Computer recommendations please

Daventaki

My render computer has been acting up and it is a hardware issue.  What can I say its been a great computer but it is about 8 years old.  So im looking for recommendations.   I am shooting for something with a RTX 4090.  I have checked out CyberPowerPC and was wondering everyones opinions on them.  I have also been looking at HP Omens (no extra expansion for gpu cards so it puts it at the very bottom of the list) and the possibly of buidling myself again.

Matt_Castle

One hassle you may run in to with a prebuild for Daz Studio is that dependent on your scene and settings, initialising a scene for Iray can take considerably more system RAM than the final VRAM use. (It's all to do with Iray converting textures from their on-disk formats into the format Iray passes to the GPU).

People disagree on how much (some say 2x, some say 4x, I have personally seen one scene use 5x), but there have definitely been tests (I forget who did it) that found a 24 GB 3090 ran out of 64GBs of system RAM before the VRAM was the limiting factor*. And a lot of prebuild companies often don't provide an option to build with very large system RAM.

* This is part of why when I recently upgraded my GPU, I decided to just stop at the 16GB 4070Ti Super, because I doubted I could properly use a 24GB card, and upgrading system RAM would have been a huge hassle. (It feels like it'd be a waste to be buying more DDR4 RAM, and swapping to DDR5 would have meant replacing most of the system!)

outrider42

RAM is the easiest thing to upgrade though. As long as you have free slots available, you can pop in more sticks. It is best to get RAM with the same stats, but it is not the end of the world if you cannot find the same exact set.

I recommend building or buying that way, leaving free slots so that if you find you actually need it, you can expand. You can still expand if all the slots are used, but that would mean ditching the RAM that was already installed, and that would be expensive. You may be able to ask the builder to use larger capacity sticks so that you do have free slots for more if needed. 64GB is still a decent amount. I have built scenes they chew up all my RAM, but I have also managed to build scenes that fit in 64GB while using every drop of my 3090's 24GB of VRAM. So it can happen. If you change the Iray compression settings to reduce compression you can really jack the VRAM use up. If you stay at the default, the odds lean towards using up the 64GB of RAM first, but it is possible to fill the 3090 up if you have enough texture data.

I don't buy prebuilds, so I don't have any recommendations. If it is going to include a 4090, then they will match it with a fairly strong CPU as well. If you only use Daz, you don't need the fastest CPU around. It doesn't even need to be that great, pretty much anything modern will work. AMD has been strong in CPU, but Intel has some solid chips in the middle tiers. Even if you do not use the 4090's VRAM, you will use its speed. It is in a class by itself in that department. However, 4090s are at a premium right now, so you will be paying more. Most of them are well above $2000.