PC Upgrade Advice

[chrisdunham95]

Hey guys,

I currently have a - X99-UD4 gigabyte motherboard, 32gb of ram , GTX 770, i7 - 5820k, (500gb SSD, 2x 3tb HDD) - i am looking to upgrade very soon but not sure where to start or what actually would improve Houdini/other vfx software (maya/nuke/rendering) performance. 

To me my graphics card and ram was what i was thinking.

My ram is nothing special and my board is quad channeled so was thinking of replacing my current ram with 64gb (4 x 16) sticks, and then replacing my current GTX 770 with either a 1070/1080 OR as suggested by a pc building freind, a Quadro of some type? (but i didnt and couldnt tell from online specs/benchmarks whether a Quadro would out perform a GTX 1070/80 of the same price for rendering/simulating rather than gaming) 

He also had a suggestion that i use the new m2 sata ssd instead of new ram. Using that to place all projects on and work from, (as it has much higher read/write speeds than a ssd) - also considering to begin to use openCL and GPU rendering is beggining to take over.

So essentially looking for some advice and facts about what will help my performance etc. (When i get to it my budget will be around 1000) 

Any help would be great! 

 

 

Edited August 14, 2017 by chrisdunham95

[lukeiamyourfather]

8 minutes ago, chrisdunham95 said:

was thinking of replacing my current ram with 64gb (4 x 16) sticks

Are you running out of memory when working? If so this will help significantly. If you never run out of memory this will make zero difference.

9 minutes ago, chrisdunham95 said:

whether a Quadro would out perform a GTX 1070/80 of the same price for rendering/simulating rather than gaming

No, the performance for the price of the Quadro products is significantly worse than the GeForce products. Quadro products offer some features and support not found in gaming cards which you pay a huge premium for (ECC memory, higher level technical support, professional application driver fixes, stereo glasses sync, many display output sync). If you want faster view port performance and faster OpenCL simulations while spending as little as possible go with a gaming card like a GTX 1080.

12 minutes ago, chrisdunham95 said:

new m2 sata ssd instead of new ram

Most M.2 SSD are SATA connected and will offer no performance improvements over a SATA SSD. They're simply smaller and take up less space. A few M.2 SSD are PCI Express connected and they're fast but they're also very expensive (like the Samsung 960 Pro). I think most users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a SATA SSD and a PCI Express SSD without a benchmark to tell them which is faster. In this specific case your money is better spent elsewhere in my opinion.

17 minutes ago, chrisdunham95 said:

So essentially looking for some advice and facts about what will help my performance etc. (When i get to it my budget will be around 1000) 

What do you spend the most time waiting on? Simulations? Rendering? Are you experiencing problems in your workflow or is this more like money burning a hole in your pocket?

[chrisdunham95]

21 hours ago, lukeiamyourfather said:

Are you running out of memory when working? If so this will help significantly. If you never run out of memory this will make zero difference.

No, the performance for the price of the Quadro products is significantly worse than the GeForce products. Quadro products offer some features and support not found in gaming cards which you pay a huge premium for (ECC memory, higher level technical support, professional application driver fixes, stereo glasses sync, many display output sync). If you want faster view port performance and faster OpenCL simulations while spending as little as possible go with a gaming card like a GTX 1080.

Most M.2 SSD are SATA connected and will offer no performance improvements over a SATA SSD. They're simply smaller and take up less space. A few M.2 SSD are PCI Express connected and they're fast but they're also very expensive (like the Samsung 960 Pro). I think most users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a SATA SSD and a PCI Express SSD without a benchmark to tell them which is faster. In this specific case your money is better spent elsewhere in my opinion.

What do you spend the most time waiting on? Simulations? Rendering? Are you experiencing problems in your workflow or is this more like money burning a hole in your pocket?

- Yeah i often spend along time trying to get sims to work with only 32gb etc. so more ram is needed as you've said! 

- Ahhh okay thankyou for clearing that up, that is what i could see also, just my friend who builds pc's seemed convinced a quadro would be better but i agree with your statement for sure, (and my mate has no vfx knowledge just a pc builder for a living) 

- Ahhh again thats what i seemed to see from online results also! makes sense,

- Rendering tends to be my biggest pain rather than simulating ( i have to wait days and days for renders sometimes leaving me nothing else to do etc.) and in general would like to be able to bash out work abit quicker than currently, 

Thanks for the help Luke appreciated! 

 

[lukeiamyourfather]

1 hour ago, chrisdunham95 said:

Rendering tends to be my biggest pain rather than simulating

You might look into GPU rendering if you're working one off. It has a lot of strings attached but it can help some projects in a cost effective way. Or consider upgrading the processor and motherboard if you're using a traditional renderer on the CPU like Mantra. You could basically keep everything how it is now but upgrade to a Threadripper 1920X or 1950X for not much over $1000.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157785

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113448

That would double your rendering performance or even more for another $200 with the 16 core model (32 threads). Sure the GPU, memory, storage, and other components could use an upgrade but if you're primarily waiting on renders that's where I'd put the money if it were me.