European PC builders such as PC specialist any experiences or recommendations?
Pitmatic
Posts: 899
in The Commons
Hi
I finally have the money to get a new PC I am looking at an I7 32gb ram RTX306012GB I dont really do big scenes but i want to drop my render times dramticaly considering my current system has a GTX1050 in it.
I was looking at pc specialist has anyone used them? or have alternative suggestions I could build my own but its looking like its cheaper to get a prebuilt than from parts but I am open to the idea and amazoning the whole thing.
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If you mean the Yorkshire(?)-based company pcspecialist(.co.uk) then yes, my previous power laptop and my current desktop are from them, and a friend got a laptop from them (after a recommendation) and he is happy with them. Only really had one issue, with the heavy duty battery for the laptop and despite it being not a normal battery a new one was sent out pretty quickly.
I would recommend them - their custom build items are failty good with an ok range of choices with various base models, or a straight 'off the shelf' model.
If you mean "PC Spezialist" in Germany: you should look at the components of the PC they had cheap components some times in the past.
If you look at amazon.de you will find good offers for such a PC. (Most have a i5 - which should be sufficient. Also most have 16 GB RAM but you can easily put another 2 x 8 GB RAM (or 2 x 16 GB) in the PC).
One of my DAZ PC is a Lenovo Legion i5-10400F prebuild with 2 x 8 GB, i put another 2 x 16 in it. Also a second M.2 SSD. At the time I buyed it the 3060 12 GB was not on the market. So I have a 3070 with 8 GB. But i would recommend a GPU with higher RAM.
I've ordered a couple of machines from PC Specialist for the office. No problems with the order or the delivery. Didn't have to call 'support', so can't say anything about that.
For my own machine I bought a machine from Scan.co.uk and then changed the CPU cooler and added more case fans, memory and hard drives from elsewhere.
Bought from them nearly 25 years ago and then it was okay...
My latest two PCs was done by alternate which is also my first option when I need anything realted to computers. So maybe take a look if they have anything You would want...
The one in the UK? Bought a laptop from them earlier this year and happy with it.
This is a good starting point for a computer Intel Core i7 11700KF @ 4589.88 MHz - CPU-Z VALIDATOR (x86.fr). You need a big HHD or external. Just get what motherboard you want.
PC Specialist.uk - I don't think there is anything wrong with their hardware generally but I had issues with delivery - they wanted to charge me £12 because of my postcode - I got it delivered to my brother's 3 miles away and got delivery free because of his postcode. Then the HDD started clicking virtually out of the box. They weren't willing to supply a replacement until I sent it back - this after I'd been installing software. In the end I bought a replacement HDD from Amazon, cloned the hard disk, then sent back the faulty one to get a replacement. Personally I wont be using them again based on their customer support. That was a desktop, I was going to use them to buy a heavy duty laptop later but after that experience I didn't.
I have always gone with Chillblast myself. Probably very similar to Pc Specialist, but I guess it's a personal choice and I have always had great PCs and customer service from these guys. I changed my mind mid build and still got a very quick turnaround! Maybe a little pricier, but it's close.
I was looking at https://www.pcspecialist.ie/ (i assume its the UK comp really)
I am in ireland so getting stuff from the UK since brexit is a costly pain in the bum. so I hope to go from a 3rd gen I7 to a 11/12th gen I7 and I will have a think
Try to get the CPU in the K series to clock them. They may run a stock speed 4600 Mhz and overheat. Mine had a dual-fan AIO cooler and hit the thermal throttle of My CPU on my render machine. i9 10850KF, So I had to underclock my CPU. Just a heads up, you can use Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) to adjust the clock. If you are going for a dedicated GPU, you don't need the KF series of i7. The F is for the on-CPU video.
Going from a 1050 to a 3060 is going to be quite an upgrade. You will be quite happy with that. Since you are in Europe, I am curious if electricity is any concern for you where you are located. Your new PC will be using more power than your current one. I think the 1050 is a 75 Watt part, the 3060 is about 180 Watts give or take. Current i7 CPUs can use a surprising amount of power if they use all their cores, though you probably will not do that often unless you use the CPU to render.
You don't need a huge upgrade to CPU. It just needs to be good enough to handle Daz Studio and whatever software you prefer to use. You can not only save a little money you can also save a little bit of power as well by using a more efficient CPU.
Some people might suggest AMD is better at using less power, and this is true with a little known exception; Intel chips use less power when idle and in video editing apps. So it kind of balances out when you consider most of the time the CPU is more idle.
Also, the 4000 series is very power efficient, too. The 4060ti actually uses a little less power than the 3060, and a 16gb model is coming. It uses about 160 Watts, or less. The downside is its price is probably a fair bit higher than the 3060 you are looking at, but it will be faster. The 16gb model is coming in July. The 8gb 4060ti is selling quite poorly, so finding a 16gb version when it launches should be easy, and they might be on a slight discount.
Also, a new 4060 is coming, but it only has 8gb unlike the 3060, and I don't recommend any 8gb cards at this time. However its launch in July should still force a price drop in existing 3060 stock. So this is also something to think about given how close we are to that date. But it might depend on how many 3060s they have left.
In general we don't need to think about electricity (except for the price). One can have 2.3kW's behind normal 10amp fuses and 3.6kW's behind 16amp fuses.
Thanks @outrider42 currently I sometimes run my PC for say 6 hours on a render in teory a faster card would mean less on time maybe?
I am now dithering as to what to do prebuilt or DIY sigh...
Rendering on the 13700k uses about 260w, loading items and initialising renders it''ll briefly touch 160, keeping everything running while doing a GPU only render is about 50w. Gaming is about 100-125w. Like you say you're probably not going to hit all the cores hard but the single threaded performance makes the 13th gen intel stuff worth considering.
Thermal throttling is kind of expected on the new i7 and i9 cpus with an all core workload, but with a decent cooler you'll only lose a couple of hundred mhz. I've got a reasonable water block on mine, a contact frame, some paste I found in the parts box and a decent amount of radiator area. Still hits high 90s after 30min of cinebench. There was an Intel engineer on DerBauer's Youtube show, his thoughts were that if you're not hitting high temps then you're leaving performance on the table. The bios on my z790 even has a go as fast as possible but stay under 90 degrees option. Tried XTU on the 13700k, the results were strange in terms of clock speeds and utilization. The motherboard auto settings wanted to go 5800/4400 from 5400/4200 which was marginal. I've put it back to stock, it's quick enough and I don't think any gains would be worth the time needed to fine tune it.
I found Overclockers UK to be good. Their aftersales are excellent too
Their aftersales is great but you tend to pay for it at the front end. Not sure how shipping to Ireland is now, it was a confused mess just after Brexit. Sometimes have good GPU deals.
I only buy parts but I tend to use Amazon, Scan and Overclockers depending on who has what I want at the best price. Overclockers has a good range but can be expensive, Amazon are cheap for storage, ram, cables, sometimes other stuff if you can find it on their terrible site. Ebuyer sent me a UPS that had sat on a shelf long enough for the battery to be toast and were terrible to deal with. Bought my last GPU from CCL who don't have a great rep but it was 20% less than everywhere else. I've bought a refurb laptop and a monitor from laptops direct, they were cheap and arrived when they said. Sometimes there are bargains on Ebay, some of the bigger places dump stuff on there and if you're lucky there'll be a voucher, Currys have an outlet shop on ebay.
utopiacomputers (co.uk) in Kilmarnock, Scotland, has an excellent reputation for PC building. Their premises are local enough for me to pop in and discuss at length before buying anything. I don't have enough knowledge of prices to make comparisons with other builders but you can go to their website referred to above and 'put together' your own choice of components if none of their own chosen specs suit you.
I have no affiliation with this business but have bought one PC and upgrade components over a number of visits. My friend, who lives at the other end of the UK has bought two PCs over the years on my recommendation.
During the time of graphic card scarcity I happened to be in the shop to ask what was available and they said (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) that they were supplied direct fom Nvidia and that morning had sold a much sought-after card to a customer in good faith while knowing that it could be put straight onto the internet for a huge increase in price.
Please, don't base your choice on my experience but you can see what components can be put together and at what cost on their website.
If you are UK based I would measure everything up against ocuk as recommended above in this thread. They are pretty much the market leader in the UK.
Oh yes, a new GPU will mean much, much faster. A 1050 is very slow on its own, but you also use CPU rendering a lot because the 1050 runs out of VRAM so easily. Those 6 hour renders will dissapear with almost any of these new GPUs, whether it be a 3060 or 4060ti (16gb).
You can try the benchark we have. We have a 1050 score in there, and it is bad. The 1050 only got 0.65 iterations per second. I don't know about your CPU, but it is fair to say it far less than 0.65.
But the 3060 can do 7 to 8 iterations per second in this scene. We are talking a massive speed up here. Over the 1050, that is a full 11 times faster. But you don't get to use your 1050 that often, you usually use the CPU. Versus a CPU, you are probably looking at more than 20 times faster performance, and I am not exaggerating. So that will turn your 6 hour render into MINUTES.
6 hours divided by 11 is 32 minutes. 6 hours divided by 20 is 18 minutes.
You might be rendering the same scenes that took 6 hours in just 18 minutes. How does that sound? I would be pretty stoked.
Now every scene is different, and your actual performance might vary a little, but it is fair to say you will be render significantly faster than you ever have before.
So this would save some power in this way. While the new PC uses more power at max load, it will be running that max load for a much shorter time period.
However, I doubt you will stop at just one render. I would be willing to bet your new found freedom will prompt you to create more stuff and render more pictures. It would be hard not to! With your extra VRAM capacity, you will probably want to put more stuff in your scenes too, again, it would be hard not to. So you could still wind up creating a larger and more complicated scene that might take an hour or two.
It would be best if you never had Thermal Throttling going on. With the tree-tier AIO cooler, my Cpu runs around 4800MHz Factory just installed, and that's what it ran. Two-tiered AIO cooler, I had to underclock to the same CPU 4300Mhz. It has a running temp at full load temp is 87c with the three-tier system. So I would say it has a lot to do with cooling.
Cooling is the most important factor but so is the default behaviour of the chip which has changed from earlier generations. My 13th gen cpu if given an all core workload like a cpu render will try to hold all cores at the max all core turbo limit, (5300,4200), at the max power limit of 253w without a time limit. The only limiting factor is thermal throttling. All the power limit settings are still there and can be changed by the user, and you can also use an upper thermal limit but full tilt boogie is the new default even with 'stock' motherboard settings. In more normal use cases it doesn't run much hotter than my 10th gen chip while going quite a lot faster.
Just an update I have opted to order from PCspecialist I have gone for an I5 13 gen with the 306012gb A 1TB nvme and a 2TB ssd for daz content only (its taken me 3 years to accumalate 900gb of content so will do for a while.
I can then just carry on using my external USB HD work drives till they fill up and get replaced maybe by ssds in the future or whatever emerges as the new thing.
It will be air cooled (i think that will be fine with the largest they have) I am put off water cooling by the fact leaks are a thing and water and electronics dont like each other its an opinion dont flame me :)
This will be replacing my Dell I7 3770 from 2012 I dont change PCs very often I assume based on people i know if i were a Mac person i might be on my 6th Mac by now.....
Congrats, very exciting!
That's going to be a big upgrade, congrats. Air cooling is fine. I've got a watercooled PC but my preferred option is always air cooling for cost, reliability and lifespan.
There won't be any need to water cool this rig. While some parts might use more power than your previous one, these are are all still very efficient parts and modest on power. The only reason to go water would be noise. Some 3060s do have very cheap coolers on them and thus might get loud, but all of these parts can potentially be very quiet with air, too.
Right ok it finally arrived and after a day of hair pulling getting my content library to play nice and with adobe trying to be a pain i have a new PC
so i reran a scene that took 6 hours to render and I think it got to 360 iterations I loved passing off noise as film grain lol anyway the scame scene renders in about 20 mins and at a slightly larger resolution and 1000 iterations I might have given it longer as i went to make tea LOL.
Now I admit i dont do big scenes so my use case wont match everyone else but its transformative i can now do more in the same time, swear less and dont have to have the pc running all evening while my wife moans/reminds me about the cost of electricity.
Also the nvida preview has become useable...
I have noticed that all content loads much faster (it is on a ssd now) but my work scenes are still coming off an external HDD but ovver all load times are way down the only thing is dforce is quicker but not as quick as i thought it would be but i am not complaining.
My only criticism of the system is I swear I ordered it with 2 16gb ram but got 1 32gb stick is dual channel ram a benefit to daz? also the case fans are RGB and frankly the flashing is giving me a twitch so might turn that off if i can figure it out...
Interesting times.
I tried to add a photo of the RGB action but the forums upload is kaput it seems