Advice Needed for Upgrading My Setup for Freelance 3D Work

Hey Everyone,

I’m thinking of upgrading my setup or possibly buying a new one, but I don’t have much experience with what’s important for 3D work.

I’m a freelancer using Blender, a bit of Nuke, and some Unreal Engine. I constantly hit the limits of my current setup, which is manageable for personal projects but challenging for paid commercial work.

My current setup:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
48 GB RAM

Here are some additional details from CPU-Z:
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I started with 16GB RAM and upgraded to 48GB after a few years.

I have limited knowledge about hardware and what is essential for 3D work. I do a bit of everything: modeling, texturing, animation, rendering, simulation, compositing, etc. I understand that the GPU is probably the most crucial part and the main bottleneck I notice (running out of GPU memory, slow render times).

My questions:

What are the most important components to focus on for 3D work?
Are there parts of my current PC that I should reuse in a new build to save money? For example, can I reuse some of the RAM, or is it too outdated? The new RAM is at least 3 years old, maybe more.
Are there any good tools or websites that can help me set up a PC tailored to my needs?

I’m considering a budget of around $3000 for the new setup. I don’t need new monitors; my current ones are fine.

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

You should get the most expensive GPU (3080 TI/ 3090, or 4070+) that you can afford. The latest Intel or AMD CPUs with 24 cores will be sufficient. Make sure you also buy the fastest RAM (64GB+) you can buy, pay attention to the RAM compatibility. You probably want power source that supports at least 850watt

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What is the different between 3090 and 4070? The 4070 on the first glance seems cheeper and faster. Ist das correct?

The 4x series is newer.

Compare them here

Quick answer: there are 3 main factors that are involved with “power workstation for 3D and/or Video”.

CPU: Faster is better.
GPU: See above.
RAM: More is better.

Some will consider using SSD drives to be a 4th factor, including those weird NVE “drive on a tiny card” things (which are quite fast, I’m told. I don’t have one.) But for many, it’s icing on a cake, so to speak. The rest of the above is the actual cake.

With CPU, choices are either Intel (my fav), or AMD. For Intel, I recommend a 13th gen CPU - i7 or i9. The 14 gens aren’t really much faster, cost more, crash more.

RAM: I don’t get too involved in stressing over ram speeds. I prefer stability over speed for RAM. I consider 32 GB ram to be minimum, I have 64 and usually this is pretty sufficient.

GPU: I always suggest nVidia, full stop. There’s a wide gap of power/heat, VRAM, and pure speed here. In general, faster = more heat/power = more cost. VRAM is usually in the 8-16 GB range (8 is minimum you should consider.). If you need more than 16, you’ll have to get a high-end card - which will be fast, but also more power/heat/money. There’s really not an option of “I want a ton of VRAM, but don’t need that much speed.”

I built my current system in my office for around… $1600 or so? Something around there. I only reused the RAM from my old system, but it was also 100% the ram type I needed (and was only $80 or so, not a huge budget item) - case, motherboards, power supply, drives were all new. So for a budget of $3K, you can get some serious power.

Hope that helps.

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The way to easily distinguish the specification difference between Nvidia graphics cards is by model number.
The first two digits are series numbers, and the second two digits are the difference in performance and specifications.
Comparing 3090 with 4070, the specifications may be higher than 3090, but the performance of the new 4070 is higher. :thinking:

RTX 3090 VRAM 24GB
Boost clock: 1740 MHz
Stream processors: 10496

RTX 4070 VRAM 12GB
Boost clock: 2490 MHz
Stream processors: 5888

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I heard, that vram is especially important. Is that so? The 3090 has twice that the 4070 has.

What does a better CPU mean in Blender? I never had the feeling, that this was a limiting factor for me. But I could be wrong

I just looked on Puget System, what they would recomend for Blender artist.
I’m asuming, that if I would buy all the components myself, it would cost less then $4000, correct?

Does this setup make sense?

Some operations are handled by the CPU, others by the GPU.

Some CPU operations, though not all, can be multi-threaded. So, a CPU with a higher single-thread speed will do things faster than a dated CPU. And things that can use multiple cores, ditto.

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Most viewport stuff is on the cpu, but gpu kicks in more during rendering

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If you have a large scene to process, you can also choose 3090.
But the 4090 has a much higher clock.
This can be processed faster.
But the 3090 has more stream processors and VRAM.

In fact, it may be difficult to determine which one is better when comparing two GPUs.

You can consider the amount of VRAM used on average and the speed of work. :slightly_smiling_face:

Ahh, my old PC, a 6700K and a GTX 1070 (I now use it as a NAS unit).

So, first question, I assume you are rendering with Cycles. I mean a faster GPU will help Eevee as well, but even a 1070 should do fairly OK, maybe not super real-time, but whats a few seconds here and there.

As such, you could technically just update the GPU to a recent RTX based card and notice a massive difference in Cycles rendering (and I mean MASSIVE, here’s my video going from a 1070 Ti to a RTX 3080 Ti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5kkKSgNHd4).

In some ways and assuming you have a SSD for storage and a PSU that can handle it, just replacing the GPU may be enough. Sure the old 6700K isn’t super fast by todays standards, but it frankly wasn’t a bad CPU and you have plenty of RAM.

So you could just do that first and see how you go. In many ways it may not be a bad idea, as new CPU’s are like a month or two away and any other change, just means a new PC.

Also, keep in mind, if you get a fairly good new GPU, you can always then just move it over to any overall new PC later.

At this moment in time, my go to GPU would like be the new RTX 4070 Ti Super. The pricing isn’t too bad (as far as bad GPU pricing goes), it’s pretty fast (would be faster then a 3090) and has 16GB VRAM. Only the 3090 and 4090 have more.

As for the CPU in general, unless you are CPU rendering, a 16+ core monster is largely a waste of money. Yes parts of Blender are multi-threaded, but you won’t be using them all that much most of the time and a current/next gen 8 core CPU is still pretty darn fast when all are at 100%.

For RAM, just get 64GB now.

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I assume you mean the 4080, since the 4090 has the same VRAM as the 3090.

Apart from that, the only main difference is that you can’t buy a 3090 new now, the 4090’s are really expensive and the 4090 is twice as fast.

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I saw it was already posted but the draft is glitching : P

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Thank you for that in depth answer. I already considered just buing a new GPU, but I feels a bit weird to put that shiny new GPU besides such “old” hardware. Will this limit the Power of the GPU, or even damage it?

An often forgotten aspect of the 3090/4090 is that they are huge cards. Your old case may not be big enough to take it. The other factors are heat generation/cooling/PSU watts.

Generally, I would say that making such a significant upgrade in GPU should require an all new build, so that the other components are at least within the same gen/era and not too old.

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If you’re not going to have a new PC configuration and want to keep some of your existing systems, you’ll need to be familiar with part compatibility and performance.
If the performance of the CPU, mainboard, and RAM is lower than that of the GPU, the GPU will not perform 100%.

I agree with this, on both counts. The high-end cards are definitely physically large.

And I’d prefer a modern CPU with a “middle of the road” nVidia card, over an ancient CPU with a top-of-the-line nVidia card (assuming VRAM was not a deciding factor). The CPU (and the motherboard) have to feed the GPU, and i prefer to have them sort of from the same era. Otherwise older components might reduce the bandwidth/performance.

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with the ryzen 9000 series about to come out and the nvidia 5090 about to be released i’d wait a bit. even if you don’t want to buy the latest components the old hardware goes way down in price as soon as the new stuff comes out.