have a LOT of inventory of 3000 series cards left over. This has created a unique problem, because they do not want to release the 4000 series with too many 3000 series cards sitting around. They will compete with each other.
So the strategy appears to be that they will only release the 4090 and 4080 first. These will be faster than anything else around, so nothing can compete with them. But that still means that the "old" 3090 cannot remain selling for over $1000 when a 4080 destroys it for less money.
What all this means is that I believe the 3090 will drop to its lowest pricing right after the 4090 is announced. Not necessarily after it launches. If you step back to the 3000 series release, this is what happened.
The 3090 got announced, and the 2080ti was getting sold for as little as $500 on ebay within days of the reveal. While that is used, it is very hard to ignore such a price. But after the 3090 launched, all hell broke loose and the 2080ti prices rebounded back up. Certainly the crypto mining boom had a lot to do with that, but a price drop right after the reveal of a new generation is pretty consistent. You have the high end users who always want to best, and may not care about how much their old item sells for.
The 4070 is still in limbo. Rumors keep shuffling around, and I think the issue is that Nvidia themselves is undecided on the 4070 spec. They appear to have 2 different versions. One has 12GB and another weaker one has only 10GB. The 4080 should have 16GB either way, that seems locked in at this point. The 4070 may release later than 4080 as well, possibly even pushing into 2023. This is not too out of the ordinary, the 3090 launched first, then the 3080 came out a few weeks later, and the 3070 came out a few weeks after that. They have been staggered like that. But this time they may wait a little longer in order to sell off their 3090 and 3080 stock.
There is no talk at all about a 4060. This card might be well off onto the future. The 3060 launched a full 6 months after the 3090. I expect that to repeat again.
It is also possible the two 4070 versions are the regular 4070 and a 4070ti that would come later. That could explain why their are two specs in the leak cycle. Either way, the 4070 is supposed to match a 3090 in performance...but the VRAM could be a buzz kill for Daz Iray users. I think that makes the 3090 still very attractive. But the key here is that the 4070 will almost certainly cause the 3090 prices to plummet down more, as if the performance is that close, the 3090 cannot logically sell for too much more. The 4070 will likely fall into the $500-600 bracket.
As it stands right now, you can find 3090s for $800 on ebay, so seeing the 3090 go to $600 to match the 4070 is not out of the question. I do think the 24GB of the 3090 will help keep it floating above the 4070 though, as there are people who want that VRAM (like us). Gamers are not as concerned about VRAM as long as they have enough, and 12GB should be enough for gaming. If they release the 4070 with 10, there may be a little push back there. AMD's competition will likely have 12 or 16 itself. Nvidia cannot ignore AMD too much as AMD is supposedly going to be very competitive with Nvidia. The 6000 series is already neck and neck with the 3000 series, and AMD Ryzen has been doing very well, so AMD has a lot more momentum going into this generation than they have had for years. I think more gamers may be ready to switch to AMD than in years past. Of course...we are not gamers. Well some of us do game, yes, but we need CUDA for Daz Iray, so we are still largely locked into Nvidia. But people who only play games may look give AMD a real gook look this time.
At any rate, that competition is to our benefit. Things are flipping, we went from the worst ever time to buy a computer in 2020-2021 to what may become one of the best times to build one in 2023.
As long as crypto does not blow up again, the market should stay in our favor. However we cannot discount the chances of some new crypto exploding and causing a new GPU shortage. That is huge concern, because crypto is not dead. It comes in cycles. The last 3 crypto booms were 2014, 2017 and 2020. Each one was much bigger than the previous one, which is the real scary part. If that pattern holds, then we may have a couple years of calm before the next big wave hits. And when it hits, forget it, you will not be buying a GPU for very long time when the crypto boom happens unless you get extremely lucky or pay a scalper 3x the cards real price. But for now and the near future, the market should remain in our favor and continue to get better for us.
Oh, and yeah, don't worry too much about the CPU. Almost all CPUs are very good now. It depends on what you want to do, maybe you have other programs that need it, but Daz Studio is not one of them. Daz right now is still mostly single threaded and so does not benefit at all from 16 core CPU. You only benefit if that CPU is used for rendering...but seriously do not bother. Get a good GPU, and use that to render. A system builder might tell you that it is "unbalanced" to have a 5600X with a 3090, but they are looking at it from a gaming perspective. Again...we are not gamers. You do not need that for Daz Studio. This is where Intel shines, because Intel still has great single threaded performance across its entire product stack. The just announced Ryzen 7000 series looks to have great single threaded performance as well, so that could be possible. But it is a new platform, AM5, and getting on board will cost a little more. However, you do not need a ton of single threaded performance for Daz, either. Unless you are building some epic scenes, you should be fine with any decent CPU out today. So you can save a lot of money by getting a cheaper CPU. Maybe when (or should I say if) Daz 5.0 ever ships things might be different....but when is that going to happen? Daz is so secretive, it could tomorrow, it could 3 years from now. However I would expect performance to be better if they spread the load around in smart way.
Thanks for your input Outrider... I always enjoy hearing your perspective on things!
Ryzen 7000 will be availabie soon: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-zen-4-ryzen-7000
This could mean a further drop in the price of the Ryzen 5950x or more "bang for the buck" from a Ryzen 7000. In any event the 7000 series will require DDR5 memory and a new Motherboard chipset - Something to consider for the future upgrades.
Indeed, Ryzen 7000 is coming in just a few weeks. The downside is that you need the new AM5 motherboard and DDR5 is required. But they also promised to support AM5 until 2025. That means, supposedly, you can buy the cheapest Ryzen 7000 in 3 weeks (the 7600X for $300) and then you will be able to upgrade to any AM5 Ryzen for several years. It doesn't have to be 2025. Maybe in 2027 you decide to buy the last Ryzen from 2025, because that would still be a nice upgrade without buying all new stuff. And buying a 2025 part in 2027 would likely be at a steep discount. The Ryzen 7600X looks to be pretty darn nice and will likely run Daz as well or better than my 5800X does.
You would have that option as well, and AMD has proven that will support a platform for multiple generations. It is easily one of AMD's best selling points.
All that said, all the CPU is doing for Daz is directing the program itself. How much stuff you have in the viewport is a factor, as well as how many items you have that use "smoothing" on them. When smoothing is enabled on something, it has to calculate it every time you do anything in Daz, even just moving a camera. The more iterations you have, and the more items with it enabled all add up to introduce a lag on your scene every time you move. Of course you can disable smoothing until it is time to render, but this is where a good CPU can actually make a difference in how usable Daz can be.
When I had my old I5 4690 which was from 2014, some items would slow it down. I think it was "Bend on the River", which my PC could barely handle. It was so bad that Daz was almost unusable. But when I upgraded to my 5800X, that same item now works fine in Daz, with no slow down of any kind. But my I5 was old and pretty outdated. Almost any new CPU will handle this item significantly better than that old I5 did. Even a new Intel Core I3 should handle that scene like a champ. That is how far we have come. I can't find it now, but I saw somewhere that the Ryzen has Ryzen has improved over 100% over the original release in 2017. The 5600X can play games over 100% faster than the 1600X.
Do note this will not make Daz faster at everything. A large Daz Genesis library will still load at dial up speeds. Nothing makes that faster other than removing chunks of the library, because that is a software bottleneck, not a hardware one. I just wanted to point that out to not give any false hope that you can suddenly load Genesis 8 super fast with a new CPU. Nope.
So it is really up to you what to do with CPU. If budget is a concern, feel free to skimp a little. Or, if your current machine handles your Daz scenes fine...there is the option of not buying a new machine at all! If your current machine can handle the meaty 3090, then you can just buy a 3090 and roll with that, too. You do not need to feel forced to buy a whole new computer to render. A 3090 is indeed beefy, it is physically huge and requires a fair amount of power. If you have the space and your power supply is up to the task, you can do this and save a ton of money for sure.
Like I said earlier, we are not gamers, so you do not need to be concerned about balance here. You can run a 3090 with an older system just fine if it meets the requirements. If you plan on using all 24GB of VRAM, you might need some more RAM in your machine. I have 64GB in mine and it has been ok so far, but I also haven't pushed all the way to 24GB, either. If you have 32, that will likely not be enough. But hey, maybe it is for YOU. It isn't like you have to use up that 24GB of VRAM. 32GB of RAM is a decent fit for a 12GB card (though it can still run out).
So you have lots of options here.
The issue with crypto-mining getting suddenly very hot every 2 or 3 years, and causing the price of videocards to suddenly skyrocket and the availability for us regular users to buy videocards to plummet... I doubt that's going to be a major factor again the next time crypto gets hot: the two main cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum either are about to or have already progressed the processor-power for their mining mechanism up OUT of the range where video cards are price-effective for mining those cryptos, and none of the other cryptocurrencies are anywhere near to being in the same league as those two cryptocurrencies. It is like comparing two sports-cars to a bunch of mopeds and Yugos.
There's not likely going to be a giant surge in mining of, say, Pi Coin or Doge Coin or any of the others anytime soon on videocards, such that videocards would suddenly be being bought up in the thousands and thousands of units to build Pi Coin or Doge Coin mining farms. That train has left the station. Probably forever.
Another factor that was driving these things this time around is that there is also a fork-in-the-road moment going on in the banking-system world, the issues of which are way beyond the scope of this discussion, and that going any farther into here would likely risk TOS troubles (i.e. politics)... but suffice it to say, I don't think those factors are going to repeat themselves for... dunno, maybe another 50 or 100 years, or maybe ever.
So, yeah, I don't really anticipate us scrambling mightily for videocards again come 2025 or something... though, on the other hand, I'd say I'd eat my hat if I turned out to be wrong about this, but... I don't wear hats!
For me it doesn't make sense to upgrade until they have a AMD Ryzen CPU with integrated GPU that is at least on-par with a RTX 3070 as far as RT and all those magic AI circuits (tensor cores is that it?) & such. I forget what they call them. I don't know if they even dream about a baseline PC APU that's so fundamentally capable in a modern entry level compute way.