AMD vs i7

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Hello all,

My first post here as I have only just started out playing with blender and I am not sure if this is the right thread to post this in. If this is not, could someone move it or tell me where to move it to?

I am slowly moving away from 3DsMax and Maya as my student account there will end soon and I am now working on a low budget youtube channel. Not posting the channel here in case people think I am just here to plug the channel. I want to make somewhat of a good impression on my first post.

As such I am looking to build a new system for this youtube work. The channel I am involved with is primarily focused on mobile gaming but is now moving to incorporate live-action short films with CGI.

I will be using 3DsMax and Maya until my student subscription runs out at the end of the year, but will hopefully be fully off that addiction and completely in the Blender camp before that happens. Addictions can be hard to break.

So on to the purpose of this post.

I have some experience with tech and building workstations in the past, my current was built by me about 5 years ago. Back then it was pretty easy, buy the best Intel CPU you could afford. That was it. Then AMD came out with the Ryzen CPU and I am unsure where to go. I live in Australia so any prices I post are in AUD. At the moment I am trying to decide between the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6-Core Socket AM4 3.4GHz and the Intel Core i7 7800X Six Core LGA 2066 3.5 GHz
There is a significant price difference between the two and I can’t work out where to go. I have been using Intel for years and am hesitant to move away from a known brand.

The list of software other than Blender I will be using on my machine is this:
Adobe Premiere
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Audition
Adobe Photoshop
Element 3D
RealFlow
3DsMax
Maya
DaVinci Resolve 14

At the moment I am using blender for fire and smoke simulations and working on using it for fluid simulations rather than realflow. At the moment I am mostly using Maya for its automatic rigging tool which is adequate for my macro humanoid animations that I am doing. I only need to do arms, legs and head for now. No fingers or facial expressions. Then all of this getting composited into the After effects for final edit in Premiere.

Parts around the CPU I was aiming to install were:
32gig DDR 4 RAM 2400mhz
1080 GTX or the 1080 GTX Ti if I can stretch the budget.

I was wondering what the communities thoughts on this were.

Cheers all.

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Re: the 7800X vs. the 1600 specifically, the 7800X benchmarks about 25% faster: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7800X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-1600/m304816vs3919

You should also be aware that the i7 8700 is a little cheaper than the 7800X, and a little faster:
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7800X-vs-Intel-Core-i7-8700/m304816vs3940

(If you want to overclock, you could go for the 8700K, which is a little faster than the 8700, but a little more expensive than the 7800X.)

I’ve also heard that the Intel Skylake / 2066 chips (e.g., your i7 7800X, or the i7 7820X or i9 7900X) are over-priced, run too hot, and have a bunch of other problems, compared to Kaby Lake (e.g., i7 7700K, 7700, i5 7600K) and Coffee Lake (e.g., i7 8700K, 8700, i5 8600K). But I’m not super knowledgeable, you’d have to dig around for specific complaints about Skylake.

It sounds like the things you’ll be using Blender for are mostly multi-threaded applications, so you could go for either Intel or AMD, which both have good multi-core performance, although you might want to look at the Ryzen 1700 or 1700X to beat the 7800X or i7 8700’s multi-core benchmarks.

For single-threaded applications (general modeling ops, high-density geo, booleans, etc), look at single-core benchmarks instead of multi-core. The Intel chips beat AMD across the board in single-core performance.

I’m not super knowledgeable about any of this stuff as it relates to Blender, though, so maybe someone w/ more experience can chime in or correct stuff.

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Thanks for your input :). I will take all of this into consideration.