I really appreciate all the input. I’m woefully out of date on the technical stuff and honestly would rather spend my time learning and using Blender and get the information from those of you who are up to date, I especially appreciate specifics wrt hardware.
I’m located in Japan and don’t yet speak Japanese beyond an infant level:-? so there’s a serious communication barrier with most Japanese sales staff.
As for budget, I’m willing to spend $3000 or $4000 to get a kick ass system that will last me for a long time.
I would spend about $1500 - $2000 on the computer itself and get 2 big monitors. You can always upgrade the motherboard later on if need be and still keep most of the components (HD’s / DVD drives / vid card etc.).
I would rather get better components than extra monitors but that is up to you. Certainly don’t get a Mac. I have a pair of Macs ,which I love, but don’t use them for Blender.
The next production system I am going to build looks like this:
Motherboard: Asus Maximus V Extreme
CPU: Core i7 3770
GPU: 4 EVGA 680 4GB
RAM: 32GB DDR3
Storage: 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD
Case: Bitfenix Colossus
PSU: 2 Corsair Pro 1200 Watt
OS: Windows 7 (x64) Pro
I am ordering the components from Amazon and it should fit within your budget.
It doesn’t work that way.
Today you pay 50% more for 10% more performance if you want the fastest.
A year later there’s something 50% faster than what you got.
You need to “invest” in hardware.
Try to buy so you have the opportunity to upgrade lateron.
Find a balance between price to performance and maximum performance.
Everything else really is a waste of money, unless you’re a company working in a field, where speed = money.
If you render a frame in 39 minutes instead of 40 minutes, you don’t care.
If you’re a company rendering on 1000 machines, hitting a deadline, you save 16.6h and on the long term a lot of money.
If you buy a machine for 4000 bucks you prolly put 2000 in the gutter.
Get a machine for 2000, invest the remaining 2000 over the next 3-5 years to keep it upgraded.
Good choice, I’m currently researching to upgrade myself. Its sad because I really like my iMac. But, I need a blender machine.
I was raised in a Window/Linux home and switched in college when I discovered I could work on my graphics projects on a mac for 24 hours, never restart or have any softwares crash. (I’m not saying nothing EVER crashes on Mac, just my conversion experience). As an artist, technology should serve my creative process. In addition to an extremely streamlined OS for optimal workflow, my Mac is reliable. I am never interrupted by crashes while working in Photoshop, Blender or any other app.
Other things I like about my Mac are: 1.) its quiet: there is no fan and the hard drive and DVD/cd drive are really quiet. Very important when recording audio or watching a movie. 2.) Its space efficient: The iMac has no tower, just the monitor panel and peripherals. 3.) power efficient. I leave my iMac on most of the time and live in a small apartment alone. My electric bill is never over $100 a month.
Many people who have never owned a Mac will tell you that they are not worth the cost, but how can they know? It may be obvious that I really prefer Mac OS and hardware to Windows and other hardwares, however, for Blender, the lack of GPU rendering is enough for me to look else where for my upgrade.
Even now I pine for a machine with that kind of stability, and I too believe technology is, or at last should be to serve us rather than us serving it. Power consumption of any modern computer should be negligible on your power bill even if it’s left on 24/365.
If it weren’t for the fact that my top priority was to buy the best machine for Blender I may well have bought an Apple.
This post’s responses were decisive in my choice, especially those posts made by those who had owned both Apples and PC’s.
In an ideal world, and the future I will own both;-)
A third way is build a hackintos. I use Mac stuff almost 20 years long but I hate apple’s policy about the forced upgrades and poor or extremly high priced accessories or other components. I use hackintos more the five years ago with no or minimal problem. But a recent Linux more than enough if you can find all the apps for your future tasks.
Not trying to get into the eternal Mac vs PC argument here but I must disagree. I have three Macs and, while I do love them for some things, they have been significantly less reliable than my Windows and Linux machines. I’m still using Windows 7 but have yet to have a single Blue screen or experience any slowdown as opposed to my macbook pro which gives grey screens a few times a year for no apparent reason in addition to more and more spinning beachball by the year. Don’t get me wrong, anything before Windows 7 had more issues than I could stand (hence why I have the Macs I do) but thankfully those days are behind us now.
Also, I don’t really think that comment on the electric bill is really worth bringing up since I have at least one full tower pc running all day every day (i7, 2x GPUs, liquid cooling, multiple HDDs, 1000W PSU, etc…) and have never reached a $100 electric either.
Again, not trying to argue - just making those facts known to anyone who lets these remarks influence their buying decision.
I suppose that computing has become over all more electronically efficient. I was referring to my previous computer. It was a windows workstation that was custom built, all bells and whistles (really, the fans whistled) and it was not very lite on my electric bill.
It was covered by several different warranty, because all the parts were from different manufacturers. But, After 1 year the motherboard failed. Just outside of the warranty. At best, that computer was powerful for rendering, but I couldn’t work on Photoshop for more than 2 or 3 hours without needing to reboot.
War is over, if you want it. Have a merry, merry christmas and a happy new year
