Help Needed to build Portable PC used for 3D Projection Mapping+Rendering

[Cloud1337]

Budget (including currency): No official budget but fairly reasonable

Country: Middle East, Europe

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 3Ds Max, Unreal Engine 4 and 5, Adobe Suit, Mad Mapper.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Hey guys,

 

This isnt anything serious since my boss and I are trying to find an alternative pc instead of carrying a huge bulky build to setups so i suggested we try building a new smaller pc for this. He hasnt given me a budget but just asked to do some research so here i am asking the people who know this stuff more than me.

Anyways what im looking for is a portable poweful pc which can be used for work and can handle 4+ projectors at a time at max 10 projectors while having softwares running in the background (Mainly mad mapper and after effects). Now the issue arrises with what is the absolute best build i can go with that can support such a heavy load. Im literally starting from zero with this build so im not sure if i should go with 2 or more GPUs to support the projects, a powerful CPU with alot of cores, RAM, all this is something i understand the minumum but not with what im looking for.

 

Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

16 minutes ago, Cloud1337 said:

Country: Private

Cant really give accurate suggestions without country, and to dox someone you need more than just an extremely rough estimate of where they live and only 1 very vague data point so no worries about that

 

How small would you like the build? micro atx or mini itx? Micro atx would be alot cheaper and give more flexibility incase you need the extra expansion but mini itx is smaller

[TheBean]

well considering you need to use the adobe suite, intel is probably better. 

since you need a bunch of projectors, getting those super cheap GPUs is a good option. (many people will get something like the gt 730 for display outputs)

since those workloads are pretty intensive, you'll want *at least* 12600k cpu, at least rtx2060 level of gpu. 

at least 32gb ram

 

edit: having multiple display outs but also being itx build gets really hard to do. cant have small and lots of ports for display. 

might want to consider maybe thunderbolt ports for display outs or something. 

[jaslion]

31 minutes ago, Cloud1337 said:

Budget (including currency): No official budget but fairly reasonable

Country: Private

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 3Ds Max, Unreal Engine 4 and 5, Adobe Suit, Mad Mapper.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Hey guys,

 

This isnt anything serious since my boss and I are trying to find an alternative pc instead of carrying a huge bulky build to setups so i suggested we try building a new smaller pc for this. He hasnt given me a budget but just asked to do some research so here i am asking the people who know this stuff more than me.

Anyways what im looking for is a portable poweful pc which can be used for work and can handle 4+ projectors at a time at max 10 projectors while having softwares running in the background (Mainly mad mapper and after effects). Now the issue arrises with what is the absolute best build i can go with that can support such a heavy load. Im literally starting from zero with this build so im not sure if i should go with 2 or more GPUs to support the projects, a powerful CPU with alot of cores, RAM, all this is something i understand the minumum but not with what im looking for.

 

Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

 

Whats the current pc? Because at best this would be a micro atx heavy af system still.

[Biohazard777]

22 minutes ago, Cloud1337 said:

Country: Private

Private... 

 

27 minutes ago, Cloud1337 said:

instead of carrying a huge bulky build

Does the huge bulky build perform good for your use-case? If it does, what are the specs? (that would help with recommendations for your new build)

[Cloud1337]

2 minutes ago, Biohazard777 said:

Private... 

 

Does the huge bulky build perform good for your use-case? If it does, what are the specs? (that would help with recommendations for your new build)

Private as in company wise not where i am currently.

And concerning the bulky pc it recently started struggling with 4 projectors thus the reason we are looking to build a new one.

 

The current specs are:

CPU: i7-8th gen (cant remeber excatly)

GPU: Rtx 3070

RAM: 16GB

 

If you need anymore specifications lemme know all Ill try to get them.

 

[Cloud1337]

8 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Whats the current pc? Because at best this would be a micro atx heavy af system still.

The current PC is running a RTX 3070 with a i7-8th gen cpu and 16GBs of RAM but struggles with using 4 projectors.

[Cloud1337]

19 minutes ago, TheBean said:

well considering you need to use the adobe suite, intel is probably better. 

since you need a bunch of projectors, getting those super cheap GPUs is a good option. (many people will get something like the gt 730 for display outputs)

since those workloads are pretty intensive, you'll want *at least* 12600k cpu, at least rtx2060 level of gpu. 

at least 32gb ram

 

edit: having multiple display outs but also being itx build gets really hard to do. cant have small and lots of ports for display. 

might want to consider maybe thunderbolt ports for display outs or something. 

Thats the issue im currently facing is with the outputs. Having several projectors and a monitor running 4k animations is super heavy on the pc so we're trying to find a solution.

 

Ill look into thunderbolt since im personally not very familiar with it.

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, Cloud1337 said:

Thats the issue im currently facing is with the outputs. Having several projectors and a monitor running 4k animations is super heavy on the pc so we're trying to find a solution.

 

Ill look into thunderbolt since im personally not very familiar with it.

What falls under 4k animations? Video files or like live projects? Because at a certain point you can only push a single system that far.

[TheBean]

@Biohazard777 you didnt really need to go digging through their profile to find a location.. if they didnt want to say, leave it there. kinda weird dude

[Biohazard777]

1 minute ago, TheBean said:

@Biohazard777 you didnt really need to go digging through their profile to find a location.. if they didnt want to say, leave it there. kinda weird dude

Acting on instinct, words like private and leet trigger the instinct, whoops.

Anyhow, you got some questions / advice for the OP, or are you here for some off-topic chit chat? 
 

3 hours ago, Cloud1337 said:

Thats the issue im currently facing is with the outputs. Having several projectors and a monitor running 4k animations is super heavy on the pc so we're trying to find a solution.

@jaslionasked a pretty good question, are all of those animation just pre-recorded videos and you are doing hw accelerated decoding on multiple 4k screens or are you actively generating that 4k content and displaying it in real time?
Heck, even "just" doing hw accelerated decoding can be a lot for a GPU, if it is like 10 simultaneous 4k H265 videos:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/8gqwrq/how_many_h264_videos_can_nvdec_decode_at_once/

(yeah I know an old card, don't wanna search further till we know what kind of workload you are throwing at the PC)

Have you done some profiling, I mean on your old bulky PC that sometimes struggles to keep up, to see where the bottleneck is?

 

[Cloud1337]

12 hours ago, Biohazard777 said:

Acting on instinct, words like private and leet trigger the instinct, whoops.

Anyhow, you got some questions / advice for the OP, or are you here for some off-topic chit chat? 
 

@jaslionasked a pretty good question, are all of those animation just pre-recorded videos and you are doing hw accelerated decoding on multiple 4k screens or are you actively generating that 4k content and displaying it in real time?
Heck, even "just" doing hw accelerated decoding can be a lot for a GPU, if it is like 10 simultaneous 4k H265 videos:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/8gqwrq/how_many_h264_videos_can_nvdec_decode_at_once/

(yeah I know an old card, don't wanna search further till we know what kind of workload you are throwing at the PC)

Have you done some profiling, I mean on your old bulky PC that sometimes struggles to keep up, to see where the bottleneck is?

 

To start, dont worry about digging into where im actually from its not really private, just trying to keep the actual location of the company abit secret if i can.

 

Anywayssss to continue @jaslionquestion about the animations, it falls under both live simulations using MadMapper and prerendered animations which are usally 1080p. I dont think i was clear with what im using this build for so Ill try to be more specific here. We do live projection mapping for event parties clubs the likes so we usually use 1 PC to output all animations fo the projectors. We currently output a maximum of 3 animations using 4k projectors and we start struggling when trying to use the 4th, thus the reason of this whole post. Animations go from presets from the app which scale with the projectors and are not animations but more like live sims to bought assets and original content which usually are 1080p or 4k animations. Another thing to note is that these installations usually last all night (7pm-2am) of continuse nonstop outputs. In rare cases, we have to create new animations using after effects on the spot to accomidate with issues that we face on site and sometimes just for the sake of not using the same stuff during the night.

 

I hope this clears up somethings.

 

Honestly after some more research it might just be a straight up pain to go for a small portable build so might try to get regular build with a case that comes with a handle.

[jaslion]

2 hours ago, Cloud1337 said:

To start, dont worry about digging into where im actually from its not really private, just trying to keep the actual location of the company abit secret if i can.

 

Anywayssss to continue @jaslionquestion about the animations, it falls under both live simulations using MadMapper and prerendered animations which are usally 1080p. I dont think i was clear with what im using this build for so Ill try to be more specific here. We do live projection mapping for event parties clubs the likes so we usually use 1 PC to output all animations fo the projectors. We currently output a maximum of 3 animations using 4k projectors and we start struggling when trying to use the 4th, thus the reason of this whole post. Animations go from presets from the app which scale with the projectors and are not animations but more like live sims to bought assets and original content which usually are 1080p or 4k animations. Another thing to note is that these installations usually last all night (7pm-2am) of continuse nonstop outputs. In rare cases, we have to create new animations using after effects on the spot to accomidate with issues that we face on site and sometimes just for the sake of not using the same stuff during the night.

 

I hope this clears up somethings.

 

Honestly after some more research it might just be a straight up pain to go for a small portable build so might try to get regular build with a case that comes with a handle.

Can you maybe do a test simulation to see which part is being maxed out? Because if a 8700k is being maxed out already for just 3 things then well a 5950x or 12900k are NOT going to cut it.

 

This computer will not get lighter but only heavier really. That and there is a limit to how much a single system can do too.