Need help for choosing a budget workstation GPU

[Demogorgon]

I am helping my uncle in building a workstation PC, and we hit a roadblock while choosing graphics card for it.

My uncle is a VFX animator and he works with a software called Nuke x11. 

His budget is 250-300$ for the Graphics card alone. Yeah, It's an ultra budget build.

Please suggest some good graphics cards in this price point for VFX works.

Should I go with Quadro or Geforce cards or Go AMD.?

I am not familiar with quadro cards.

I know 1600 super/2060 will be a good choice if this was a gaming build but i lack expertise in choosing graphics cards for this purpose.

Please help.

Thanks in advance.

(:

[SupaKomputa]

https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/requirements

 

It doesn't specifically required a workstation GPU to work.

With that price point a workstation gpu would be underperforming compared to the consumer counterpart.

So with $300, my suggestion is a RTX2060 or a used GTX1080ti.

The used market for Nvidia cards will be filled with great performing cards with good price due to the recent release of the new generation (RTX3000).

You might wanna wait till the end of the month.

Buying new is not a great option for now if you wanna have Nvidia GPU.

[SnooPainting8310]

Nuke seems to be a software that doesn't multi-thread well, so this mean you could choose a high speed cpu (3300x, 3600) which are a lot cheaper (performance/price) than cpu with a lot of cores. So you could save some money there to get a better gpu.

 

About the GPU, what you could do is grabbing a mobo with more Pcie slots in order to be able to put more gpu in the future so you'll be able to easily upgrade the computer's performance for the future upgrades.

And for a particular GPU, I agree with what @SupaKomputa said.

 

[Demogorgon]

2 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/requirements

 

It doesn't specifically required a workstation GPU to work.

With that price point a workstation gpu would be underperforming compared to the consumer counterpart.

So with $300, my suggestion is a RTX2060 or a used GTX1080ti.

The used market for Nvidia cards will be filled with great performing cards with good price due to the recent release of the new generation (RTX3000).

You might wanna wait till the end of the month.

Buying new is not a great option for now if you wanna have Nvidia GPU.

 

1 hour ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

Nuke seems to be a software that doesn't multi-thread well, so this mean you could choose a high speed cpu (3300x, 3600) which are a lot cheaper (performance/price) than cpu with a lot of cores. So you could save some money there to get a better gpu.

 

About the GPU, what you could do is grabbing a mobo with more Pcie slots in order to be able to put more gpu in the future so you'll be able to easily upgrade the computer's performance for the future upgrades.

And for a particular GPU, I agree with what @SupaKomputa said.

 

Thank you, We had planned on using a Ryzen 7 3700x. Are the cost savings by going with 3600 significant enough? I'm living in India and it has the worst used PC parts market. There is literally no used GPU for sale in my city. So buying used is not an option.

Should I wait for 3060 release? My uncle said he can wait for 1-2 months if necessary.

[Demogorgon]

My uncle said his work PC at his office had an i9 and he wants a cheaper but somewhat similarly performing machine. So I think 3600 is out of our way. Or is it?

I chose Ryzen 7 over i7 because I thought Nuke will be a primarily multi threaded workload. But you said

1 hour ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

Nuke seems to be a software that doesn't multi-thread well

 

So now , is it still a good choice or should I switch to i7?

[SupaKomputa]

Which i9? The consumer or workstation. The consumer one have better single core performance than the workstation part.

Single core performance of ryzen is not hugely worse than i9, so for a home budget solution it is still the best.

With the right motherboard (B550 or better) you will have a longer lifetime for the whole setup, up to 2 more generations (4000 and/or 5000) .

About multithreading, all software will / must be multithreads sooner or later, that's what's the market demanded, so investing multicore cpu is worth it.

There's a workaround for nuke to use multithread in this topic:

https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/130659/multi-thread-render-support?mode=Post&postID=1087357

[Demogorgon]

38 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Which i9? The consumer or workstation. The consumer one have better single core performance than the workstation part.

Single core performance of ryzen is not hugely worse than i9, so for a home budget solution it is still the best.

With the right motherboard (B550 or better) you will have a longer lifetime for the whole setup, up to 2 more generations (4000 and/or 5000) .

About multithreading, all software will / must be multithreads sooner or later, that's what's the market demanded, so investing multicore cpu is worth it.

There's a workaround for nuke to use multithread in this topic:

https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/130659/multi-thread-render-support?mode=Post&postID=1087357

Thanks for the link.

Also, I read that nuke supports GPU accelerated rendering. Should this affect my choice of GPU?

[Demogorgon]

@SupaKomputa

Do you have any GPU suggestions on AMD's side?

[SupaKomputa]

Yes, if it does, then you may want to get the fastest gpu your budget allows.

For $300 you may want a USED GTX1080, RX Vega 64, Radeon VII.

Anything with a 8gb vram or more.

You may also get a RTX2070 once the market price has dropped, since the new 3070 will be $450, i guess you can expect the 2070 will be around $300.

[Demogorgon]

As I mentioned earlier, buying used is not an option, but still I will try my best to find one. 

Any suggestions for new GPUs?

Also should I wait for 3060 release?

[SnooPainting8310]

1 hour ago, Demogorgon said:

My uncle said his work PC at his office had an i9 and he wants a cheaper but somewhat similarly performing machine. So I think 3600 is out of our way. Or is it?

I chose Ryzen 7 over i7 because I thought Nuke will be a primarily multi threaded workload. But you said

So now , is it still a good choice or should I switch to i7?

 

After further research, the priority for your build are like so : CPU (SingleCore perf) > GPU >CPU (MultiThreaded perf). 

If you follow this benchmark (this one too), the i9s dominate other cpu in term of signlecore perf making it the best cpu possible for this software, thou Nuke X enable the use of GPU which is a easy jump in term of performance compared to cpu but Nuke use the GPU only for specific things. 

 

So to me depending on the benchmark you are referring to the choices are like so : (cheaper) 3300x, 3600, i7 9700k or (more expansive) i7 10700k

And for the GPU, I would wait to check the rtx 3060.

 

Other sources : 1 , 2 , 3

[Fatih19]

6 minutes ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

 

After further research, the priority for your build are like so : CPU (SingleCore perf) > GPU >CPU (MultiThreaded perf). 

If you follow this benchmark (this one too), the i9s dominate other cpu in term of signlecore perf making it the best cpu possible for this software, thou Nuke X enable the use of GPU which is a easy jump in term of performance compared to cpu but Nuke use the GPU only for specific things. 

 

So to me depending on the benchmark you are referring to the choices are like so : (cheaper) 3300x, 3600, i7 9700k or (more expansive) i7 10700k

And for the GPU, I would wait to check the rtx 3060.

 

Other sources : 1 , 2 , 3

Wouldn't waiting for Zen 3 makes more sense tho? He said that this build is ultra budget for a workstation, the price drops following their release (or perhaps those CPU themselves) could be very beneficial.

[SnooPainting8310]

I really don't know when they will be released

[SnooPainting8310]

For  a right now build I would go i7 10700k for cpu and rtx 2060(309$) for the gpu(if you got the budget) or gtx 1660 super (220$)/gtx 1650 super(160$)

 

Sources : 1, 2

[LilPeace]

Graphics cards are slightly high across the board however right now, so it would be a good idea to wait a little most likely. If anything, you can build the rest of the computer other than the GPU right now and even use it with integrated graphics until you decide for sure on a GPU and are in the perfect timing market-wise.