Upgrading for 3D work need help with a motherboard choice.

[Metalsiren]

Hello everyone,

I need help with motherboards and your opinions to upgrade my old PC.

I was planning to buy a new motherboard (and an AMD CPU) at the end of September, but my ASRock H170 Pro4S motherboard just freezes on the loading screen.

 

Budget (including currency): 150000yen (around 1400$ CAD)

Country: Japan (my brother lives in Montreal but I am pretty sure that the shipping would be expensive).

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Blender (animations and simulations) and Unreal Engine 5 (Open-World creation and VR) will be the main software. Games like Race simulators (Forza) and open world.

 

After the "research" I did, I am looking for an AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU build.

I was thinking to get the RYZEN 9 5900X as my new CPU with a CPU cooler. (I currently have an i5 6600).

A Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2 as my boot drive (currently Samsung 850 Evo 250 GB 2.5" SSD).

 

So I would need a motherboard and maybe at least 32GB of new RAM (currents see list below).

 

I currently have a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060 and planning to get a RTX 3080 or up (I need the CUDA of NVIDIA). Unfortunately, they are minimum 100000yen now (around 940$ CAD)

 

Old parts: 

Case: Thermaltake Versa H25 ATX Mid Tower

RAM:  (2 x 16 GB) TEAMGROUP Elite 32 GB DDR4-3200 CL22

           (2 x 8 GB) Crucial CT8G4DFD8213 DDR4-2133 CL15

Power Supply: Antec NeoECO Classic 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB OC

Storage: Samsung 850 Evo 250 GB 2.5" SSD + Western Digital 6TB HDD + Western Digital 3TB HDD

Fans: The ones that came with the case (1 back, 2 front)

CPU Cooler: Intel E97379-001

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600

Motherboard: ASRock H170 Pro4S ATX LGA1151

 

Thank you so much for your help and suggestions.

[WereCat]

Almost any B550 or X570 motherboard will be fine, providing it has the features you want.

 

Really, just look at the motherboards and determine if it has enough USB ports, M.2 slots, PCIe slots, SATA ports, etc... for your use case.

 

Unless you want to do some heavy OC, especially on the memory side then I don't think it really matters. If you want to push your RAM OC then probably grab an MSI board since MSI has quite good RAM overclocking even on cheaper motherboards. But as I said for your use case the features are likely more important.

 

Also most ASUS and MSI boards (not all so watch out) have an USB port that allows you to flash the BIOS even if you have incompatible CPU so it may come in handy if something goes wrong after updating BIOS, not sure if thats what you want though.

 

Also I don't recommend mixing that new 2x16GB RAM with the old 2x8GB if you want to avoid issues on Ryzen.

[RONOTHAN##]

Odds are the 12700F would end up being the better choice, it's a bit cheaper and it's the same performance in multi core workloads with better single thread performance. If it's more expensive though the 5900X the 5900X isn't a bad choice. 

 

If you go 12700F, I'd go for either a MSI B660m-A Pro, B660m Mortar, or Gigabyte Gaming X and maybe a couple other boards depending on price. 

 

If you do go AMD, it still does depend on price. The B550 Steel Legend is a solid choice, the B550 Taichi is usually a really good bang for the buck board, the B550 Tomahawk is solid, B550-A Pro, etc. This again does depend on pricing and what features you actually need, and there are a lot of boards that would also do great that I didn't list. 

[jones177]

I did 3D for a living and for a Ryzen setup I would use the system I have listed below.

 

CPU: 5900X

Motherboard: X570 AORUS Master

RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4 3200

GPU: EVGA FTW3 ULTRA  RTX 3080 ti

PSU: EVGA 1000 G+

Case: Lian Li O11 Dynamic

Cooler: EK 360mm AIO

SSD#1: Corsair MP600 1TB

SSD#2: Crucial MX500 2.5" 2TB

 

With long overnight CPU renders even with a cool CPU like the 5900x the motherboard may overheat in a hot climate. 

I like AORUS Masters for this but will us an Ultra as well.

The 5900x does not render hot but does idle hot so I use a 360mm AIO.

 

For a GPU rendering only rig, I would use Intel with enough cores to make Photoshop happy and that is about 8. 

Intel's are cooler when not rendering and use about half the watts at idle. 

For Intel I use AORUS Masters motherboards as well. I have ASUS boards but I will not use less than a Hero since I have had issues when I did. Usually the issues were CPUs running hot. 

 

GPUs can get hot rendering so I now like cases with air intakes below the the GPU like the Lian Li O11 Dynamic. For a more traditional setup I like to use cases with 200mm fans.  

 

With GPU rendering, vram becomes an issue so the more the better. 

I used 11gbs for years and 12gbs was not an upgrade. The 3090 with 24gbs was a good upgrade so you may want to wait for prices to come down in your area of the world.

 

I did 3D design so a about 7 to 200 renderings per project. With that storage was not an issue so 1 or 2tb SSDs. 

Slow storage is an issue so since 2007 I have not used any 72,000rpm HDDs. If I have to use them they are remote like on a server or USB drive. 

A texture that takes 1 second to load from a SSD takes 5 seconds from 72,000rpm HDD and that can add up in a complex scene.

Also most consumer HDDS are designed to move small amounts of data fast but will choke moving large amounts. This can cause errors and crashes, usually in the middle of the night after multiple renders.  

 

Heat over time is what caused most issues so I never overclocked my rendering rigs and today with hotter components I would probably be undervaluing them.

  

[Metalsiren]

Thank you everyone for those recommendations.

 

I am not very stressed by the GPU since the rendering will be done on my friend's machine.

 

I will be doing some 3D modeling, but most of my work will be around asset placements (World creation), shading, baking, animations and weather simulation.

For that I need a good CPU with enough cores and threads.

 

I always used Intel, never overclocked. I am not attached to the brand, just that I never had any problems.

But I am hearing that AMD has the edge for the type of computing I need.

 

Also thank you for the case and cooling suggestions. It has been apparent last summer that the hot humid summer in Japan is awful when your machine is working at 100%.

 

PS: never visit Japan between June and September! You will not enjoy the weather!