New system spec

#1

Haven’t seen any posts looking for new system specs as of late, so thinking of something like this. Main tool in C4D is X-Particles, and also using Adobe Suite and a CPU-only-powered 3D graphics renderer as well. (And if I should just wait for an M1 iMac, let me know ;–)) Thanks for any feedback.

Asus® PRIME TRX40-Pro AMD® TRX40 based chipset, ATX Motherboard
AMD® Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 3970X Processor, 32-core / 64-thread @ 3.7GHz, (4.5GHz Boost), 128MB L3 Cache
DDR4 Memory 64GB Crucial® Ballistix™ DDR4-3200MHz (4 x 16GB), CAS 16 latency, low voltage
Video Card 8GB EVGA® NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming GDDR6 video card

#2

Well, if you’re shooting for a 3070, I’d start trying to buy one ASAP. There are wide-spread scalping and crytpto-mining-induced shortages for those cards.

I’ve heard good things about BestBuy’s lottery system, it at least gives you something like a chance compared to a lot of the other sites where folks w/ bots buy up all the supply within seconds of it being posted.

#3

Thanks for the tip. The systems integrator I’m deailng with claims to have them ion stock. Guess I’ll find out… Do you have a clear second choice for C4D and XP?

#4

The 3060ti should be pretty similar in terms of viewport performance and at a slightly lower price point. A 3080 is nearly impossible to get but would be a bit better performing with a GPU renderer like Octane/Redshift.

OEMs have slightly better access to stock, my warning was mostly if you were building it yourself. I’ve heard really great things about Puget Systems if you haven’t picked your computer-maker yet, they’ll help talk you through the right parts for the exact 3D tasks you want to do.

Unless you’re rendering absolutely massive scenes or like to have 40 apps open simultaneously, I think you might be over-specc’d on RAM.

Mash might have a more informed set of opinions on the rest of your components.

#5

I have a quite similar build since last year (with a 2080Ti though), and I’m very pleased with performance.
128 Gbyte seems a lot, but it has proven really useful in a lot of situations. Sims fit into Ram, Adobe Bridge is finally useful, and the system is always responsive and stable. Most of the times, I use 40-60 Gbyte of RAM, so there’s headroom left, but I like it exactly like that :slight_smile:
Especially for x-Particles, don’t forget massive amounts of fast storage space for caching. I totally underestimated the space that simulations generate and just lately added another 4Tbyte-SSD for caches only.

#6

The 3060Ti is a great card but seems sold out here too.
The upcoming -very soon- 3060 is said by Nvidia to have a limiter for crypto mining, which kicks in when it detects the program.
Nvidia also is said to be producing a range of crypto-currency mining processors (CMPs) not suited to the general demand,
We’ll see how that goes!
see here

#7

Its easy to pack a system with ram these days so I would tend to say yeah, why not. AE with a 4k comp can soak up as much ram as you throw at it, my new build this year I went with 128gb, but 64 would have been fine.

#8

My thoughts:

  1. You should know that After Effects is horrible at using extra CPU cores. A 16 or 32 core CPU is absolutely no faster than an 8 core CPU. In fact it’s typically slower. So you really need to look at some special rendering software like this
    https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/
    or
    https://www.mekajiki.com/rendergarden/

  2. Your hardware config seems crafted to render 3d w/CPUs. (High investment in CPU; low investment in GPU) That will work, but most pros are using GPU rendering. Redshift or Octane…or Cycles. VRAY and Arnold are also transitioning to leverage GPU.

#9

Yes, CPU heavy for sure. My main application is Mandelbulb 3D, which is 32-bit and doesn’t use a GPU. So really trying to create a balanced system spec for all purposes, which of course is impossible. :wink:

#10

“My main application is Mandelbulb 3D”

Ah, in that case, makes total sense.

#11

RAM - well never quit sure what will come up, so I think 64GB is probably going to work.

#12

Storage - thanks for the tip. I am using a RAID array but no SSDs (except for system drive). I’ll see if I can tweak the spec a bit, but pretty much at the top of my budget.