i was wondering if anybody can recommend or send me links to good desktops for modeling and animation. I can never seem to find a computer with graphic cards etc. Not even sure if a gaming computer is what I need?
Do you want a computer for animation that you’ll be playing games on, or a pc you’ll be playing games on that you want to do animation on. In general, the hardware is going to be compatible, especially if you’re rendering onto the GPU. However, if you start doing more work on the CPU (sim, render, whatever) having many cores is tremendously helpful as a smaller portion of resources can be allocated for more trivial side-tasks. This is something that is not as valuable for gamers which are not as multi-thread optimized, nor intended to be run in the background like this. Often the CPU tasks we work with by their nature also perform well in parallel, though at the same time they’re increasingly being offloaded to the GPU.
A 6 core/12 thread CPU and a couple of GTX 1070s is what I’d opt for. Ignore all the gamer garbage designer brand memory and doofus heat sinks. Get a good raid card (like a really good raid card with a decent cache and support for RAID 10) and a couple SSDs plus a cold storage HDD or two.
The overwhelming amount of stuff marketed to consumers is just wankery. Ask yourself if you’d see it in a data center. If not, then pass.
it sounds like you need to build one. there is places that will build it for you, but at a good bit extra. im into building pc’s and the hardest part is the Motherboard, getting a good one, thats not stuffed with features you dont need, but not too budget that it fails or bottlenecks. also making sure it works together with your CPU and RAM.
heres the big question, whats your budget? the build in my sig was less then 600, and its good enough for me. the other big question, what kind of rendering? big realistic? cartoony? 2D? cycles?
long renders on GPU will require a high end power supply which most normal computers are sorely lacking.
I want to learn how to make animation short films. I don’t know much about computers though. Like Blender has render options like the cpu and other stuff. I do want to make realistic images and cartoony images like disney. so I don’t know what cpu I should have or graphics card, memory, etc.
I find around $720 is what you want to spend. The $500 build will probably not be enough for blender unless you already have parts like ram, harddrives, psu.
GTX1060s are very affordable. An i5 from a couple years ago. 16GB ram. SSD OS.
blender and nvidia work together the best due to CUDA (the technology that renders on nvidia cards) integration. while steps are being made to improve AMD cards, its still a few steps behind. intel is the preferred CPU since AMD is targeting lower end budget.
for simplicity sake, a single GPU may be preferred, since there are not as many settings. the whole SLI thing seems to get bad rap, but 2 cards without SLI bridge seems to be ok, cant say for myself though.
for a prebuilt solution, most manufactures have a gaming lineup, which would be a good starter computer. DELL has Alienware, Asus Republic of Gamers, and Lenovo has Ideacentre (or something like that). im personally a lenovo guy, but my motherboards are asus.
i dont know if im allowed to link out to these places. but heres some hardware to look out for:
GTX 970(mid-high) or 980(high) (optimized since 2.73, i use 2.74 on my 970 and it works great)
GTX 1070(mid-high) or 1080(high) (2.78a or above for optimized performance)
Intel i7 67xx series (latest Skylake)
Intel i7 47xx series (high end last generation)
the link shows some performance graphs:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6700+%40+3.40GHz
the “K” at the end of CPU names means you can easily set it to run faster then intended, at the risk of damage though.
CPU ghz (how fast it goes):
2.0 is really slow
2.4/2.5 is acceptable (performance mobile)
3.0 is standard
3.3/3.5 is standard high performance
4.0 is when it gets good :yes:
RAM (how big of scene it can load):
8 gb is standard (a bit too small at times for me)
16 gb is high standard (soon to be standard)
32 gb and up is extreme (many computers max out here)
Feels like 16GB standard is already here, does such a great job on keeping all your daily stuff.
My time with 8GB was actually probably even a little more annoying compared to my years on 4GB and below.
Think of it the same way harddrive space is thought about - buy the best/most capacity you can afford, that way you’re less likely to spend time screwing around later.
For clarity, SLI is a gaming technology, and even if you do not have SLI set-up, or if your motherboard is not SLI compatible, Blender will see both for rendering. Likewise, even if you do have SLI set up, Blender will not take advantage of it in any way, afaik.