Rig update for 3D Work

[Arrrtie]

Hello! New user here, looking for some suggestions on an upgrade path:

Current build:
i5-8400 2.8GHz CPU, RTX 2070 Super 8GB, 32 Gigs DDR4, Windows 10

Budget & Location: $1500 US

Aim: 3D Modeling & Animation, but an allowance for a great gaming experience on occasion, Overwatch, TF2. Gaming is lower priority.

Monitors: Currently running a 1920x1080 74Hz Monitor, and a secondary 1920x1080 60 Hz Monitor. Will eventually want to upgrade to 4K monitors, but that isn't in the pipeline.

Peripherals: None to purchase right now.

Why are you upgrading? I'm upgrading to increase the speed and quality of my renders, and to move into doing animated shorts. I've just started learning Blender, but I primarily use Daz Studio with the Octane plugin so I can optimize my GPU's rendering. A little while ago when I tried to render a relatively short animation on the GPU, it ran out of memory, and I had to cut almost everything out of the scene other than the two figures and a small background. I'd like to be able to do full animated shorts of high quality eventually, so it's time to look at upgrading.

I'm looking to move to AMD and will probably grab the Ryzen 9 3950x, but I'm a little lost on motherboards. I'd like to be able to run dual GPUs so I don't run out of VRAM anymore, but I don't know what would be necessary for this, or if I'm just not configured correctly. I really don't want to have to build anything from the ground up. Is this the best card for what I'm doing, or is it overkill? Since this is more of a workstation than a gaming PC, I should be focused on more threads and not GHz, right? I'm terribly new at all this, any help would be appreciated, thanks!
 

[jaslion]

12 minutes ago, Arrrtie said:

Hello! New user here, looking for some suggestions on an upgrade path:

Current build:
i5-8400 2.8GHz CPU, RTX 2070 Super 8GB, 32 Gigs DDR4, Windows 10

Budget & Location: $1500

Aim: 3D Modeling & Animation, but an allowance for a great gaming experience on occasion, Overwatch, TF2. Gaming is lower priority.

Monitors: Currently running a 1920x1080 74Hz Monitor, and a secondary 1920x1080 60 Hz Monitor. Will eventually want to upgrade to 4K monitors, but that isn't in the pipeline.

Peripherals: None to purchase right now.

Why are you upgrading? I'm upgrading to increase the speed and quality of my renders, and to move into doing animated shorts. I've just started learning Blender, but I primarily use Daz Studio with the Octane plugin so I can optimize my GPU's rendering. A little while ago when I tried to render a relatively short animation on the GPU, it ran out of memory, and I had to cut almost everything out of the scene other than the two figures and a small background. I'd like to be able to do full animated shorts of high quality eventually, so it's time to look at upgrading.

I'm looking to move to AMD and will probably grab the Ryzen 9 3950x, but I'm a little lost on motherboards. I'd like to be able to run dual GPUs so I don't run out of VRAM anymore, but I don't know what would be necessary for this, or if I'm just not configured correctly. I really don't want to have to build anything from the ground up. Is this the best card for what I'm doing, or is it overkill? Since this is more of a workstation than a gaming PC, I should be focused on more threads and not GHz, right? I'm terribly new at all this, any help would be appreciated, thanks!
 

Basically before going to a prosumer platform the 3950x is the workstation cpu.

Ram wise you can use a fast nvme drive as a scratchdisk and let windows use as big of a pagefile on it as you want. This is what I do and it works wonders.

I can make you a build in a bit or if someone is faster they can post it as I'm pretty slow over analyzing every part :p.

[.Apex.]

1 hour ago, Arrrtie said:

Why are you upgrading? I'm upgrading to increase the speed and quality of my renders, and to move into doing animated shorts. I've just started learning Blender, but I primarily use Daz Studio with the Octane plugin so I can optimize my GPU's rendering. A little while ago when I tried to render a relatively short animation on the GPU, it ran out of memory, and I had to cut almost everything out of the scene other than the two figures and a small background. I'd like to be able to do full animated shorts of high quality eventually, so it's time to look at upgrading.

It wouldn't be worth the upgrade from an RTX 2070 if you're running out of VRAM as it already has 8GB, the next tier up is 11GB and it costs twice as much and if you wanna go any higher you'd have to shell out a shit ton of money, the way to go around memory limitations is to render on the CPU instead and install a lot of RAM since it's cheaper that way but it would be slower than a GPU, by how much depends on which parts you're comparing.

 

Though I've also seen that Blender can use host memory (RAM) in conjunction with VRAM, in that case you'd only need to upgrade your RAM? I'm not sure how that works and I don't have much experience in Blender, would be nice if someone can elaborate on that

1 hour ago, Arrrtie said:

I'm looking to move to AMD and will probably grab the Ryzen 9 3950x, but I'm a little lost on motherboards. I'd like to be able to run dual GPUs so I don't run out of VRAM anymore

VRAM doesn't stack by running Dual GPUs you'd still be limited by the VRAM of a single card

 

1 hour ago, Arrrtie said:

I'm looking to move to AMD and will probably grab the Ryzen 9 3950x, but I'm a little lost on motherboards.

1 hour ago, Arrrtie said:

but I don't know what would be necessary for this, or if I'm just not configured correctly. I really don't want to have to build anything from the ground up. Is this the best card for what I'm doing, or is it overkill? Since this is more of a workstation than a gaming PC, I should be focused on more threads and not GHz, right? I'm terribly new at all this, any help would be appreciated, thanks!

If you're going with the CPU Render route then the 3950X is a great choice
 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 3.5 GHz 16-Core Processor	$737.99 @ Amazon
CPU Cooler	be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 50.5 CFM CPU Cooler	$86.46 @ B&H
Motherboard	Asus PRIME X570-P ATX AM4 Motherboard	$147.00 @ B&H
Memory	G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory	$299.99 @ Newegg
	Total	$1271.44

I'm assuming you already have a decent PSU which is why I didn't include it

[Arrrtie]

3 hours ago, jaslion said:

Basically before going to a prosumer platform the 3950x is the workstation cpu.

Ram wise you can use a fast nvme drive as a scratchdisk and let windows use as big of a pagefile on it as you want. This is what I do and it works wonders.

I can make you a build in a bit or if someone is faster they can post it as I'm pretty slow over analyzing every part :p.

I'm not using any nvme at the moment, I hadn't looked into it too much, I only recently moved my OS to an SSD, I'll have to research how that works! Thanks!

[Arrrtie]

2 hours ago, Syn. said:

It wouldn't be worth the upgrade from an RTX 2070 if you're running out of VRAM as it already has 8GB, the next tier up is 11GB and it costs twice as much and if you wanna go any higher you'd have to shell out a shit ton of money, the way to go around memory limitations is to render on the CPU instead and install a lot of RAM since it's cheaper that way but it would be slower than a GPU, by how much depends on which parts you're comparing.

 

Though I've also seen that Blender can use host memory (RAM) in conjunction with VRAM, in that case you'd only need to upgrade your RAM? I'm not sure how that works and I don't have much experience in Blender, would be nice if someone can elaborate on that

VRAM doesn't stack by running Dual GPUs you'd still be limited by the VRAM of a single card

 

If you're going with the CPU Render route then the 3950X is a great choice
 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 3.5 GHz 16-Core Processor	$737.99 @ Amazon
CPU Cooler	be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 50.5 CFM CPU Cooler	$86.46 @ B&H
Motherboard	Asus PRIME X570-P ATX AM4 Motherboard	$147.00 @ B&H
Memory	G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory	$299.99 @ Newegg
	Total	$1271.44

I'm assuming you already have a decent PSU which is why I didn't include it

Glad to hear the 3950X is a good choice. I've got a Corsair CX750M PSU at the moment.

I had no idea VRAM didn't stack, so I guess I don't understand what the goal of running more than a single GPU is. I'll definitely have to learn more about how people are able to render animation in Full HD on GPU without running out of memory. Getting more RAM to render on CPU isn't a big deal, but yeah, it's exponentially slower. That's an unfortunate choice to have to make. Thanks for the advice though, that definitely helps make some decisions.
 

[jaslion]

6 minutes ago, Arrrtie said:

Glad to hear the 3950X is a good choice. I've got a Corsair CX750M PSU at the moment.

I had no idea VRAM didn't stack, so I guess I don't understand what the goal of running more than a single GPU is. I'll definitely have to learn more about how people are able to render animation in Full HD on GPU without running out of memory. Getting more RAM to render on CPU isn't a big deal, but yeah, it's exponentially slower. That's an unfortunate choice to have to make. Thanks for the advice though, that definitely helps make some decisions.
 

The goal of multi gpu is basically to assign the power of 2 cards to do one job. Some rendering programs can split the load on both cards (they cannot be in sli) and conserve some vram that way but then again you'll still run out of vram if it runs out on one card as it's basically just splitting up the to render parts and it can only be optimized so much. Which is why that when vram is an issue rendering on the cpu can be pretty nice. As windows will just keep making a pagefile that is larger and larger if you let it when actual ram runs out which allows you to basically render whatever you want.

 

Also optimize your scenes when rendering. Saves resources and time + prevents vram from running out. It's why for test renders gpu's are used more often compared to finals where a cpu is used as it can just scale. Of course you can let windows assign ram to be used as "vram" but this is limited on consumer hardware. It's why I invest more into cpu's and less into a gpu as it just has to be good enough to do quick renders and then I let my cpu take over or I section a small animation into multiple parts.