Planning on a build

[SamDavis]

Hello, as mush as I dislike to make my first post a requestish post, I do have a few questions. I have been a follower of the Linus tech tips on youtube for a good bit now, and I was nappy to see that a forum, this forum was started, And adore the target audience/community that is in the making. I came here because I have a good hunch that I would get positive feedback. I am currently in school for animation and video editing. I am having trouble deciding what to go with in terms of hardware. Would intel be the way to go or AMD. Dose AMD provide anything that would differ it from Intel that makes it better For the field of work I am entering, and visa versa. Should I invest in a workstation Card now or wait until I am more experienced. What components of my pc will be stressed the most in the process of video editing and 3D rendering. So I would greatly appreciate It if you guys would help me prepare for the build, I guess gaming Will be done as well on this pc but not as often as school work and animating, But mostly animating. I thank everyone in advance as I hope to get feedback on this topic :), thanks again

[Sean]

I'm not too familiar with animating/video editing but I do know a little bit about hardware (not necessarily much compared to other people here though)

Right now, the safest option for a CPU is Intel. AMD just can't compete with them at the moment. Again, I'm limited in my knowledge of animation, but from what I do know you'll do well with plenty of RAM (16GB, though you could make do with 8 I think), a decent video card like a 7870/670 and above, and a quad- core CPU. Make sure you check some other sources though, I'm certainly not the most qualified out there :P

[CaptainSi]

Hey buddy. If you're going to be using Adobe products get an Nvidia card. They have a feature called CUDA cores, which accellerate Adobe programs. Something like a 650ti, 660ti or 670 will be awesome graphics cards. Video editing and 3d modelling and rendering strains most on your CPU, so you will want a good Intel CPU, 3770k, 2600k. You don't need workstation grade hardware unless you are going to be rendering large projects each and every day. You will need to look into RAID arrays for mass storage, and about 16gb of ram will be sufficient. Buy the ram in 8gb sticks so you have the capacity to upgrade. Get a motherboard that supports VirtuMVP, and SATA 6 Gb per second. If you want me to go into more detail let me know, but try and google around and learn it for yourself, so you can make educated purchases. Best of luck with your course!

[Guest]

Hello' date=' as mush as I dislike to make my first post a requestish post, I do have a few questions. I have been a follower of the Linus tech tips on youtube for a good bit now, and I was nappy to see that a forum, this forum was started, And adore the target audience/community that is in the making. I came here because I have a good hunch that I would get positive feedback. I am currently in school for animation and video editing. I am having trouble deciding what to go with in terms of hardware. Would intel be the way to go or AMD. Dose AMD provide anything that would differ it from Intel that makes it better For the field of work I am entering, and visa versa. Should I invest in a workstation Card now or wait until I am more experienced. What components of my pc will be stressed the most in the process of video editing and 3D rendering. So I would greatly appreciate It if you guys would help me prepare for the build, I guess gaming Will be done as well on this pc but not as often as school work and animating, But mostly animating. I thank everyone in advance as I hope to get feedback on this topic :), thanks again [/quote']

Personally I'm an Intel guy. How serious will you be getting with the system and animation It may be worth moving up to a 2011 workstation if a) your budget permits it and b)if the extra cores are going to be utilized. From what you've stated I would think a 3770K at minimum.

As for video cards; I would look more into the NVidia Quadro than the GTX's. I personally don't know much about the Quadro's other than they're designed for video editing in workstations however the downside with them is they certainly aren't the greatest when it comes to gaming. If you want, we can design a system for you, we'd just need your budget and country ($2000 NZ is different to $2000 US or CAD by a long way..)

[SamDavis]

Thank you guys so much for the feedback, i have been reading around, trying to understand this tech more than i do now and trust me, Im not seasoned in this field in any way. After long though i finally decided that i would be majoring in 3D animation instead of 2D as the market for 2D isint pushed as much as 3D. As for a budget, i do and dont have one, im willing to get the product that will deliver everything i need, but understanding the price of workstations cards it would be hard for me to justify a $1K+ GFX card this early on. What i have gathered from this is of course already pushing me toward the right direction and i thank you guys greatly for that. ~sorry for my constant questions, i Was speaking with a friend who was far further ahead in her education than I and we were talking about GFX cards, rather you should duel them or just get a super beefy one due to the fact that dueled cards are more prone to problems, incompatibilities, and errors, as well as Maya's fickle attitude when it comes to recognizing you have more than one card on the PC. Also when you duel cards, Sense we are talking mainly on the Nvidia side, when you use sli on 2 cards (as far as i am concerned they do have to be the same) is it bassicly the stats of one card just doubled or some sort of averaging thing. And if i wanted to could i put 2 Nvidia cards in a PC, both being different, and use one for ask A and the other for Task B, would having 2 cause a problem or just flop and not work in genera

Thanks again for your feedback :)

[Guest]

When you SLI the cards you are essentially expanding the existing card. The second processor is given a workload however the RAM is not doubled in the sense that it doesn't also get handed new tasks. It duplicates the RAM from GPU 1. So if you had 2GB in each card, you only have 2GB of GPU RAM to work with, not 4GB. To SLI it is recommended to get two identical chips so 2 GTX680's or 2 660TI's however the actual card makes can be different but ,most people go with identical cards, whether that be Asus, MSI, EVGA ect is up to you. Hopefully someone with knowledge of the NVidia Quadro cards is around soon to help out because my personal view is that for your build you'd benefit from them over anything else.

As for a complete system, In your shoes I'd go with some version of the following:

1.

3770K on an Asus P8Z77V-Pro, H100i or Noctua D14, 16GB Corsair Vengeance, 2 Samsung 840Pro SSD's, WD Black 2TB drives, Silverstone Strider Plus 750w or Corsair AX750w PSU. GPU is up to you

This is what I would personally get if I was financially restricted - the 3770K will give you a lot better performance for animation than the rest of the 1155 chips unless you start looking at Xeon. The CPU coolers I've selected are both very good and will allow you to heavily overclock the CPU, just remember if you get the air cooler (D14), that you'll probably need low profile RAM due to heatsink clearance.

2.

3930K on an Asus P9X79 Pro, H100i or Noctua D14, 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum, 2 Samsung 840Pro's, WD Black 2TB drives, Corsair AX760 PSU.

Option 2 is a fair bit more expensive as it is a hex core 2011 build with more premium parts so you're looking more into the upper $2k mark for it + you've still got to factor in displays. It'll give you rock solid performance but at a price..

Cases are up to you really; you can go something relatively inexpensive like a Bitfenix Shinobi or move up to something like a Corsair C70 or 600T. Cases are a lot more of a personal thing as it's 90% aesthetics.

[SamDavis]

I was going to go with the NZXT Kraken (on of the ones they sell, havent chosen) is there an advantage over Fan cooling or the no maintenance water cooling CPU solutions?

[Guest]

I was going to go with the NZXT Kraken (on of the ones they sell' date=' havent chosen) is there an advantage over Fan cooling or the no maintenance water cooling CPU solutions?[/quote']

You could debate things like noise and aesthetics til the cows come home with those. I'd wait for the reviews on the Kraken first before you run out to buy. There is another product that has just been launched at CES that has captured a lot of interest on here, the Swiftech H220. It's a cross between a H100 and a custom loop with the ability to add in other radiators and blocks to the existing system. From the product demo at CES it was shown to be from memory something like 8 degrees cooler than the H100 on an identical system.

[SamDavis]

So its like...a fully sealed loop but not at the same time ? haha because thats the image you built in my head. I dont plan on running out and buying anything now, im holding onto my wallet with both hands till June rears its ugly head

[Guest]

So its like...a fully sealed loop but not at the same time ? haha because thats the image you built in my head. I dont plan on running out and buying anything now, im holding onto my wallet with both hands till June rears its ugly head

It's a closed loop to start with however you can expand it. The pump is a 6w one so it is capable for small to medium loops..

[CaptainSi]

Running dual GPU's in SLI or Crossfire won't give you any advantage in your case. I would also stray away from workstation hardware because you will be overpaying massively for the 3-4 years use you'll get out of it, keeping in mind that computer hardware doubles in performance every 3-4 years (Moore's law). Like I mentioned before, you must think extensively about your storage solutions. I recommend an SSD for programs and a RAID array for storage. Something like an Intel 550 SSD 128GB + Two WD Black 2TB drives in RAID 1 will be great, and the 128GB SSD will be plenty for all your programs, while keeping boot times under check and maintaining general snappy performance. Also think about options like Thunderbolt, eSATA for backing up projects, or even a NAS solution for storage and backups. Best of luck!

[SamDavis]

So its like...a fully sealed loop but not at the same time ? haha because thats the image you built in my head. I dont plan on running out and buying anything now, im holding onto my wallet with both hands till June rears its ugly head

Looks like i just lost all hat feedback .__.