Hi my boss came to me today and said that i need to build a new pc for around 2000-3000 usd he said if i cant decide he will buy a mac pro please help i hate mac.
I would think it would be the same as making a gaming pc, since you have to render all the vertices after being subdivided so many times.
Go for a Xeon. And maybe a quadro. Although a Titan X would probably be a pretty baller card too. 32GB of DDR4 ram and then some 480-512GB SSDs. I'll post part picker list soon
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/NqKvFT
there is a list. mostly complete. pick some fans, and add peripherals if needed. i am kinda assuming you already have a keyboard, mouse, and monitors. i used a GTX 980, you could trade out for a Titan X but...thats your call.
Get the 980, and drop a RAM kit for an HDD or two if you don't have a NAS, tons of storage or budget left.
ECC RAM might be an after thought, dunno how that will affect 3D animation work.
Here is mine.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/hdGyBm
8 cores, titanX, NVME SSD and quiet air cooler with a silent style case.
All I really did was I dropped the mobo down and the storage down.
I dropped the mobo down simply because I really do not find the asrock WS board to be all that much better than an asrock extreme 4 or 6 with some extra bits. Its not like the asus WS boards where everything is tweaked and modified.
The storage I thought was overkill. If your boss only had 3 grand max to spend on a mac pro, he could only reasonably get a few TB anyways.
Like I said though, I went full tilt for reliable speed.
by adding those two cores, you actually sacrifice some CPU performance because of the pretty significant drop in clock speed.
Mehhhhhhhhhh so long as the programs he is using is not some weird ancient crap, it should work better with 8 cores.
Any time the system is not on full tilt, the cpu will turbo up to around 3-3.2ghz which is respectable.
I would drop all the money into a proper workstation card and fast storage because GPU compute is going to be faster. For instance, 3D modeling with Blender Cycles, a model that will render in six minutes on my i7 4790k @ 4.7ghz will take 1 minute, 50 seconds on my GTX 970. Find out whether the software he uses leverages OpenCL or CUDA better. If it's OpenCL, get him an AMD card and if it's CUDA, obviously get him an Nvidia.
Shouldn't we ask first what programs they'll be using on this machine? Anyone?
Without that information, all your builds point in the right direction, but are only guesses.
I would imagine they'll be using programs like Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, or Maya, as far as 3D rendering goes. Maybe even After Effects for animation.
The most Important to know is software here, support for opencl or cuda... render engine...
I would go for Titan X and i7 5820k, in the long run you may want to have 2 or 3 gpus, it all depends if your rendering engine takes advantage of gpu compute.
Also please be more specific on the usual workloads, if you don go above 100 textures per project and maybe a few million poligons, I been doing ok on those limits with 16 gb of ram, but to be safe I would go 32gb....ram speed is also important in long rendering projects.
on the recomendations for software goes:
if: - 3dsmax/maya/rhino: go for a quadro or firepro for viewport, they take advantage of the pro drivers
- Blender: it doesn't takes advantage of the pro drivers, therefore the quadros and firepros are useless, go for a Titan X, it will be plenty and for rendering it will beat anything for rendering in cycles.
render programs: -luxrender: grab a r9 290x 8 gb
- octane: grab a Titan X
- Cycles (is the same as rhinocycles, and octane has "copied somethings from it) go titan x if you need instant support, cycles (in blender) is getting opencl 1.2 support, but it will take a while until its fully supported, like cuda is, if you can aford waiting (wich from what you said you can't) an r9 290x 8gb will even beat the titans (maybe no the titan x)
- I don't have enough knownledge about vray or other rendering programs to recommend you the hardware for them.