[SOLVED] Need help for rendering build

[kindangrysliceofpie]

Hey everyone. My mom is an architect, and she’s looking for an upgrade from her 2004 Mac. She’s a “computer nerd” but she’s only farmiliar with devices from the 80’s and 90’s when 3D rendering was first being developed. As she’s getting back into architecture, she wants me to build a computer for her that is capable of creating hyper realistic renders very quickly. She’s going to use FormZ for the wireframe, and use Vray for rendering the objects, however if you can provide links to rendering software (something a bit stronger than blender, and she’s willing to spend quite a bit of money on the software) that is more capable then I’ll look into that as well. Here are her requirements:


- real time ray tracing (software must be compatible with it), if she finishes a render and she wants to change something, she doesn’t want to have to wait for the entire thing to render again. I showed her Nvidia’s RTX video and asked “how long do you think that took to render”. She said “a few months?” I said “the past 12 seconds you just saw took 12 seconds to render” and her brain just exploded.
- no aesthetics (while I pushed for it she said no to save money), however she does want a dual or tri monitor setup.
- dual SLI, would dual 2070’s be better than 1 2080 Ti?
- ryzen 9 when it comes out, would that be a better option than the i9-9900k?
- 32 or 64 GB of ram? Will 3rd gen ryzen still be ram speed needy?
- she doesn’t exactly has a budget, she needs these capabilities, so she’ll ask me to give a price first and then we’ll figure out if that’s too expensive.

I’ve heard of quad SLI. Should we get 4 2060’s? What is more cost effective? What is an SLI bridge and do you need 4 PCIE slots? What are the advantages of an EATX mobo over an ATX? is rendering more CPU or GPU intensive?

Here’s a parts list I was thinking of. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/h9VKQZ

 

[jossrik]

Have you looked into a threadripper setup? You can get quite a system with that... 2950X, TR4 motherboard, 64Gb of RAM. Forget about 4x 2060s, SLI is only good up to two boards now, and it goes 1070/1080/1080ti or 2070/2080/2080ti. Both cards have to be the same, not the same manufacturer or type, but both must be the same chip, for example, two 2080Tis or two 1070s. I would probably forgo the consumer graphics cards for now, there are cards out there for professionals that have much better stats as far as capability and support. NVidia has the Quadro series and AMD has the FirePro series, that would be a starting point. But still look into the turing architecture from NVidia, that's got the ray tracing baked in. HDDs I would avoid, I probably would go with a 2Tb Samsung 970 pro NVMe or similar. The NVMe drives have way faster large file throughput than standard SSDs, with maybe a large SSD for storage.

 

[kindangrysliceofpie]

Thanks so much for the input! I looked into vRay and FormZ and the program is designed to use CPU and not GPU (there’s a GPU option but it’s less optimized). The i9 seems best for price-performance, however with ryzen 9 launching this summer we’re going to wait.