Hi everyone,
I am new to both this forum and PC bulding and I need a big big help.
I should build a new PC from zero scratch for professional working usage. I'll use it mainly for 3D modeling, rendering and graphic design (I work as Product and interior designer) and in addition I'll use it for a little bit of gaiming (strategic game like Total war). In particular, I will use: 3dsmax (vray), indesign, illustrator, photoshop, autocad, sketchup. My budget goes from 1k to 1,3k€.
Do you think that's enough to build a PC with good performances or my budget should be increased? Could you provide me some information about best components and build in general following my needs? List of components is really appreciated
Thanks a lot in advance <3
ZB
If you are totally new to PC building, and you need this for work, I might suggest looking at a specialist PC building company rather than self building. There are a number of these builders about who will allow you to custom - spec a machine to suit your needs without charging a fortune.
In the UK I have had good experience with an outfit called PC Specialist (I have ordered my last 2 laptops from them as they allow custom spec laptops as well as desktops). You would need to look to find an equivalent company near to you but I'm sure there should be one.
In terms of price - 1K euros should be enough for a mid performance tower, if you need to include the screen in that price that might be a bit of a low budget (especially as for design you probably want to invest in a decent screen, which can easily cost 300+).
I do quite a bit of this type of work (I do mechanical design mainly with some rendering / animation work from time to time). The different software packages all require slightly different things from the machine -
For modelling work, you need fast single thread performance and a decent graphics card. 3D Studio Max prefers a workstation graphics card for maximum stability, so either an nVidia Quadro or AMD FirePro / Radeon Pro card. These cost quite a bit more for the same tier of performance as a gaming card though, I would suggest getting the best workstation card you can afford. You may want to look up some reviews of 3DS Max performance vs GPU as a faster gaming card might be a better purchase (and would be faster in the other software you list / games).
For rendering in V-Ray, you need lots of cpu cores (if CPU rendering) or a recent nVidia gpu if you want to render on the graphics card. I use V-Ray quite a lot, in my experience the GPU rendering isn't as accurate - it tends to produce very rough textures so I typically stick with CPU rendering instead. I would say you want at least an 8 core / 16 thread cpu if you are going to render on the cpu. Good options at the moment would be either the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel 10700K. The newly announced Ryzen 7 5800X would also be worth looking at but that is quite a bit more expensive and as it's only just been announced may be hard to get hold of.
Memory wise, I'd suggest at least 32gb of ram - modelling and rendering can really eat through a lot of memory. Memory speed isn't too critical for performance in these types of tasks (although faster ram does provide a boost in games). You might want to consider getting ECC memory for a workstation type build - although this costs a bit more and make sure the motherboard / cpu support it. AMD Ryzen cpu's all support ECC, however on Intel I believe you would need to look at an entry model Xeon cpu (e.g. a Xeon E3 cpu) to get ECC memory support. Standard memory should be ok though.
Storage is the final point - 3D models can get pretty large, so fast storage is a must for good load / save times. I recommend an NVME SSD. All modern motherboards support these and they don't cost that much more than standard SSD's. If you go with an AMD platform you have the option of a PCIe Gen 4.0 drive, Intel only supports PCIe Gen 3, although the real-world performance difference between the two is quite small (despite much higher theoretical numbers on a Gen 4 drive).
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