Building a New PC For 3D Modeling

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Birthofnebula

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Oct 16, 2011
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Hello everyone!.
Well, I'm planing to build a new PC by the end of this month for my private business.
These are the softwares that I'm gonna be using (3DS Max, Photoshop, Aftereffect, etc) planing to run a couple of games as well.
I'm mainly gonna be using 3DS Max.
Which CPU should I get ? Is Intel i7 990x good enough ? Or is there a better one ?
Or should I go for duel CPUs ? I'm slightly confused.
Things I need:
GPU
Ram
Motherboard
Budget: around 5000$
I was hoping I could get some help.
Sorry for my bad English, it's not my first language.

Thanks.
 

Kippa

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For speed and single threaded applications the 2600k is good and fast, but if you have apps that are specifically optimised for multi core work (3ds ect) maybe getting an intel 970 six core cpu, which can be got quite cheaply now as it has significantly come down in price.

 

techpops

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This can get really complicated really fast. It depends on two main things as far as I can see from your post.

1. How much money are you willing to invest in this?
2. Are you going to be rendering final work yourself or having animation rendered for you through a render farm service?

If you're planning on doing it all yourself then really put as much money into the CPU/s as you can. I'll give you an idea of a few choices going up in price. If you just want to model and create scenes with your main PC and farm out the rendering, which is what most businesses do, then really anything with enough RAM in it will do the job.

The El Cheapio GFX Workstation
Athlon X6 1090T / 4x4GB

The El Cheapio GFX Workstation that thinks it's all that but really isn't.
Athlon FX 8150 / 4x4GB

The Wannabe Workstation (most people go for this in the beginning)
Core i7 2600K (It isn't worth it going above this if you want any value in performance. If you just want the fastest then by all means, pursue the higher end for a bit more horsepower)

The Real GFX Workstation
Server motherboard with 2 CPU sockets
Xeon CPU's from Intel or go AMD with Opterons ( the AMD bulldozer server CPU's are due out in a few weeks) On the AMD side you really only have two main choices, six core Opterons or 12 core ones. The 6 cores are the only ones that won't scare most people away on price (those are the C32 4000 series. The G34 12 cores are reserved purely for the rich). From Intel you have a lot of choice, you can pay a lot or you can pay even more than a lot. You can also pay a lot more than that. Xeons are what pro's turn to after they've suffered enough with client CPU's, usually when they've made enough for the scary prices to start to look almost attractive vs the pain of not getting the quality of work done the client wants. (You can use crossover motherboards that are kinda like server motherboards but also kinda like desktop boards in that they use standard PSU's, non server memory and come in ATX form factors so you can be creative with how you house it all, in cheap PC cases if you wish)

The OMG-the-street-lights-went-out render farm
Server motherboards stacked as high as your bank manager will allow. (Again you can use crossover motherboards that are kinda like server motherboards but also kinda like desktop boards in that they use standard PSU's, non server memory and come in ATX form factors so you can be creative with how you house it all, in cheap PC cases if you wish) If you ever go for this, PM me, I have some animation I'd like rendered since were best buddies now :)

In all five systems, you'll have to choose between a consumer grade graphics card or a workstation graphics card. Most get away with the consumer gamer cards but depending on Max, you might have to go with better for stability. I'm not a Max user so can't really tell you but places like CGTalk and dedicated Max forums will be able to give you great specific advice.

I haven't really gone into detail here, like I say it can get really complicated but this should be an OK overview to give you an idea of what's out there and where the choices are on a scale of monies.

HTH

 
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