Help with building a PC specifically made for Daz Studio Iray Renders + Gaming
asmronly24
Posts: 25
Hi,
I'm looking into building a PC that works well with processing renders or anything in general with daz studio. I play demanding PC games as well.
My price range is around $2000 USD.
Any suggestions? I've built multiple PCs before, but I'm rather out of the loop with today's newer technology and am unsure if there are parts that work specifically better for something like daz studio.
Thank you.
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Comments
Start with the GeForce 1080Ti as a goal, and then work around from there. Unless you aren't going to be doing any Iray renders (Iray is a huge part of the Daz ecosystem, but there is also 3Delight), in which case the 1080Ti is unnecessary. You mentioned gaming though, and the 1080Ti is awesome at that!
I'd say that the majority of Daz users on this forum prefer Iray, but 3Delight is good too (and has a number of fans here) if you want to go that route.
The CPU is less important for Iray, but more important if you are doing other forms of rendering. CPU core count can be important, but really a good 6 core/12 thread, or even a 4 core/8 thread processor should be just fine for most (pretty much all?) gaming and Iray based rendering.
Memory is important. Based on various comments here, shoot for at least 32GB if you can, 16 GB should be considered bare minimum (you can try it with less, not recommended).
Also, a decently sized SSD (512GB or more, 1 TB if you can squeeze it into the budget), along with a huge HDD as a backup/storage drive, should make you quite happy.
Yeah, I use exclusively Iray so I'll look into a 1080Ti then. My first rig has 32gb of ram so I'll likely go with that again.
I would go with a GTX 1080ti paried with an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X (8 core, 16 thread 3.6Ghz 4.0Ghz Turbo), at least 16GB of RAM, and a good name brand power supply (at least 500W)
With this setup you will be able to play today's games in 4K and all parts of daz studio will be very quick. (The GPU will handle Iray, and The CPU will handle other parts of Studio like cloth simulation)
And be aware that if you want to do other things while your render is running, you need at least two graphic cards - one for monitor and the other for render only
my $2000 dollar machine ... built about a 18 months ago...
ASUS server board ... holding two xeon processors...
16 ddr4 memory slots that with zeons are capable of reading up to 64 g per slot for a total of a terabyte of ram.
two xeon 2630v3 processors
and a 980 ti with 6g ram...
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mobo $500
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16g ddrs 160 each ... I got 4 for a total of 64g
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processors list of $800 each at the time... and I was going to start with one, but I checked ebay and found a pair of "engineering samples" at $350 each
so I stopped and did some thinking... I was using two machines with five year old i7 920s (still have both up and running) and thought to myself ..
If I get the two and one fails I've still spent less money than if I had bought one new one.
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so I bought the pair
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new 980 was $650 same as the evga 1080 with 11gigs on board.
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granted I'm a computer nerd so I had a extra server case (big 20x20... sitting around that I got for $20 at a computer resale shop.
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now the 2630 v3 are rated at 12,800 on passmark...current price average is $670.. so call it at 13k
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now there are about 100 processors listed higher but are there?
starting with the 2630 there are 24 with ratings up to 14K
about 24 from 14k up to 15k
another 24 in the 16k range
the next 12 are from 16k thru 17 to 18k and then the last 20 which peak at about 25k
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so the 2630 is only about 4 steps from the top....
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but did I mention the server board takes other cpus... all the way up to at least the 2595 v3 ...which are rated at 20k and a posted price of about $2600 ...
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but then I did check ebay last week ... and if I want to gamble again... (although remember ebay will guarentee it works when it arrives) it seems that if you want to wait a couple weeks for them to ship from hong kong... the 2695s.. are about $350 each..
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and I keep thinking I could pop a pair into my board effectively doubling it's rating for about $700
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so far I've resisted because than I would have two extra processors that need a mobo and ram...
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you can reach me on fb or here for more details..
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as for gaming... the 980 seems to do a pretty good job there also...
you need the ram to hold your models... my older machine maxed at 24 g ...
system used 2g, the scene used 20gig for the models... and I sat there for an hour telling windows it couldn't close programs because it was low on memory because daz was the only program... that was back before iray so the processor was running at 100% the whole time, also...
You don't need the latest and greatest. Get a Intel 6 core i7 3930 or xeon 8 core and 32 or 64 gigs of ddr3 ram. Spend the bulk on Video cards.
the cards don't stack for rendering with iray or did they fix that in the newest upgrade...
Multiple cards work with Iray.
The entire scene is loaded into the Vram for each card, and then they all get to work on rendering the scene
The cards do not need to be identicle, or even the same GPU series (They just need to be Nvidia and new enough to support Iray)
If the scene does not fit into the Vram of a card, that card will not be used for the rendering.
From reports on this forum, it seems that multiple cards have diminishing returns for multi GPU rendering.
For example:
You have a scene that takes 10 min to render with a GTX 1080 ti
That same scene will most likely take somewhere around 7 min to render with 2x 1080 ti
and 5 min 45 sec with 3x 1080 ti
so the card still has to be large enough to hold the scene on its own.... but if the scene is too large it won't share it between two cards... but if it fits into each card they'll do some work...
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I will definiately stick my 980 back in with the 1050 ..
changing a ten minute render to 7 minutes means my two hour renders should drop to about 84 minutes instead of 120
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thats worth using.
No, if the sceen doesn't fit on a card that card will be dropped and will not contribute any further to the render (or other renders, until DS is restarted). However, if you have a mix of cards with diffrent capacities then any that can hold the scene will continue to render as normal.