Best hardware for Zbrush?

Laze

Hey, think this is the right area for a question like this, so I'm looking to put some money into upgrading or begin building a new rig. Looking for any suggestions on processors, motherboards and video cards that are in the best interest of enhancing Zbrush performance.

I was looking at the really high end workstation video cards like Firepro and Quadro, but then I read some where it's more about the processor for Zbrush and getting an SSD. Anyone care to enlightenin me on what I should be looking at?

Cheers.

cryrid

The videocard wont make much of a difference as far as zbrush goes. Just get a decent amount of Ram (zbrush is currently only 32bit except for maybe the decimation plugin, so it can't really use more than 4GB, but I imagine having more will at least let you run other programs at the same time). Really any modern processor should also work just fine as well.

I'm currently able to push a few million points with a laptop I got more than 5 years ago (3GB of Ram, a Core 2 Duo (2.20Ghz), and a Geforce 8500M).

Joshua Stubbles

The biggest thing I've noticed for ZBrush is ram. The more the better. 16GB would be great. Faster CPU will help anything involving calcs, like rendering, applying a displacement, etc. My home system has no issues at all, up to about 10million points (onscreen at once).

My system:
Intel i5-2400K (quadcore, 3.2ghz)
ASUS P8P67Pro Rev3 Mobo (bios 3.5)
8GB DDR3 Corsair Dominator
Nvidia GTX560
Samsung 840 128GB SSD (os/main apps)
2x500GB WD HDD Raid0

Froyok

cryrid wrote: »

The videocard wont make much of a difference as far as zbrush goes. Just get a decent amount of Ram (zbrush is currently only 32bit except for maybe the decimation plugin, so it can't really use more than 4GB, but I imagine having more will at least let you run other programs at the same time). Really any modern processor should also work just fine as well.

I agree with that.
zBrush use your CPU for everything (even for displaying your sculpt in the canvas).

nyx702

Harddrive speed is also a big factor. I noticed a big jump in performance whenI installed an SSD. If you can get a SSD and set the scratch disk to it at least that would improve the performance.

JohnnyRaptor

CPU, more cores n threads the better
4 gb of ram atleast (ZB4Rx only uses 4gig) but you may want more for smooth OS. And I hear zb5 will be proper 64bit.