Greetings form a German stranded in the Arab world.
I am looking for my new PC that will be focused on Blender.
What I’m looking for is a setup allowing me to render ~ 15 min animations, lets say over night.
I have now idea if that is realistic for a desktop PC.
The budget is in the title.
Due to sad circumstances I am also able to think about a render farm and would like to know the budget of creating one to be able to survive on the planet by providing that service.
Thank you in advance.
You won’t get a machine that can render a 15 min animation overnight. Probably never will based on the quality of the animations unless you get a thousand cores running or a hundred gpus.
Yep, that is a bit of a naive expectation. People are prepared to spend a lot more time rendering their animations in general so the standard is higher. You could probably render 15 minutes of computer graphics from 10 years ago overnight, but not the level you want today. It’s always like that - if you get more processing power, you usually just increase the quality of your renders not the speed. Have you seen 8K monitors as well? Well… apparently they already exist. Resolution expected by people is increasing rapidly. You might consider using services of other render farms ‘to survive on the planet’. I think owning a render farm is a great luxury. You can do a lot with a few graphics cards though. A few computers with 7x GTX 1080TI’s in each could be a serious solution. There was a thread with a guy building one similar to that somewhere around.
YMMV but used server hardware can be useful in these situations.
Yes, that is showing how little I know. For a desktop setup, is a 8 core processor with, lets say 4 graphic cards realistic for a budget of $2000? As good as it gets for the money is the goal then and using render services. Since I’m not gaming and have no other demands on the hardware, I’d like my next PC tailored for Blender.
Well, I would personally go for GTX 1080 TI cards if possible because of the memory that is much needed so it’s not really enough for 4 of them I think. It depends on what you are planning to render. If you are rendering a lot of fast frames there are instances where 4 cards will even render slower than 1. There are many things to consider.
Thank you for the comments. From the post with 700++ budget I have the processor and the board and now a recommendation for a graphics card. I understand that a so general advice is complicated.
How to answer someone what he needs if he does not know what he wants to do with it.
I guess it is similar naive to think I could make a living by putting $100.000 in hardware providing render service.
Edit: I’m self restricted to linux. Am I facing issues that the hardware might not be supported yet?
So far:
AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Processor with Wraith Prism LED Cooler - YD270XBGAFBOX $319.99
ASUS Prime X470-Pro AMD Ryzen 2 AM4 DDR4 DP HDMI M.2 USB 3.1 ATX Motherboard $177.39
G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) (PC4 25600) F4-3200C16D-16GTZR $226.90
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition GAMING, 11G-P4-6393-KR, 11GB GDDR5X, iCX Cooler & LED $869.99
Total 1594.27
Plus power supply, ssd for startup and a hard drive.
Might increase the budget for a second GTX 1080 Ti.
I would focus on real-time rendering solutions to get that much animation done overnight. Unreal Engine (I know I’m always preaching Unreal… can’t help it) or wait for Eevee. You can get amazing results from Unreal so look into that if you need work done now.
Then for the PC, you are looking for a good strong gaming PC which you can easily get for under $2,000. Check out Alienware’s Aurora (if you don’t want to build your own). They have great support but you can find much cheaper PCs if that’s not important to you. I would choose the one with a 1070 graphics card or better.
A bare bones starting point if you wish to build a GPGPU raytrace workstation. Start out with 1 GPU add more in the future. PSU choice for now can accommodate another GPU or two.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
I’m a little concerned that the motherboard, even though advertised as being ATX might be of the wider variety in which case the case(no pun intended) might be a problem.
TL;DR: Threadripper because of them sweet, juicy PCI-e lanes.