"New Octane" - Linux 3D Animation Build

[Matthew Musselwhite]

So last week I built a new workstation to replace my old Hackintosh VW (Visual Workstation) that is getting on now in age at 5.25 years old; obviously for 3D animation, performance got a little long in the tooth. Upgrading was originally on the table when I built that system, but with Apple no longer allowing NVIDIA to push the Web Drivers on newer OSes, so anything newer then Kepler was off the table if I wanted CUDA (which I do), and I simply did not have the funds for an upgrade until now... So instead I decided to build a new Workstation comprarable to a HP Z4 in terms of performance and would run Fedora Linux, as Pixar was running it's professional cousin, Red Hat, and also because litterally all the software I use have Linux ports in some compacity or another.

 

So here are the specs for my rig:

• AMD Ryzen 7-3700X @ 3.6GHz
• Patriot Viper Steel RGB DDR4 RAM (32GB, 3200MHz)
• Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mini (6GB GDDR6, 3x MDP ports)
• WD Black SN750 NVMe (1TB, Linux Drive)
• Kingston V300 (120GB, Windows 10 Drive)
• WD Blue (1TB 7200RPM, Internal Storage Drive)
• Gigabyte AORUS Elite X570
• Cooler Master MASTERAIR MA620M
• Cooler Master MWE Gold 850W PSU
• Antec NX230

The price I paid for the GPU was quite egregious at £400, so I'm not too happy with that but what are you gonna do?
The only reason I went with a X570 board instead of a B-series one was the USB ports, it's nice to know I have 5 ports still available at the back for future expansion... Speaking of expansion, that and realiabilty were the names of the game, with me not OCing and keeping stock speeds to extend the longevity of the both the CPU and GPU. And despite AM4 is becoming an EoL standard, I still can upgrade this to the 16-core Ryzen 9 without a motherboard swap, which is a nice peace of mind thing, and with MB can take a max of 128GB of RAM, and the skies the limit with GPUs will hopefully mean I can comfortably grow as my projects get more complex without too much issue.

 

The performance gains isn't too surprising considering there is a 5 1/4 year difference between the 2 builds, it's so fascinating the increases for what is/was considered "top of the line consumer" CPUs, that I have to show the benchmark results!

 

The only game I've tried so far is Little Nightmares 2 on Ultra, I can say with the old Hackintosh 40-60FPS, but with New Octane I can get 80+FPS; which is a nice improvement... But I will probably would have to downgrade this to "High" if stream this title, but that is still an  improvement over being forced to go "Medium" the last time I streamed the game! Honestly, the Windows drive only exists so I can use SFM if I need to, or occassionally play VR titles - everything else I can do in Fedora!

 

Overall though: I'm chuffed with this system and I cannot wait to finally do some work on it!