So in October of 2020 I built a workstation PC for myself to keep up with my freelance motion design, video editing, graphic design and photography career. I originally bought 2 x 32 gb DDR4 3200 mhz Corsair RGB Pro Ram due to budget reasons at the time but I planned on rebuying 3 more kits of that ram so I get max out the memory on my motherboard. Caching simulations in Houdini is very ram intensive which is why I would need 256 gb of ram. Now with money not being a factor I want to know what the best 256 gb or 128 gb ram kit is for my rig. I had tried running through the Qualified Vendor List but there weren’t a whole lot of options for 256 gb unless i’m missing something (which could always be). I did some googling and that brought me to the all to familiar world of level 1 techs.
So here is my PC Specs thus far:
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960x
2 x Asus ROG Strix 2070 Super Advanced
2 x 32 gb DDR4 3200 mhz Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro RAM CMW64GX4M2E3200C16
Gigabyte TRX40 Designare rev. 1.0
EVGA 1300 G2 1300 watt PSU
iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT AIO
Current Workstation:
2x 2699 v3 Xeon Engineering Sample
Supermicro mobo with 16 sticks of semi assorted sizes of 2133 ECC totaling 178gb.
My experience has been that you as long as its ECC, you get less crashes. I remember being at Gnomon and having their i7 and i9 comps crash, when my xeon with ecc at home didn’t. Depending on how many… tasks/tops cooks your doing for your sims, it might be fine to stay non ecc, and just be fast. If part of one cook had an issue, you could always recook it and be fine.
I actually am in the middle of a rig build mainly focused for Houdini.
I went the 2x Epyc 7502 in a SuperMicro H11DSi. Both procs are Engineering Samples, and the mobo is used, everything off ebay.
It has been super cheap depending on when you buy, and I really think its going to be a great node to build upon. I am going for more of a PDG TOPs pipeline, primarily focusing on a terrain pipeline (heightfields to polys, layers to splatmaps, scattering csv).
The biggest issue has been the damn case and SSI-EEB. Totally had to send back my first one and get a shitty DeepCool that I will prob run without the front panel.
Take a look at the Crucial 64GB (32GBx2) kits, you can buy a bunch of those if you want 256GB. Rev E/B die ICs puts low amount of load on the memory controller. Even Puget systems use those kits on their system afaik.