Building my own PC for an environment artist

acealmighty13

My current PC works great for now and not too worried about making any purchases at this very moment but it's popped into my head about looking into building my own desktop or purchasing one from Best Buy, Amazon, etc.  I've never built my own PC but feel this could be a project off to the side I could work on while the one I have still works.

I don't play a lot of games on my PC and would use it mainly for personal projects.  Or to improve my own skill set as an environment artist.  Any suggestions on PC builds?  Or desktops brands to look at?

Burpee

Must have : i7 CPU 
at least 16g of ram ( the more is better, if you can afford it just go for 32 )
and for the GPU Nvidia is a must have, and I'd go for the GTX970 

Check this link

acealmighty13

Burpee said:

Must have : i7 CPU 
at least 16g of ram ( the more is better, if you can afford it just go for 32 )
and for the GPU Nvidia is a must have, and I'd go for the GTX970 

Check this link

I searched but this didn't pop up.  Thanks for the link.

ZacD

Building your own is definitely the way to go. It's pretty easy, and a useful skill, especially knowing how to fix a hardware problem yourself instead of waiting on support from the Dell or HP. You'll get the most bang for your buck by building your own as well. Any idea on a budget? I'd suggest also getting at least a 256 GB SSD. 

acealmighty13

No idea yet on budget.  If anything, I may purchase pieces as I have the money and go from there.  A friend told me about PC Part Picker.  I also know about New Egg.  An SSD is on that list.

ZacD

Also look at Microcenter if there is one in your area, they often have great deals on processors/motherboards. 

dystopianghost

Building your own PC is probably the best way to go to get the most bang for your buck. I personally use an I7 4790k with 16gb of ram and a gtx 970 with a 250gb ssd boot drive and two 2tb drives for storage. Depending on you budget you could do much better or much worst. I would recommend you get at least an i5 but would lean more towards the i7 just because you would be able to grow into it. The more ram you have the better honestly but some programs won't benefit from having 64gb of ram over 8gb it really comes down to program specifics at that point. Something you should also consider is just ordering a workstation from one of the several manufacturers that are out there. I would recommend this for someone who doesn't want to mess around with their pc much and they just want it to work, most workstations are rated from 24/7 use. Hope this helps some good luck.

Bletzkarn

I need to build my own PC as well soon. Currently using a laptop can't have too many programs running at once. Even though it's not a gaming PC I'd argue 3D modelling requires even more powerful hardware.

You can get away with an i5 for games but 3D modelling I'd get an i7 for sure.

i7
16GB RAM
Nvidia 970+

And I'd also look into some good cooling systems for when you have 9 photoshop tabs, substance painter and unity all opened up at the same time. Also VR development.

Meloncov

If you're not doing simulations or pre-rendered animations, I'd consider an i7 optional. Certainly nice to have if you can afford it, but if you're on a tight budget, you're probably best off focusing on graphics card (at least in terms of immediate results; it is easier to upgrade a graphics card down the line).

As for RAM, if money is tight, get just 16 gb now, but get it in the form of two 8GB sticks, not four 4GB sticks, so it's easy to upgrade down the line.

acealmighty13

At the moment my PC has 16gb of RAM but after talking to those at Allegorithmic, it appears the speed of my nodes is dependent on my computer processing the information.  For example, I have a Uniform color node set at 2048x2048 and the timing on my PC runs at 5.74ms, while the video I was following along with had 0.16ms, this is something I'd like to have fixed.  Is there a way to boost that for the short term? 

Linko

You should wait the next generation of graphic card. AMD and Nvidia should release a new generation this summer.

Also a lot recommend the GTX 970 but this card has 3.5 Gb of memory this is weak for GPU computing, also the AMD card if OpenCL is supported are much more powerful for this task. For example the R9 390 has 8 Gb of memory, two times more powerful than a GTX 970 and much more than a Titan X for rendering (source: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph9621/77386.png). Also the value / price is more interesting: http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/ And if you do GPU computing (render, baking) your vram will count, not your ram. Blender Cycles support OpenCL and is faster with AMD OpenCL than Nvidia Cuda and you can bake your maps with it, bake the lightmap, do render. You can also get more performances with the Game Asset Generator.

But like i said i recommend you to wait the new generation of card, for the CPU you can get a i5 6600k and for the SSD a Samsung 850 Evo (if you get 500 GB you wont need an hard driver).

m4dcow

acealmighty13 said:

At the moment my PC has 16gb of RAM but after talking to those at Allegorithmic, it appears the speed of my nodes is dependent on my computer processing the information.  For example, I have a Uniform color node set at 2048x2048 and the timing on my PC runs at 5.74ms, while the video I was following along with had 0.16ms, this is something I'd like to have fixed.  Is there a way to boost that for the short term? 

As far as I know, substance designer is more dependent on your CPU, while substance painter is more reliant on GPU. Maybe @Jerc or one of the other Allegrithmic folks could chime in? 

ZacD

Linko said:

Also a lot recommend the GTX 970 but this card has 3.5 Gb of memory this is weak for GPU computing, also the AMD card if OpenCL is supported are much more powerful for this task. For example the R9 390 has 8 Gb of memory, two times more powerful than a GTX 970 and much more than a Titan X for rendering (source: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph9621/77386.png). Also the value / price is more interesting: http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/ And if you do GPU computing (render, baking) your vram will count, not your ram. Blender Cycles support OpenCL and is faster with AMD OpenCL than Nvidia Cuda and you can bake your maps with it, bake the lightmap, do render. You can also get more performances with the Game Asset Generator.

http://polycount.com/discussion/161733/amd-crimson-drivers-does-anyone-having-any-issues
http://polycount.com/discussion/161527/maya-problem-cant-select-multiple-objects-at-once

And from one of the Substance Painter devs:
"Also note that AMD drivers have a tendency to make poor performances and break things between drivers versions without any reasons, especially for 3D Softwares. So while we do our best to support AMD cards, the drivers make our job really hard (that's why I would personally advise to use NVidia GeForce cards instead)."
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2275972#Comment_2275972

And personally, I know that Substance Designer (Nvidia iRay), 3D Coat (Cuda acceleration), and xNormal (Optix-CUDA/OpenRL baking) all have CUDA or Nvidia exclusive features, and don't take advantage of OpenCL. The only 3D application I've heard of really taking advantage of OpenCL is Blender.

Jerc

If you plan on using Substance Painter/Designer, I would advise getting a high end NVidia card (most of us here at work run on GTX 980s).
Do not get a GTX 970 if you plan on using Painter on heavy projects: The 970 have a well documented hardware memory flaw that impacts performance very heavily in Painter.

dystopianghost

Jerc said:

If you plan on using Substance Painter/Designer, I would advise getting a high end NVidia card (most of us here at work run on GTX 980s).
Do not get a GTX 970 if you plan on using Painter on heavy projects: The 970 have a well documented hardware memory flaw that impacts performance very heavily in Painter.

Well now my gtx 970 doesn't seem so nice....

acealmighty13

I've been looking at PC Part Picker getting a rough estimate on what I should be able to expect to spend on a new PC with the suggestions posted here thus far.
This one showed some interest, but replace the 120gb SSD for a 250gb SSD.

http://pcpartpicker.com/guide/Zrttt6/msi-build-your-dream-pc-guide-best-friends-forever

This one as well for the case.  I have four internal hard drives I've collected over the years.  And the case can hold up to eight hard drives.  I'm still focusing on the i7 chip, probably increasing the price a little bit on this particular build.

http://pcpartpicker.com/guide/F8xFf7/msi-build-your-dream-pc-guide

m4dcow

A suggestion might be to get 2x16gb sticks of ram instead of 4x8gb sticks. They are close enough in price, and you would have the option to go with 64gb down the line.

Jonas Ronnegard

Just got a new rig with 64gb of ram and a Titan x, really feels worth it, gonna save me a lot of time and money not having to wait and stuff stop working,
4k painting in Substance painter is also lag free, only that made it worth it.

acealmighty13

Jonas Ronnegard said:

Just got a new rig with 64gb of ram and a Titan x, really feels worth it, gonna save me a lot of time and money not having to wait and stuff stop working,
4k painting in Substance painter is also lag free, only that made it worth it.

If I may ask, what was the cost of the rig?