Best processor for digital animation | Help |

[PatoDelMonte]

My cousin (Animation student) asked my to help him build his first PC. He wants to use it as a workstation (he doesn't game) and intends to use it for 3D animation.

 

So I was contemplating an Intel 8700 or a Ryzen 7 2700, but im not shure if his workload would benefit from "more cores" or "faster cores".

 

He wants to use Blender, Maya and light CAD

 

Our budget for the system is $1300. Also, we live in Central America, so prices tend to be higer

 

Any animators that could give me some insight?

[Enderman]

Maybe a 9980XE?

[emosun]

usually a workstation will use several xeons as opposed to consumer hardware.

 

ask your cousin if the software he uses is cpu intensive or not. dont build a machine without knowing what the software is

[PlayStation 2]

Many questions: budget? Software? Required hardware?

[BLCT]

What kind of work is he doing exactly? An 9980XE will be best case scenario, but an i7 8700k can also do fine. In 3D rendering, the amount of ram is as important as the CPU performance. So preferably 64gb, or at least 32gb. Many many questions. Budget? What kind of software is he using? etc etc..

[PatoDelMonte]

16 minutes ago, BLCT said:

 Many many questions. Budget? What kind of software is he using? etc etc..

I've updated the post to reflect some stuff that i forgot. We have a limited budget, so we have to go with 16 GB for now

[PatoDelMonte]

28 minutes ago, handymanshandle said:

Many questions: budget? Software? Required hardware?

He wants to use Blender, Maya and light CAD

 

Our budget for the system is $1300. Also, we live in Central America, so prices tend to be higer

[PatoDelMonte]

32 minutes ago, emosun said:

usually a workstation will use several xeons as opposed to consumer hardware.

He's still a student, ha dosn't have the budget for workstation parts, and in our country the selection of hardware is very limited

[BLCT]

6 minutes ago, PatoDelMonte said:

He wants to use Blender, Maya and light CAD

 

Our budget for the system is $1300. Also, we live in Central America, so prices tend to be higer

1 minute ago, PatoDelMonte said:

He's still a student, ha dosn't have the budget for workstation parts, and in our country the selection of hardware is very limited

$1300 USD? Also universities usually throw away, sell, or upgrade their computers after 3-5 years. Maybe he can get a cheap one/ or cheap parts from his university, I would ask around in the IT department. Hopefully he can get one that isn't too outdated.

[PatoDelMonte]

5 minutes ago, BLCT said:

Also universities usually throw away, sell, or upgrade their computers after 3-5 years

We alredy asked, but they don't sell old computers because they're actives

[GDRRiley]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Threadripper 1920X 3.5 GHz 12-Core Processor  ($409.99 @ B&H) 
Motherboard: ASRock - X399 Phantom Gaming 6 ATX TR4 Motherboard  ($254.98 @ Newegg) 
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance RGB 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 Memory  ($199.99 @ Newegg Business) 
Storage: Samsung - 860 Evo 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($82.89 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Toshiba - P300 3 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($82.67 @ Newegg Business) 
Video Card: XFX - Radeon RX 580 8 GB GTS Black Core Edition Video Card  ($189.99 @ Newegg) 
Case: Corsair - Carbide SPEC-04 (Black/Gray) ATX Mid Tower Case  ($49.99 @ Newegg Business) 
Power Supply: Corsair - TXM Gold 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($68.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $1339.49
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-12-28 02:04 EST-0500

[Mattias Edeslatt]

The university or their IT-department should be able to recommend what a "good" system should consist of. 

 

Some programs use the CPU more others GPU. Some programs like few faster threads and some workloads like many (and as fast as possible) threads.

 

My best guess is to get a AMD with as many fast cores as you can justify the cost for, much RAM, guessing 16 GB is minimum and more is better, 32 or 64 GB if you can afford and a graphics card that the software's support. Some programs can utilize a iGPU/APU fore some tasks besides i dedicated GPU so a processor with integrated GPU could be a good investment.

 

How is the used market? Maybe pick up a used "workstation" that have WS GPU and CPU? HP, Dell or IBM make good single workstations. 

 

I have built myself a used system with dual 2670 Xeons and 112 GB of DDR3 RAM. There are some sweet deals and money to be saved if you are willing to build your own system from used parts or get a second hand pre-built workstation. Maybe find a used dual- or quad-processor system and get a newer graphics card. Just check that the software can utilize a "non pro" GPU like nVidia GTX/RTX or AMD RX/Vega-cards.

[Jun Ishiwata]

In blender you can choose to use your gpu or cpu , if you want to use gpu i recommend a sli combination. If you're going to use a cpu i'd say the higher the core count the better.  For instance blender guru uses 2 threadrippers (32 core) to render which is really fast but really expensive. If you're going to use a cpu to render i recommend a good aio to cool your processor since its going to be under 100% load for a long time. I have a i9 9900k and EVGA 1080ti and i rendered a 4 second video 30fps in about 3 hours using my 1080ti. If i did it with my i9 it would have taken longer. So price wise i think you should invest in a better gpu than cpu for rendering because you'll end up cheaper with a Gpu to get the same result.