New PC Build for Blender. Moving from Mac to PC

Support Technical Support
1

Hi,

I am switching from a Mac to a PC. I have worked on Macs for a very long time and to be honest this whole ‘build your own’ computer approach is a bit bewildering to me.

Nevertheless I have come up with the below configuration.

I will be using the computer for CGI work primarily. Mostly complex models often rendered to very large files at high resolution for large scale print work. Mostly still images. Some animation. I also do photographic retouching and image manipulation on very large files at high resolution. Possibly some video editing and grading further down the line.

Primary Software:

Blender
Modo
Z-Brush
Substance Painter
Photoshop

How does the below config stack up for these requirements?

The 4 SSDs would be RAIDed together as RAID 0. I’m not sure if this is sufficient cooling (I have never given this kind of ‘under the hood’ stuff a thought until researching PCs).

I’m coming from an iMac Pro and I’m slightly worried that this set up is going to drastically increase my electricity bills…

Obviously my main goals are to drastically increase render times by switching to GPU rendering primarily.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Case: FRACTAL DEFINE 7 XL BLACK QUIET TOWER CASE

Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™ i9 24-Core Processor i9-13900KS (Up to 6.0 GHz) 36MB Cache

Motherboard: ASUS® PROART Z790-CREATOR WIFI (LGA1700, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, Wi-Fi 6E, 1 x 10GbE)

Memory (RAM): 96GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR5 5600MHz (4 x 24GB)

Graphics Card: 24GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4090 - HDMI, DP

1st M.2 SSD Drive: 2TB SOLIDIGM P44 PRO GEN 4 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (up to 7000MB/sR, 6500MB/sW)

1st Storage Drive: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW)

2nd Storage Drive: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW)

3rd Storage Drive: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW)

4th Storage Drive: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW)

Power Supply: CORSAIR 1000W RMx SERIES™ - MODULAR 80 PLUS GOLD, ULTRA QUIET

Power Cable: 1 x 1.5 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead, 1.0mm Core)

Braided Power Supply Cables: CORSAIR Premium Individually Sleeved PSU Cable Kit Pro (40 Series) - Black

Processor Cooling: CORSAIR iCUE H100i ELITE CAPELLIX XT RGB High Performance CPU Cooler

Sound Card: ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Network Card: ONBOARD LAN PORT

USB/Thunderbolt Options: MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS

Price: £4,886.00 including VAT and Delivery

2

OK, Let’s see here… :wink:

  1. Budget wise I see no issues, looking at your list of hardware.
    Only thing to critique could be the mobo, as it is overpriced for what it delivers imho. All the other stuff is high end and will do great, and is a lot more than most of us here will be running :laughing:

  2. Another thing is the RAID 0 setup. Wonder why you want this? RAID 0 is just striping, and has no fault tolerance at all.
    Yes, performance will be a tad higher, but If one SSD goes “poof” you loose all the data on that striped RAID set.
    If you -have- to do RAID go for RAID 1 at least, but that will ‘cut the storage’ in half, as it will be mirrored data.
    But tbh… RAID can be a pain in the behind when problems start to occur.

  3. Not sure on the OS you will be using, but reading your notes I would suggest someone helping you out with the install and setup for Windows or Linux. Just to be sure you start with the optimum setup straight away.

  4. So for performance (/re-imaging purposes) you could set up the OS on one SSD, put all user related/temp files for the OS & apps on the second SSD.
    Use the other SSD’s for data storage.
    On that matter, you could get larger HD’s for the data for about the same price.

  5. On the power requirements… Yes, the Intel CPU’s are power hungry, but so is the RTX4090. Expect your power usage to go up compared to the ImacPro. But tbh… you’re basically putting a computer inside the computer. :wink:
    Nothing that Apple has compares to NVIDIA cards in raw processing. Not even the new M series. Or at least not yet…

Hope this helps, if you have any more questions just post them here :slight_smile:

rob

3

For the love of god, don’t do that. For general creative usage, the performance difference really won’t matter and in fact could be worse. As for the possible problems it could cause, it really isn’t worth it. So yeah, just don’t do it.

In addition to that, I’d also largely avoid QVO drives, there’s a reason they are a bit cheaper. Instead maybe look at the Crucial MX500 4TB drives, just don’t get any of the BX ones.

Apart from that it all seems reasonable, the 13900KS is likely a bit overkill and chances are most of its cores will be spending a lot of the time doing nothing, tho the single thread performance would be top of the chart. Check to see if a 14900K is also an option and just get whichever is cheaper (they are basically the same CPU, within 1-2%).

4

And at the same time you want to go with 4 drives in RAID 0? Bold move.
Even if you have backups diagnosing and fixing your setup in a case of a drive failure is not particularly fun as @RobWu mentioned. Usually its easier to just wipe the drives, set RAID again and restore data from backup. Which you will need to do anyway if you will have a drive fail in RAID 0. All of that can take a lot more time than swapping a single drive and formatting it.

You also didn’t mention if you want to use RAID for OS or data storage which is important. I’m running 6 HDD drives in encrypted RAID 1 as a secondary storage in my Linux machine for over 3 years now. I’ve reinstalled OS couple of times and the RAID is automatically detected every time, and I had zero problems with it so far. But the OS is on a separate NVMe drive.

I’d go for 80 PLUS Platinum or Titanium version. Don’t cheap out on a PSU. It can kill all your components if it dies.

5

No idea what the prices are on your end, but over here (NL) both these SSD’s hover around € 270,= . :person_shrugging:

6

In that case, last I checked I don’t think the MX500 use QLC chips like the Samsung QVO drives do. So if they are around the same price, I would totally get the MX500 drive (and in fact I have a 2TB version of said drive in my PC for the past 3 years.)

7

I was thinking the same thing - nothing lower than RAID 5 seems worth the effort.

8

Hi. Thanks for the feedback everyone! It’s very helpful indeed.

Regarding RAID 0: First, it would not be used for the OS which would be on a separate 2TB drive (running Windows 11). I maybe wrong about but my thinking was to create a large, fast storage capacity with the 4 drives (looking for around 16TB total) and then to back it up with a daily back up to an external drive and an hourly “Time Machine” Mac style back up to another external drive, so the risk of significant data loss would me minimised. I thought this would give me the fastest large capacity internal storage solution. But perhaps the speed increase isn’t enough to justify this set up? It’s similar to a set up I had on another system long ago that used conventional hard drives. Maybe its less advantageous with SSDs? Also, I anticipate using software RAID if that’s relevant at all…

Perhaps a better solution would be to go with 4x 8TB drives and do RAID 1 or RAID 5?

As for Modo: I have a lot of experience with Modo and still find it to be a very useful and advanced CG software depending on the needs of the project. It’s a key part of my pipeline so certainly not ready to abandon it yet. But as mentioned would be using Blender, Z Brush and Substance where appropriate.

As a side note, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a set up that doesn’t include those hideous and garish luminous interiors. What are people thinking with that stuff?! They’re revolting and resemble those illuminated souped-up racer cars. I just want an understated classy design that doesn’t look like I’m on a Borg ship!

Anyway, apologies for my uncertainty on all of this. I’m much better on the software than the hardware…

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As others have said already this raid 0 with 4 sata 3 ssd’s seams meaningless. Can I suggest a list of parts more balanced and rational imo? For 5K£ there are better choices.

10

@Fiercehairdo if you want capacity and speed you can check PCIe cards that can host multiple NVMe drives. Some of them have their own RAID controller.

11

So… your plan is to back up a RAID 0 system to an additional drive, and then also back that up to another drive? Why? If you have six drives already, why not use RAID 5 or 6? You’re shooting yourself in the foot massively here, your planned process is significantly slower than a higher RAID level. It’s good to have external backups, but with RAID 5 or 6, you don’t need hourly backups

12

Well my reasoning was that RAID 0 would enable the fastest read/write times. Am I wrong on that? As you can tell I’m not an expert on this! :smile: :see_no_evil:

13

Α modern Gen 4.0 or Gen 5.0 nvme would be way faster than a sata 3.0 raid 0.

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For general home user use (ie not a commercial multi-user rational database on a 128 core CPU server), it would make ZERO difference. Add software based RAID and you are just shooting yourself in the foot.

Yes, I can see it would be a little nice to just have it all as a single drive letter, instead of 4, but even so, DON’T DO IT…

In fact, where you get real speed is by having them all as separate drives and managing your setup/storage so that at most of the time you are reading from one physical drive and writing to another physical drive. Avoiding trying to read and write to the same drive as the same time (which is what RAID 0 must do) is when one tends to notice a performance difference.

15

Yes, it’s faster:

2024-01-03 10_49_02-Free RAID Calculator - Caclulate RAID Array Capacity and Fault Tolerance. — Mozi
2024-01-03 10_49_02-Free RAID Calculator - Caclulate RAID Array Capacity and Fault Tolerance. — Mozi728×495 11.4 KB

But you have no fault tolerance, and if one disk dies, you lose all your data.

Compare that to RAID 6:

2024-01-03 10_49_48-Free RAID Calculator - Caclulate RAID Array Capacity and Fault Tolerance. — Mozi
2024-01-03 10_49_48-Free RAID Calculator - Caclulate RAID Array Capacity and Fault Tolerance. — Mozi738×465 11.8 KB

As said, RAID is about data protection, not speed. If you’re not getting data protection, and actually making your fault tolerance worse (RAID 0 with 4 drives is far more dangerous than 4 separate drives), what’s the point? :wink:

16

I’ve just been thought this, used a retina iMac (and still do) for most things, but built a PC this year for Blender.

After a lot of research I ended up going for the Fractal Design Torrent case as it has one of the best tested air flow capacities out there for the price with two huge 180mm fans on the front. My 4090 usually sits around 50-60degs.

I went with a single 1TB ssd with 5000mb/s which is more than enough for running Windows 11 and hosting all the software, could even go to a 2tb if needed.

For storage these days Raid really isn’t required as the SSD’s are crazy fast anyhow and in real world scenario you wouldn’t really see the difference in speed or cost involved.

I would possibly go for an SSD which holds all the ‘work stuff’ textures, materials, animation frames etc. If you’ve going to be rendering huge amounts of frames I would render to a dedicated normal hard drive, if when editing I would then drop into your editing package and use an SSD for editing.

Just seems like a lot of money and storage for not a lot of return, but then again we don’t know what youre going to be doing with it all.

17

This might be worth a read:

18

In practical terms I would be very surprised if its actually 4x faster. I can see how just read would be faster, not sure about 4x (especially with software raid), but I have doubts about 4x write speeds. And if one was doing both at the same time, so copying a file on the RAID or reading video source files and saving the encoded file, then not so much.

Especially when it comes to SSD/NVMe drives and using software RAID. With normal HDDs and a hardware raid, that can be a different story.

19

Yeah, I have doubts about those numbers myself. The article I linked comes to this conclusion:

We spoiled this surprise up top, but here it is again—RAID arrays don’t really accelerate 4KiB single-process operations. If you’ve only got a single process accessing your storage, it won’t typically get much faster than a single disk—and much of the time, it’ll be significantly slower. In particular, we see asynchronous performance on RAID6 arrays dive straight into the toilet, getting worse the wider the array is.

And:

When we move from 4KiB to 1MiB blocksizes, single process operation throughput goes up, but the overall shapes of the graphs remain roughly constant. RAID10 beats RAID6 at every level, but we only significantly exceed single disk performance with RAID10 arrays doing asynchronous writes.

Ultimately, they conclude:

  • RAID10 for performance—including, but not limited to database performance. Yes, fileservers too!
  • RAID is not a backup. The parity/redundancy in the array mitigates downtime, not catastrophic failure. Back up your array!
  • Be extremely wary of RAID5—a single block of parity isn’t sufficient for protection for any but the very smallest arrays.
  • RAID is not a backup. The parity/redundancy in the array mitigates downtime, not catastrophic failure. Back up your array!
  • At four disks wide, RAID6 vs RAID10 is a difficult decision—RAID6’s performance hasn’t dived into the toilet yet, and it can survive more guaranteed failures than RAID10. Choose wisely!
  • RAID is not a backup. The parity/redundancy in an array mitigates downtime, not catastrophic failure. Back up your array!
  • Wide RAID6 arrays are, for almost all realistic workloads, absolute hot garbage when it comes to performance. Be careful here—you get more effective storage than RAID10, but it may not be worth it.
  • Have we asked you to back up your RAID array yet? Please don’t neglect your backups…
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Thanks so much guys. Definitely rethinking RAID 0 and looking at other solutions…