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System Upgrade Thoughts


DeeLan

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Hey Everyone. Its new PC time, and while I have a solid idea of what I'm going to get, I thought it would be a could idea to get your opinions before I drop all my monies.

At the moment I use Houdini and Nuke almost exclusively. I do a little bit of work in After Effects, Premiere and Photoshop. Occasionally I'll jump into Maya, Resolve and Substance. Moving forward (especially when I go back to uni next year) I'll be using all these a lot more, though Houdini will still be my main weapon of choice. Currently I've got a laptop with an i7 6700hq, 16gb of ram, and a GTX 970m.

I'm definitely planning on getting 32gb Ram in a 4x8gb configuration. GPU wise, I was going to use my 980ti from my old desktop (which died a year ago :( ). As much as I would love a shiny new 1080ti, I don't (currently) do any GPU rendering, and I'm not sure that the extra openCL speed from a new card would be worth the price. Any thoughts on this?

The CPU is where I'd really love some input. I'm leaning towards getting an i9 7900x. After looking at a bunch of different benchmarks, and reading through this thread, it seems like the way to go. Important to note, I don't plan on doing any aggressive overclocks on it (I've never overclocked anything before and I'd rather not kill my new $1200 CPU). Another option I was potentially looking at was the Threadripper 1950x, but from that thread I linked before, it appears to fall flat in some areas and has some issues in Houdini. The other thing I was thinking of was maybe spending the extra $300 to grab a 7920x. I'm a bit on the fence with this. On the one hand an extra two cores would be nice but then I am sacrificing single core performance. Plus would the multicore improvements even be enough to justify the extra $300? 

Also of concern is the matter of cooling. I'm tossing up between a Dark Rock Pro 3 from be quiet, or a AIO liquid cooler. It'd be nice to save a few bucks with the air cooler, but I have heard that the i9's run pretty hot, especially when overclocked, so I'm wondering if an AIO would actually cool it better enough to make it worth the extra price.

And finally, is it worth getting an SSD for my main storage drive (not the OS drive. I'm definitely getting an AIO for that).

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have indeed. I decided to go for the 7900x. I chose it because it seemed to be a good all rounder (which I can confirm it is), the stability/compatibility concerns with TR, and because I was able to save $150 and put that money towards more ram. So far it's crushed everything I've thrown at it (Mostly just Houdini stuff so far), and it runs at cool 75 - 80 degrees under load (stock speeds with a Hyper 212 EVO).

Other than that, 32gb ram, 980ti, Liquid Cooler (when it arrives), and regular hard drive for Main Storage :)

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2 minutes ago, DeeLan said:

I have indeed. I decided to go for the 7900x. I chose it because it seemed to be a good all rounder (which I can confirm it is), the stability/compatibility concerns with TR, and because I was able to save $150 and put that money towards more ram. So far it's crushed everything I've thrown at it (Mostly just Houdini stuff so far), and it runs at cool 75 - 80 degrees under load (stock speeds with a Hyper 212 EVO).

Other than that, 32gb ram, 980ti, Liquid Cooler (when it arrives), and regular hard drive for Main Storage :)

Im guessing your liquid/water cooler is for when you plan to overclock? seeing as your temp's are reasonable with a stock cooler

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From what i had read, you have a better cooling with the new noctua NH-U14s TR4 than watercooling (i don't remenber the brand).

I know it sound weird...but i saw different temp benchmark who confirm this. 

The only down side is the Noctua coolers are beast...you can loose one PCIe port because of the size according to the motherboard you use.

Second thing i can't remove from my head is : a compagny where i'm working sometime trash 4 Titan with a leaking watercooling system after 6 months....

Was using Noctua cooling system in a previous setup and i'm really happy with and silent is a important thing to me.

You should maybe take a look on it.

 

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