I apologize if this has been asked here previously
But I came across a youtube video on the Beelink SER550 MINIPC (Ryzen 7 5880H) , 32GB, GPU- AMD radeon Vega 8
Note in this video at the top the guy says that this Mini PC doesn’t support eGPU, however the video below states that an eGPU can be used. So there’s some confusion here, not sure who’s right.
My question is , would this be good enough to run blender for modeling, rendering and for learning animation? Also if I needed an external GPU to improve the performance, which would you guys recommend?
Edit: Found this one also
AMD Ryzen™ 9 7940HS Processor, 8 Cores/16 Threads
(16M Cache, up to 5.2 GHz)
Graphics - AMD Radeon™ 780M (Graphics Frequency 2800MHz)
Memory - DDR5 Dual channel (SODIMM Slots×2, Up to 5600MHz, Max 64GB)
Barebone setup for 519 USD.
No they are not. You need at least a RTX3060 GPU(RTX4050 is equivalent performing if you have the option for new generation) for a confortable work with Blender. Since we talk about desktop card verify what VRAM variants are best vs prices.
Cycles Render in Blender is done by GPU, CPU is obsolete being too slow and consuming too much energy. Nvidia cards with Optix are the faster ones.
Please for benchmarks refer to https://opendata.blender.org
eGPU implies always buying a proper external egpu case that is not cheap. You need to account for that and compare to a system that can have everything inside.
Absolute nonsense. I would be shocked if the vast majority of Blender users aren’t running significant lower than a 3060 and doing so quite happily. Hell, a 3060 blows away all Apple hardware that isn’t absurdly priced and yet I’m sure plenty of that cult are using Blender successfully.
What they’re saying is that an Nvidia GPU is massively faster than any other rendering hardware. The Ryzen, which is the CPU, could be used for rendering but typically you want to render on a GPU because they’re faster.
At my previous job, I spent a couple years doing the modelling, shading, and animating of scenes with >140 million faces – with only a little UI stuttering whenever I wasn’t able to hide things I wasn’t working on – on an 8th-gen i7 and a GTX 1660. That said, we did have 3x PCs with 3070s in the render farm to do the production-quality rendering overnight.
At home, I’m still on a Ryzen 3900 and an RTX 2070, and doing just fine and dandy with everything I care to work on. In fact, with how single-thread-bottlenecked most of Blender is, I’m rarely able to get CPU utilization about 12%. But I am looking forward to when the price floor drops out under the RTX 4080/4090 market.
@freshblend ; Ryzen works fine with Blender, but AMD GPUs are just not very good at Cycles rendering workloads compared to nVidia ones; and that holds true whether you’re balancing performance-per-dollar or performance-per-watt.
In one of the videos up there (I think the second one), the guy uses an external GPU with his Mini PC, would this be an option to optimize the performance with blender?
You could, but I don’t understand why you would. External GPU enclosures are awkward and expensive.
Why do you want a mini-pc? You’d be better off buying a laptop if portability is a concern, or a refurbished desktop if price is the priority.
I really think it depends on what you what to do with Blender. I use it for low poly game assets for Godot and I am am quite happy using Blender with my i5, Intel 620 iGPU tablet for that. That said, you would be better off building a miniITX SFF PC with a low profile dGPU if you want a compact form factor. The boards have really matured, offer a myriad fratures and some cases, using a riser cable, can fit the larger dGPU, although a 4090 might be pushing it a bit. At least this offer the option of future upgrades…
Both of the videos are correct about the external GPU. The confusion arises from the hardware, only the Intel equipped devices can use external GPUs via the Thunderbolt connection. AMD does not have this feature as it is patent protected by Intel. So, if you are looking to build this system, make sure the device has Intel CPU inside it and there is a Thunderbolt connection.
Yes portability is a huge concern for me but also buying a laptop with the same specs cost a lot more than the mini pc at least going by the prices of Lenovo Legion I have seen online. I’m still open to any option that could make my life easy when using blender plus afford me the chance to be mobile.
As stated above it depends on what your end use is.
In my case I make small dioramas or stylized characters, and I work with a 1050 on an laptop.
Of course, if you have to make intensive use of Cycles or focus on photorealism, you will certainly need a tougher computer.
Well I can categorically say this isn’t true. Why? Because my only PC is an old i5-4750 running a GTX1050ti GPU and I have no problems whatsoever running Blender 3.6.2
The key word is “comfortable” work. That is a relative term, highly depending on the projects the person does. I had to run GTX 1650 for a while and it was not comfortable. It was possible to work, but the hardware demanded constant attention and project adjustment to fit within the very limited technical capabilities.
So I would agree, when buying today, I would pick the 3050/3060/4050 as the minimum spec. for a GPU.
Not sure what you mean, my local PC shop still sells cards that came out in 2014 that have never been opened. They may no longer be produced but you can still get a lot of older cards without any issues.
