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Custom PC build advice


michaelb-01

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Hi, I'm looking to build a PC at home and I don't know a huge amount these things so I'm looking for some advice. 

 
My budget is around £3k. The main uses will be Houdini, Maya and Nuke. I do a fair amount of heavy fx work and I'm planning to do gpu rendering with redshift. My main questions are to do with which cpu and gpu to go for:
 
CPU
- the AMD threadripper looks very interesting, is it worth waiting to see how much that costs and how it compares to intel i7/i9?
- are the i9 chips worth it?
- or is it better to go for a dual cpu (e.g. dual xeons)? Would that fit in my budget? is it possible to use just one cpu on a dual socket (with the option to add another at a later date)?
 
GPU
- I would ultimately like to have 2 or 3 gpus for rendering but, so I guess this influences which motherboard I can get (with enough pci-e lanes)
- I think the 1070 seems like a really good option to start with for price/performance
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16 minutes ago, michaelb-01 said:

the AMD threadripper looks very interesting, is it worth waiting to see how much that costs and how it compares to intel i7/i9?

The pricing is speculated to be $850 which makes it a compelling option (around half the Intel equivalent). I think it's worth waiting to see the numbers and pricing.

18 minutes ago, michaelb-01 said:

are the i9 chips worth it?

I personally wouldn't spend that much on a processor for a build in that price range because you'd have to make sacrifices elsewhere to come in on budget.

33 minutes ago, michaelb-01 said:

or is it better to go for a dual cpu (e.g. dual xeons)? Would that fit in my budget? is it possible to use just one cpu on a dual socket (with the option to add another at a later date)?

You can use one processor in a dual processor motherboard but you lose half of everything else that the processor controls (like memory slots and PCI Express lanes). When you get around to getting a second processor chances are it'll be outdated by then and not a good use of money. I think it's a much better option to get what you need when you need it.

35 minutes ago, michaelb-01 said:

I would ultimately like to have 2 or 3 gpus for rendering but, so I guess this influences which motherboard I can get (with enough pci-e lanes)

If you haven't yet I'd try Redshift for a while before plopping down lots of cash on graphics cards. The Houdini support is still in alpha stage after all.

53 minutes ago, michaelb-01 said:

I think the 1070 seems like a really good option to start with for price/performance

I'd go for fewer cards that are higher end. They'll have more memory and they'll be more useful for other tasks that use a single GPU like OpenCL simulation and viewport drawing.

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Hey, thanks very much for your reply, really helpful! 

2 minutes ago, lukeiamyourfather said:

I'd go for fewer cards that are higher end. They'll have more memory and they'll be more useful for other tasks that use a single GPU like OpenCL simulation and viewport drawing.

Ok, do you think 1080ti is the best option? (better than say a quadro p4000?)

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2 minutes ago, michaelb-01 said:

Ok, do you think 1080ti is the best option? (better than say a quadro p4000?)

Yes, if I were building a workstation right now I'd go for a GTX 1080 Ti. It represents good value despite the fairly high price tag. The Quadro products like the P4000 offer first class technical support and driver development but it comes at a huge expense relative to the performance. The Quadro P4000 is on par with the GTX 1060 in terms of performance.

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I recently built a $3k workstation with this in it:

i7 6850  (6 cores/ 12 threads, but high clock speed and potential for overclocking)
gtx1080ti  (11Gb video ram - evga founders edition)

samsung 500Gb M.2 (for fast caching, a bit pricey but this thing is really fast)

samsung 1tb solid state (intermediate speed)
seagate 4tb data
quiete base case (very quiet - big case so I have room to expand)
noctua NHD15  (cpu cooler - air based)

64 gb ram

I come from a dual xeon background - and you could get some older xeon chips on ebay as an alternative, but for more single threaded things the i7 6850 hits a sweet spot in terms of number of procs vs clock speed).

I also think that in the future the industry will move towards a gpu rendering approach, if not a real-time (unreal-engine) approach. Depends a bit on your needs, for me this workstation is aimed at development work mostly. Not so much at rendering sequences... If I need to render really heavy final sequences I would do that on a farm (gridmarkets or at work depending on what I am doing).
 

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On 06/07/2017 at 9:11 AM, michaelb-01 said:

Ok thanks, also there are rumours that the geforce 20 series with Volta may be released this year (Q3), do you think its worth waiting for these to be released?

Volta is looking to be only 50% more powerful than a 1080ti. Not worth waiting for.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Now that threaripper is almost out and its still looking good, this is pretty much my final parts list. I've gone slightly over budget (by £600) but I've trimmed it down as much as I think I can (though if there are any areas that don't look worth the price please let me know!). I wanted to run it by you guys one last time before I take the plunge! Please let me know if you spot any potential issues or areas for improvement. Thanks!

(A couple of things - I'm getting 64GB of RAM for now with the view of upgrading to 128GB later, but maybe when DDR5 comes out next year! PCPartPicker says the Noctua cooler is not compatible but i'm planning to get the threadripper version of that cooler that was recently announced)

PCPartPicker part list: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/cf2zVY
Price breakdown by merchant: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/cf2zVY/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD - Threadripper 1950X 3.4GHz 16-Core Processor  (£979.99 @ CCL Computers) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua - NH-U14S 55.0 CFM CPU Cooler  (£51.97 @ Amazon UK) 
Motherboard: MSI - X399 GAMING PRO CARBON AC ATX TR4 Motherboard  (£339.99 @ CCL Computers) 
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-3333 Memory  (£549.99 @ Amazon UK) 
Storage: Samsung - 960 EVO 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  (£204.00 @ Aria PC) 
Video Card: Asus - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founders Edition Video Card  (£663.62 @ Amazon UK) 
Case: Corsair - Carbide 400C ATX Mid Tower Case  (£72.00 @ Aria PC) 
Power Supply: Corsair - RMx 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (£115.98 @ Ebuyer) 
Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit  (£82.20 @ Aria PC) 
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link - TL-WDN4800 PCI-Express x1 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter  (£26.98 @ PC World Business) 
Monitor: LG - 34UC79G-B 34.0" 2560x1080 144Hz Monitor  (£479.97 @ Amazon UK) 
Keyboard: Logitech - K120 Wired Standard Keyboard  (£15.13 @ More Computers) 
Total: £3581.82
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-08-03 22:06 BST+0100

Edited by michaelb-01
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ha - thx! Keen for a threadripper system upgrade myself - please keep us posted on how it goes! The Ryzen 1700 R&D station I just put in is very very good. 

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Some of Houdini is still single threaded. So no, Houdini won't use all of the cores all of the time. This is why you want a fast Ghz speed on the CPU. The closer you can get to 4Ghz, the better your experience.

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@michaelb-01 Yes, Windows is very good with multi-threading, SESI fixed a previous limitation in Mantra some months ago that affected WIndows with many cores/trhreads/cpus.  The main issue with Windows vs MacOS and Linux is the memory manager that can get quite fragmented with big sims. Of course Threadripper isn't out yet so we can't verify 100% that it will be the same as other processors.

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