I’m very new to blender and I’ve recently decided for some new projects I want to start learning 3D.
As a life long Mac user, my current machines are Macs, they don’t seem to handle much well and I’ve been reading that building a custom PC is the way to go. However, in researching this over the last month - trying to understand all the different pieces of hardware and their capabilities is proving far more difficult.
I was hoping for some clear guidance on PC builds and compatibility, and which is best to purchase for my specific needs.
I want this to be relatively future proof so I don’t mind upping the budget at this time in hopes I can use it much longer term, as opposed to going too low budget now and needing to upgrade later. My budget is around $3-4k AUD.
My main focus is to learn 3D animation and have fast viewport and rendering time for:
Fluid/particle simluations (my current Mac computer struggles quite a bit to run even a 100 frame 10,000 particle viewport render.)
Photorealistic image renders, maybe short video. Cities, landscapes, close ups of objects.
Realistic architecture or small groupings of buildings to create a photorealistic city scene.
I’ve spent a large amount of time trying to read up on AMD vs Intel, graphics cards, cooling systems and mother boards and I feel like the more I come to be aware of these things, the amount I need to understand triples.
I have used many of the PC builder sites but I want some specifics on what I need for the above points, I’m seeing a lot of different information on forums about trying to go for the best CPU or GPU, then contradicting information saying the best GPU is only needed for extremely high level rendering for games.
I’m looking for suggestion builds based on the above points, so that I can then research more specific builds or items and learn that way. I don’t want to feel like I’m making a purchase about something I know nothing about so I need some better direction on what I need for what I am looking to do, and hopefully that can help me research what I need to as opposed to trying to research and understand everything.
I won’t state an explicit parts list but will try to give you an high level overview of aspects to Blender hardware usage.
General usage and viewport.
It is only fair to say that Blender, to date, has problems with it’s viewport performance. It is worked on and will surely get better but be prepared for some frustration no matter what you buy.
That aside, we can say, that most of Blender’s operation ( especially in regard to simulation) benefits from single core performance. This is because of all the dependencies that have to be computed sequentially and can’t be spread out to multiple threads.
For a long time Intel CPUs where a clear winner here but recent AMD chips are blurring the line. The second factor comes in with increasing scene complexity and is called RAM. RAM is as easy as it can get. Buy all you can afford.
When opting for a AMD CPU i’d advise to get something built out of Samsung B-Dies as those are known to work properly at their full speed.
Rendering
In general we can say that NVIDIA GPUs are preferred for Blender since we still have a delay to start rendering on AMD cards due to compilation times. Newest development shows that we will benefit from RTX cores and so I recommend something out of that line.
Blender can take advantage of multiple cards while rendering. So the general rule could be expressed as:
Get as much NVIDIA RTX cards with as much an high version number and RAM as you can afford.
Cooling
Just get a tower and throw in as much fans as it has capacity. Personally I recommend BeSilent! since I have really good experience with them. If you have enough budget a watercooling for your CPU is nice but not mandatory.
Power
Please don’t underestimate the importance of your PSU. Try to give yourself a little bit of headroom here. I again recommend BeSilent!'s PSUs. They also have a handy calculator on their site.
Now this is a first oversight. Feel free to ask more.
dont forget a ssd or m2 ssd for your system
and another point i would recommend, not only high watts on your psu also the quality is important! dont buy a cheap psu. there many ranking/lists about good psu s out there.
So AMD seems to be a better choice for CPU, in terms of faster viewport perfomance on large particle systems and photorealistic city scapes, what would you suggest in terms of a CPU + GPU?
I’ve seen quite a few people say get the best you can possibly afford, but also quite a few talking about the very top end is only absolutely needed for extreme cases like game design.
Ok so try to run with RTX GPUs - with the highest VRAM I can get?
Cooling is very new to me, I’m hoping to nail down what CPU I can get and then research into best options and compatibility for that one and go from there.
Yep, seen across the board that PSU is incredibly important, as above - hoping to get an idea of what CPU/GPU to go with and research further into best options to handle those.
Understood, in terms of SSDs and Harddrives, will it link into what other hardware you have and what can work best with those or is there something else I should be looking for in terms of quality and specs?
Another thing that I think is important is that you buy a board that has enough room for more graphics cards. At the beginning you can start with a card and buy one for one year and a third the following year. This assumes that you have an appropriate board, a corresponding case and a corresponding PSU.
At the moment I’m working on a big scene. For this I use 8k textures. The textures are on my NAS (about 100-120mb / s). Loading and saving the file takes a relatively long time. It also takes a while to start rendering because the textures have to be loaded into the graphics card first. The bottom line is that you should have the textures (also HDRi and this stuff) best locally on a fast disk. Here is then to pay attention to anything special. In the future I will get fast and big SSD and work from there. And then mirror the data of the SSD in the background on my NAS. As a backup. That should not be underestimated. Many small or a few large textures can take up a lot of space. Assets and HDRIs as well.
There are many different philosophies regarding cooling. Whether air or water, both are good. Water does not automatically “always” better. If you do not intend to overclock anything, good air cooling is enough. Fans should all blow in one direction. For example, from front to back / up. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.
Regarding graphics card, I would currently recommend as many 2080ti as possible. You have to think about the place. I currently only have one in my case, but I would like two. But now have the problem that if I would install two, which would be directly to each other - which is not good for the cooling performance. Either a PCIe slot in between (but I have the wrong board - I can not do that). The old Founders Edition blew the air out of the case. The new ones do not do that anymore. I have a 1800X. But with a TR4 (for example) board and a bigger case it would work.
Hi, this my suggestion according to your budget, first all you can start with a Ryzen 3000 or a Threadripper, 64GB Ram, Solid drives NVMe M.2 or PCI Express for better performance among apps, 1 GPU RTX 2080 (2 recommended), 1- 1000 Watts PSU or higher, a Mobo from Asus is good enough with last Ryzen support and PCI Express 4.0. Between water and air cooling, I prefer the first one instead of fans, even it’s more expensive but quiet.
I hope this can help you with your decision.
This is my pc before I added a new RTX 2080 two month ago.
Here is an idea of what you can do with slightly more than 4K$ AUD. PCPartPicker Part List
I would personally pay a bit more to get the 3900X or the upcoming 3950X, but the 3800X is decent enough. It’s better to compromise with a lower-end cpu in order to fit in the 2080Ti.
I have a feeling that Clint’s first PC workstation is not going to be a full custom loop…
Clint, no one has mentioned hybrid GPUs. If you are not aware of them, they are self-contained closed-loop water-cooled GPUs that have their own radiator, just like CPU all-in-one (aio) coolers. I highly recommend this: https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=11G-P4-2384-KR … I have three of them, in a Thermaltake Core X9 case (huge, kickass, only $160).
And I very highly recommend building your PC yourself. It is not nearly as hard as it seems, if you follow along with YouTube tutorials etc. I’ve been building my own since my first ws, which was a dual-pentium… jeez, that was long ago…
Also, I think Markus above was referring to BeQuiet! fans, not BeSilent!.. Yes, they indeed rock. Their SilentWings are quite nice. And If you would end up with three or more GPUs in your beast (as we like to call GPU workstations), then SuperFlower Leadex or EVGA SuperNova (whichever is available in AUS - essentially the same) 1600W Titanium or Platinum is definitely the way to go for PSU.
I too am interested in this topic. The release of 2.8 has me very excited and I’d like to build a workstation that can render still and short animations. The thought of using an Intel processor seems more comfortable due to my past experience but I’m open to ideas.
Could I do better than the Intel Core i9-7960X? Am I better off going for the i9-9900K?
Would the RTX 2080 Ti the place start in terms of a powerhouse GPU? I see other posters mentioning starting with a single card and leaving room for expanding. Would the nVidia RTX 2080 Ti be the strongest card to start with for the goals above?
It’s worth mentioning I am a noob and learning all things Blender. I need a machine that helps me make more informed decisions, quicker, through rapid experimentation and rendering without needing to wait the times I do on my current old machine.
I’m having a hard time determining whether it’s better to invest more into the GPU or CPU but I figure for a workstation it’s not a bad position to have all ends strong.
You’re welcome. And I can tell you from experience, with multiple hybrid builds under my belt, you can slap them in right beside each other. They do not need extra space between them.
GPU is definitely more important, imho. Hell, you could even build (or buy used) a beast that is a X99 workstation mobo based (four PCI-E slots) with a i7 5820k CPU and 32GB RAM cheaply and slap a couple 2080Ti (with room for another one or two down the road), and I promise you that you’re going to be thrilled. I am still working on a X99 w/ 5820k and 32GB and not only work buttery-smooth in Blender with anything I throw at it, but also Davinci Resolve, Substance Painter, PS, etc, etc… It is not unheard of in GPU workstations to go this route, one or maybe even two generations older, for those looking to put their bucks where it counts most… (I have not, I always build new because I can, but I know that plenty of others have done this)
