Please review my workstation and advice the upgrade

#1

Hi guys,

I’m a 3D Character Artist currently on a freelance. I widely use Maya, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer and Substance Painter in my everyday routine. For now I started to think that my PC needs some upgrades or maybe even bigger changes if it’s worth it. Here is my main configuration for now:

Motherboard - Asus Z370-A pro (MS-7B48)
Processor - Intel i7 8700K 3.70 GHz
Graphic Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080
Ram - 64GB
2 Monitors - Cintiq 27 + Dell UP 2716D
What would you recommend me to change? Should I maybe think about AMD (never used and unfortunately out of context :frowning: )

Many Thanks!

#2

Why did you start to think about upgrade? Is there a specific task within your workflow that feels laggy?

Your current rig is quite good for modeling and editing tasks. The cpu is decent and has a good IPS, and the gpu is still powerful enough for viewports etc. You don’t mention anything about your OS and storage drives.
What software are you using for rendering?

#3

Thank you for your response. For rendering stuff I usually use Marmoset and Keyshot. I tried to start using Octane few years ago but it takes much more time to understand it than I expected :slight_smile:

My main concern is Marvelous designer and simulation speed there after detailing and Substance Painter texturing process when you need to work with complicated multi-layered materials. I have to work in 2k but it doesn’t work well in case if you need to export 4k at the end. You have to manually fix a lot of pattern scales etc. after recalculating.

My OS is Windows 10
Storage drives - SPCC M2 PCIe SSD 1 TB for the system + 3 HDD Seagate Exos 7E8 4 TB

#4

I think the new version of Marvelous Designer can use the gpu for faster simulations. Substance Painter uses mostly the gpu, afaik. I don’t know. I have a less powerful gpu than yours (a gtx 1070) and never had problems with SP. Only exporting takes long, especially high res textures, but that’s normal I think. The only thing I would change, not that it would make a huge difference, is the gpu, after the new Nvidia RTX 3000 series is released next month. The 8700K is a good single threaded performer, but of course Keyshot cpu rendering won’t be blazing fast.