- The GPU is fairly underpowered compared to the system as a whole, especially since you want to use the system for Blender (Cycles/Eevee rendering I assume), Unity and gaming and the speed of all three of them depends a lot on the GPU. For reference, my PC (also used for Blender, coding and gaming) has a Ryzen 1700X and a GTX 1080Ti and I’d consider that a reasonable mix.
- I’m really not sure about the Threadripper CPU. The only real benefit of the 1900X over the 1800X is more memory and PCIe lanes, and you’re not using any of those. Dropping down to a 1800X or 2700X would allow you to get a significantly cheaper mainboard as well, that price difference should allow for a significant GPU upgrade. If you really want to go TR for whatever reason, note that new models are about to launch.
- Hard drives: Why 4x1TB? I assume you want multiple drives for RAID, but three 4TB WD Reds would be significantly larger, still support RAID and pricing is similar. The performance difference between Black and Red shouldn’t really matter since you’d be using an SSD for the OS and programs anyways.
- SSD: Personally I’d go with a M.2 SSD as the boot device, but that’s personal preference I guess.
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I was going to recommend a GTX 780, but you might as well get a new 1050. Why are these prices so stupid? A 780 should cost like $50USD!
Does booting into a SSD really make that much of a difference aside from boot time?
And why do people get so obsessed over boot time, anyway?
I agree, I would increase the RAM to 32GB and choose a cheaper case, probably I would drop the liquid cooling and go with a standard solution, unless you overclock (with that CPU is just enough if you can increase it by 200MHz) or you have a proper liquid cooling solution (that includes the graphics card too), otherwise there’s no need to install one, check some comparative reviews, they’ll save you a lot of money and headaches in case of leaks.
With SSD I wouldn’t recommend Kingston, they are very unreliable and have in general poor performances compared to other SSD in the same price range.
I’m not sure, but I think it does not make much difference working with Blender. My recommendation is also that you save SSD money for now, and you buy more RAM or better GPU.
Regarding OS startup time, do not turn off your computer, you simply send the PC to sleep/suspend to RAM.
Regarding program startup time, in Linux the program load is slow only the first time it is executed, then components are stored in RAM and programs start much faster next times.
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For example, a SSD makes a massive difference for compilation times and development was explicitly mentioned. Also, afaik database servers (also mentioned) scale so well with storage speed that many people run them from ramdisks.
Another example are textures in Cycles - they’re read from disk every time you hit F12 (unless they’re packed), so an SSD can help there.
I like when there’s an SSD test, and what they show you is the boot time, lol.
Try saving a 3GB 3D Coat file with a mechanical disk and see how much more it takes compared to a standard SSD. The CPU can still be a bottleneck, since it needs to feed the file do the disk, but in general we are talking about 150 MB/s vs 600 MB/s (average) of data writing speed on SATA III SSD.
Well, I said “for now” anyway (assuming the budget was limited).
16GB RAM or 4GB vRAM can be limiting in some cases and this means not being able to work at all. I’m not sure if not having SSD can be limiting and it means not being able to work in some scene.
If there are software that writes to disk a lot, it would be slow, but you can work with a mechanical disk, on the other hand, if you hit your RAM limit, it starts to use your virtual memory, and that’s really bad.
He has the budget for an SSD, if you look at the list there’s a 512GB model.
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I was thinking the GPU was underpowered too … therefor my question I will try your config in a few moments
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OK I Will look into that too
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Of course who wants to backup 3TB of data but maybe you are right Raid 3 would leave me in my config with 3 GB in yours with 12TB I don’t only like to use raid for security but also for speed… Having 4 disks in Raid 3 will speed up data transfer by 3 times as well as having no problems losing a disk at any time… 2 is deadly. but I will never run raid 10 for my personal computer.
@SonicBlue, @lukasstockner97 and @YAFU In response to SSD
Maybe if I have 12 TB in raid 3 available I will not even need an SSD I can set aside 2 TB for Booting and programs and partition the rest for data.
@lukasstockner97 what you are telling is true but running compiler on SSD will degrade the disk fast as a lot of data is changed each time the same counts for databases. That is why I prefer using a RAID… If I could I’d have 7 normal disks in raid 3… with the curend disks the speed difference would be neglectable. the power requirements are a completely other story.
So I am going to try this again with all your recommendations and see if I can come up with a better one 
I’ll keep you posted
Thanks for all the input.
Jesus you guys really know what you are talking about don’t you 
ASUS ROG Strix 350-F Gaming, socket AM4 Motherboard
€ 129,90*
- Always liked the asus motherboards for their reliability (mine is now over 8 years and burned 1 Western Digital and and 2 seagate disk in it’s time Still going strong) Ony had to replace the cmos (bios) battery once… has been running pretty much 24/7;
AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 3,7 GHz (4,35 GHz Turbo Boost) socket AM4 processor
(Unlocked, Wraith Prism cooler, Boxed)
€ 329,-
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Actually this processor will serve me better than the one i chose at first. Mine had only 6 cores this one has 8… since I need to write and execute mostly multithreaded programs while running other stuff in the background it might be a better idea to have lower speed and more cores.
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Maybe need to upgrade the Cpu fan standard delivered with this CPU kit but that are problems for later
Corsair 32 GB DDR4-2400 Kit werkgeheugen
€ 334,-
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X 11G grafische kaart
€ 889,-*
Antec GX200 tower-behuizing
€ 39,99*
Xilence Performance A+ 730W, 730 Watt voeding
€ 67,90
Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition case fan
€ 34,99*
- This will be needed for the heat generated by cpu Graphics and Disks
WD Red, 4 TB Harde schijf * 4
€ 499,60
Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64bit software
€ 149,90*
Total
€ 2.474, 28
still within budget…
Nice one guys.
Any comments still appreciated.
There’s a particular reason that you need a system with RAID drives? (isn’t RAID 3 deprecated?)
First of all my sincere apologies to SonicBlue… I messed up calling Raid 5, Raid 3, where is my mind. but I leave my message intact for all of you to read if he/she doesn’t mind… with corrections.
Have you ever lost 4 TB of data in your life? I have and it is a pain… and it still has the speed increase if yout bus can hold it.
and no I don’t believe it is deprecated.
raid 5 can lose any of your 4 drives and still rebuild the 4the drive if it is lost
Of course you lose the capacity of one of your drives to have a permanent real time backup of the other 3.
The advantage of using RAID is mainly speed. instead of writing data to 1 drive you can write data to 3 drives simultaneously.
this is quite difficult to explain but the basis of the idea is this I need to write 100gb to one drive it takes i don’t know 10 sec (just saying something)
now I have 4 drives in raid 3 I only need to write 33.3 GB to each of the 3 drives and of course 33.3 GB to the recovery drive. speeding up the write by 33% and avoiding most cach overloads on the disks.
That is the theory.
For reading the advantages are a 33% increase and I have tested that. since each disk only needs to read and send only 1/3 of the data.
I have at home an old compac file server with 7 disks (old SCSI2 disks of 1 TB) this thing is ancient (more than 15 years old). I replaced it network card with a gigabit wired network card instead of the 10/100mbps card it originally had. it can still function as an external hard disk of 6 gb to my computer without any problem running SQL server.
Raid means
Redundant = no data loss if one drive fails
Array of = array of disks working together
Inexpensive = speaks for itself many chep ones instead of one expensive one
Disks = make a better disk than one large
JUst a short explanation
Raid 0: take all capacity al all disks and make it into one (only used for speed, no redundancy)
Disk space lost 0%
Raid 1: take 2 disks and maintain a copy of eachother (used for security if one fails the other retains all data) used a lot for banks
Disk space lost 50%
Raid 10 (read raid 1 and 0)
Disk space of one array is combined making one large disk
Disk space of two array is combined making one large disk
these are mirrored
Disk space lost 50%
Used by most internet providers or sql server that store a lot of valuable data that needs to be written fast and cannot be lost under any circumstances. and needs to be recovered even if multiple discs fail.
Raid 5 (Sorry not Raid 3)
I value most for personal use as it does allow me to work without backup but is used in file servers of lesser importance
I would prefer a 7 disk setup but that is not real easy these days.
So let give you an example whit only 4.
3 disks contain data
1 is used for backup (a sort of checksum)
if I lose one disk the data of the one lost can always be recalculated
as well as the 33% speed increase of data access you get the advantage of never having to worry of losing data again and never need to make a backup again
Space lost 1 out of the number of disks in this case 1/4 25% with speed increase of 33%
RAID might have been forgotten or pushed aside as complicated but it certainly not outdated.
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Hi Napivo,
What Latency does your ram have ? seems pricey for 2400mhz… cl14/cl15 ?
would pick: 2x 16GB G.Skill RipJaws V DDR4-3200 DIMM CL16 Single = 341,66€
I’d go intel, so new MB:
would pick: ASRock Z370 Pro Intel Z370 So.1151 Dual Channel DDR4 ATX Retail = 104,53€
Still got 2x pcie 3.0 like yours, for when you want to upgrade your system with a second card.
The reason for going intel is that I personally wouldnt render on CPU anyway, so a good single core speed
is a nice thing to focus on. (I dont use OSL) I think devs like Lukas could elaborate more on this but: Not every part of blender is multithreaded, so for the general modeling tasks single core speed is kinda cool.
Intel has the best single core speed currently. ( https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html )
The strongest being the new (basically 8700k) anniversary i7 8086k. = 429,94€
(yes, its still missing in the list above)
If thats too pricey id go for the slightly less powerful i7 8700k = 338,80€
I think you are right about the standard prism cooler. I’d also get a bigger one, isnt there a version without the cooler?
For harddrives Id just pick up a few 512GB intel ones. No real strategy behind this, except good value tbh.
512GB Intel 545S 2.5" (6.4cm) SATA 6Gb/s = 132,84€
All the prices will be a bit different for you of course.
Finally, the nvidia GTX 1080TI is a good choice.
Though, keep in mind that in the GTX 1180 is coming soon. ~2month
Hope that helps / inspires / bores / you somehow. 
Cheers
I don’t really think Intel is a great choice for a price/performance focused Blender build currently. Yes, technically they do have the best single-core performance, but trading a tiny bit of better single-core for considerably lower multi-core performance doesn’t seem like a great deal outside of purely gaming-focused use.
Blender does indeed have many single-threaded areas. However, for a typical use rendering still is the most demanding task for the hardware, and even if you’re using GPU rendering the CPU has to do scene synchronization etc. Also, keep in mind that not every scene fits in GPU memory (though a 1080Ti should be able to handle a lot). On the other hand, I might be biased towards Cycles when I think of Blender use, idk.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Intel is a terrible option, my laptop has a 7700HQ and it works remarkably well considering it’s a mobile device.
As for the 1180 rumor link - yeah, I don’t buy it. All they have is some third-party speculation, they literally quote Nvidia saying “[a] long time from now”, mention fall as the most likely option and then put “possibly July” on top of their website. Yeah, sure, “possibly” it could launch tomorrow. Likely, no. That article just seems like a clickbaity attempt to turn the good old rumor mill - just a bunch of websites quoting each other. If you look at the article, literally everything they claim is sourced as “well, we think it could be like that, and that has to count for something, right”.
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Good point about the scene synchronization, for modeling Id still be a bit suprised if the Ryzen7 2700X could beat the i7 8700k in price/performance!
(On the other hand there sure are other advantages going AMD instead of Intel, outside the price/performance debates…)
Yeah, the part about the GTX 1180 is probably mostly my wishful thinking, hehe.
I still think for my use of computers, I should take the hit on cpu speed over cores… I need to run SQL server,visual studio c# or c++ and unity at the same time… as well as blender and some drawing program… and I am usually listening to some music at the same time… to keep me relaxed.
My current computer is old for running all this stuff at the same time but it can still cope most of the time and it has only 4 cores running at about half the speed with 1/4 of the memory and no GPU support… It is ancient, a relic (but it served me well over the years) the only reason Ii still like it… If I write a program that runs on this old thing, I am sure any new computer will cope.
Trouble is I am missing out the chance to use things like cuda and it is limiting me writing software a for the future.
Thanks all for the input Napivo.
Hmmm, did I miss something? Isn’t it good too have many cores when running many applications. Instead of forcing them to share cores even if they are faster? Especially since those speed differencees are within a few 100Mhz.
No you did not, that is what I am saying too, I rather use a multicore CPU that is slower; than a single core cpu that is faster.
Single core CPU are only good if you have a multi CPU motherboard and that I cannot afford anyway.
the reason for doing this is mainly the cooling problem that arises when trying to make multicore cpu of the same speed and the costs.
I wish one day someone would invent a lego block computer system that you can add blocks to as needed… more cpu, more gpu, more memory. more disk space. only need to replace a faulty block if one fails and you still be using ancient computer parts when you you need it.
Napivo
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Ok, then I misinterpreted this as if you where favouring speed. I’m not a native english speaker, so there is always a chance for error.
Edit: I like the LEGO idea 