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3D Animation Student Building a >1000USD Tower for Student Films

Below I have listed my current build for a tower that will be used primarily for 3D modeling, animating and rendering student films in Blender and Maya. My absolute maximum budget is $1000.

 

I have already bought the case, which is why it's listed as $0.00

 

My primary questions are:

Is it better to have 8GB of faster system RAM, or 16GB of slower RAM, if i wan't to keep my RAM budget to around 50USD?

 

How much of a performance boost in Blender/Maya renders do I get with RTX 2060 versus a RX Vega 56? 

 

Is it better to have 8GB of HBM2 VRAM (Vega56) or 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM (RTX2060)?

 

Is it a better value to have a mobo with built-in wifi, over a non-wifi board with a network card?

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3 minutes ago, Lowfat_Cheese said:

Is it better to have 8GB of faster system RAM, or 16GB of slower RAM

i'd sooner use 32gb of even slower ram as 16gb will disappear real quick just video editing alone let alone rendering 3d.

you're also paying a premium for a 2060 but really won't see any benefit from it over a 10 series card

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1 minute ago, emosun said:

i'd sooner use 32gb of even slower ram as 16gb will disappear real quick just video editing alone let alone rendering 3d.

you're also paying a premium for a 2060 but really won't see any benefit from it over a 10 series card

Thanks for the advice! I was actually considering going for a Vega 56 over the 2060 as they're about $50 cheaper on some models. The 2060 is at about the maximum I can afford to spend on a GPU, but the Vega 56 seems to have comparable performance, even next to a 1070-ti.

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11 minutes ago, mikat said:

I'd wait for the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series which should be about the same price but with 2 more cores than before (probably will be announced at computex, end of may)

Thanks for the heads up! This is going to be a bit of protracted build, as I'm only purchasing one component with each paycheck, so chances are the Ryzen 3000-series will be out be the time I actually get around to buying a CPU.

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2 hours ago, Lowfat_Cheese said:

Thanks for the heads up! This is going to be a bit of protracted build, as I'm only purchasing one component with each paycheck, so chances are the Ryzen 3000-series will be out be the time I actually get around to buying a CPU.

You can buy all the components except the CPU & motherboard first. Wait and see for Ryzen 3000-series then decide if its worth buying or you could snap up a 2000-series for cheap as people dump their old stock/used items

 

Anyway I made some changes to your list.

16GB of RAM because those extra $25 or so bucks will save you a lot of headache from running out of memory when rendering

Swapped in a better SSD that also has more capacity, since SSD runs faster when there is more empty space

The Seasonic unit is actually on sale now so probably worth grabbing that first, the Corsair RMx 550W is also on sale I think

 

PCPartPicker Part List

Memory: Team - Vulcan 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  ($77.89 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Crucial - MX500 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($69.85 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($44.89 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: MSI - GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB VENTUS OC Video Card  ($349.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Fractal Design - Focus G ATX Mid Tower Case  (Purchased For $0.00) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($61.98 @ Newegg) 
Case Fan: be quiet! - Pure Wings 2 120 51.4 CFM 120mm Fan  ($10.89 @ OutletPC) 
Keyboard: Kensington - K72357US Wired Slim Keyboard  ($24.99 @ Amazon) 
Mouse: Logitech - G203 Prodigy Wired Optical Mouse  ($27.00 @ Amazon) 
Total: $667.48
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-04-29 21:09 EDT-0400

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600  Heatsink: ID-Cooling Frostflow X GPU: Zotac GTX 1060 Mini 6GB RAM: KLEVV Bolt 3600Mhz (2x8GB) Mobo: ASUS B550-F ROG Strix (Wifi)  Case: Fractal Design Meshify C PSU: Deepcool DQ-M-V2L

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15 hours ago, BigRom said:

You can buy all the components except the CPU & motherboard first. Wait and see for Ryzen 3000-series then decide if its worth buying or you could snap up a 2000-series for cheap as people dump their old stock/used items

 

Anyway I made some changes to your list.

16GB of RAM because those extra $25 or so bucks will save you a lot of headache from running out of memory when rendering

Swapped in a better SSD that also has more capacity, since SSD runs faster when there is more empty space

The Seasonic unit is actually on sale now so probably worth grabbing that first, the Corsair RMx 550W is also on sale I think

 

PCPartPicker Part List

Memory: Team - Vulcan 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  ($77.89 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Crucial - MX500 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($69.85 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Western Digital - Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($44.89 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: MSI - GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB VENTUS OC Video Card  ($349.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Fractal Design - Focus G ATX Mid Tower Case  (Purchased For $0.00) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($61.98 @ Newegg) 
Case Fan: be quiet! - Pure Wings 2 120 51.4 CFM 120mm Fan  ($10.89 @ OutletPC) 
Keyboard: Kensington - K72357US Wired Slim Keyboard  ($24.99 @ Amazon) 
Mouse: Logitech - G203 Prodigy Wired Optical Mouse  ($27.00 @ Amazon) 
Total: $667.48
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-04-29 21:09 EDT-0400

Thanks for the advice! I've integrated your suggestions into my current build plan and swapped out the RTX 2060 for a Vega 56 to save $50 that I can allocate to RAM.

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17 hours ago, Lowfat_Cheese said:

Thanks for the heads up! This is going to be a bit of protracted build, as I'm only purchasing one component with each paycheck, so chances are the Ryzen 3000-series will be out be the time I actually get around to buying a CPU.

It might be better to save up the money and buy everything at the end. Definitely get your MB last and maybe the GPU too in case they are defective. I would wait for Ryzen 3000 if you can, but you still might be better off with an Intel build. Are you in the USA?

 

Here is some info about hardware recommendations for Maya:

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Autodesk-Maya-165/Hardware-Recommendations

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Do you need RTX 2060 for the ray tracing? If not, the recently released GTX 1660ti has only 20% less power while being 100 bucks cheaper. Spend the extra cash on getting 32gb ram and thank me later. (PS: 8gb ram is ridiculously low for any productivity work btw.)

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1 hour ago, Kagaratsch said:

Do you need RTX 2060 for the ray tracing? If not, the recently released GTX 1660ti has only 20% less power while being 100 bucks cheaper. Spend the extra cash on getting 32gb ram and thank me later. (PS: 8gb ram is ridiculously low for any productivity work btw.)

I was considering the 2060 because with the upcoming release of Arnold GPU, I was interested in seeing if the RT cores would allow for a massive boost in render times for raytraced scenes. I'm currently planning to go with a Vega 56 since it's $50 cheaper for nearly the same performance (minus RT cores). So far I do alright making videos at 1080p with 8gb of RAM on my current setup, but I'm going to upgrade to 16GB for this tower. 32GB would eat too much into my budget for the other components and I can just add more RAM down the line if need be.

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1 hour ago, Bearmann said:

It might be better to save up the money and buy everything at the end. Definitely get your MB last and maybe the GPU too in case they are defective. I would wait for Ryzen 3000 if you can, but you still might be better off with an Intel build. Are you in the USA?

 

Here is some info about hardware recommendations for Maya:

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Autodesk-Maya-165/Hardware-Recommendations

I want to go with Ryzen because having those extra cores is particularly important for multitasking, and my current quad-core CPU already maxes out while rendering certain scenes. The closest 6-core Intel solutions either don't support simultaneous multi-threading, can't be overclocked, or are too expensive, plus with an AM4 board I can upgrade to Ryzen 7 easily when I have the need.

 

Puget Systems recommendations are all well outside my budget, and they are also limiting their results to the Arnold render engine. I plan on switching from Arnold to AMD ProRender to take advantage of that engines better optimization with AMD components.

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3 minutes ago, Lowfat_Cheese said:

I want to go with Ryzen because having those extra cores is particularly important for multitasking, and my current quad-core CPU already maxes out while rendering certain scenes. The closest 6-core Intel solutions either don't support simultaneous multi-threading, can't be overclocked, or are too expensive, plus with an AM4 board I can upgrade to Ryzen 7 easily when I have the need.

 

Puget Systems recommendations are all well outside my budget, and they are also limiting their results to the Arnold render engine. I plan on switching from Arnold to AMD ProRender to take advantage of that engines better optimization with AMD components.

It sounds like you have a plan ?  I do expect the Intel offerings to drop in price a bit when Ryzen 3000 comes out, but we shall see. I realized that the Puget recs were outside budget, but the testing knowledge can frequently point someone in the right direction even when they are at a lower price point.

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Just now, Bearmann said:

It sounds like you have a plan ?  I do expect the Intel offerings to drop in price a bit when Ryzen 3000 comes out, but we shall see. I realized that the Puget recs were outside budget, but the testing knowledge can frequently point someone in the right direction even when they are at a lower price point.

I appreciate the feedback, I'm really tying to test my knowledge against forums like this to see if I'm missing anything important with my build plan. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for the release of Ryzen 3000 to see how it affects CPU prices.

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On 4/30/2019 at 12:56 AM, Lowfat_Cheese said:

Thanks for the heads up! This is going to be a bit of protracted build, as I'm only purchasing one component with each paycheck, so chances are the Ryzen 3000-series will be out be the time I actually get around to buying a CPU.

I'd wait til you have all the money and spend it all at once, you never know when new hardware comes to market :)

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