Omen by HP Obelisk Gaming Desktop Computer (2080 Super) - Fair price?
Aabacus
Posts: 407
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WQ68VR8/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1
Omen by HP Obelisk Gaming Desktop Computer, 9th Generation Intel Core i9-9900K Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER 8 GB, HyperX 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, VR Ready, Windows 10 Home (875-1023, Black)
US $2,000.
Looks like a decent machine that I'd only use for rendering. I see concerns about it overheating for many hours of brutal gaming. Honestly, I'm not in for all that so I'm thinking this should be a good option.
What say the hive mind?
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Comments
My thought is that if there are heat concerns during gaming where the GPU usage can fluctuate, then those are even bigger concerns when rendering for any length of time where the GPU is likely to be near 100% for the whole render.
Yea thats a fair price, at least comparing to the last upgrade kit I purchased (mobo, i9-9900k, 32 gigs ram, 512 gig ssd) which came to around 15000 ZAR which was around $1000 ish USD then
so an extra $1000 for PSU, Case, 2080 Super, and from the comments an all in one water cooler seems pretty good even if you need to upgrade the cooling to higher performance fans later.
Edit: I stand corrected per Kenshaws post below
Where to start?
Yes, it is a grotesque ripoff. HP should be sued for by some class action attorney for the way they configure these things.
9900k MSRP $580
9900 MSRP $450
The difference between the 9900k and 9900 is the k is unlocked for overclocking.
While the motherboard is Z390 it is made specifically for HP and its power delivery is weak. Therefore overclocking would be a very bad idea. Further the unit comes with a 120mm AIO stock since it has such terrible airflow so the 9900k and Z390 is just a waste plain and simple. So that's probably like $150 or so added to the retail prcie simply because HP likes ripping customers off.
I'm sure every component is the same. Either a no name ultra low quality one that no one should ever buy or one with a hidden gotcha.
Yes, if you have $2000 to spend this will likely work for a while and not give you too many headaches. If anything goes wrong you're at the mercy of HP customer support.
For that kind of money there are better people to buy from.
This is amazing feedback! Thank you! Where would you recommend buying from? I am not married to the idea...just trying to keep under a 2k budget....
I agree, I've always been a PC builder myself but I've not kept up with the hardware so I'm out of the loop. I can build my own but I don't even know what parts to order these days that would equate something like this.
Got a shopping list? :-D
I own one. I product tested the product. It renders fast. I upgraded the ram to 64 and added a second drive. It is fine with studio however it uses full cpu and sounds like a plane taking off. It has an embarrassingly loud fan. My asus was far better noise wise. Do I love it? No. The sound and heat compared with how much memory Iray uses kinda suck
If you buying your own parts and can wait a month do so. the new Ampere based GPU's should be announced at least by then.
If you're buying prebuilt ibuypower.com is a good site.
...hmm, nothing about the PSU. I've often found many prebuilds to have barely adequate PSUs, particulaly if you plan to make upgrades such as adding extra drives, boosting memory, or adding a second GPU.
New and vastly improved GPUs are about to be announced in just a few days. If you wait just a little longer you can get a LOT more for your money. Not only are the new GPUs expected to be much faster, but they also have additional VRAM, which is important for building large scenes. Every rumor I have seen has said the 3080 will have 10GB of VRAM, and it may even have a second version with 20GB. Compared to the 8GB of the 2080 Super, that would be a massive upgrade right there.
So IMO it would be extremely bad to buy a PC right before these GPUs launch. I am sure the pre builds will start offering them as soon as they are available.
The big question is what do you use your computer for? Are you gaming? Or is this purely for Iray?
That is a vital question as it greatly effects your needs. Daz Iray is so GPU focused that you can get away with skimping on CPU. That means you can save money on CPU and place that towards a better GPU.
Even if you do game, many CPUs today are perfectly fine most games, it is only if you are going for the absolute highest frame rates (and I am talking about 120+) that you need to concern yourself with the CPU much. Otherwise you will be totally fine with a much cheaper CPU than a 9900k. An AMD R7 or even R5 be fine and those can be $100 to $200 less. Also, the AMD motherboards tend to be cheaper than Intel ones, so you can also save money there. And on top of all that the cheaper AMDs will use less power than their Intel counterparts. That means less heat in your case, potentially giving your GPU a little more room to breath.
For Iray, the only time the CPU matters is for handling the Daz app itself, which BTW is single threaded so it really doesn't need much. And then the chance that you run out of VRAM and render on CPU only mode. But you would be far better offer optimizing your scene to fit into VRAM rather than trying to render on most consumer CPUs. The difference between rendering Iray on GPU and CPU is pretty high.
BTW, I have a benchmark thread in my signature. Feel free to check it out. It has a lot of great information in it and if you have a PC now, you can download and run the benchmark yourself. This way you can more directly compare just how much faster a particular GPU will be. In time, hopefully the 3000 series (or whatever it is called...it may actually be called something else) will be added by our users as they get the new cards. So if you have not upgraded yet when they release, you can check back to that thread to see how the new cards stack up.
$2000 for a laptop with a GPU that has only 8GB RAM in my opinion is about $750 more than it's worth.
It doesn't use the GPU? I have a mac that is, of course, full CPU so I'm looking for that GPU speed.
I'm going to do some gaming but mostly iray. Gaming will not be beastly. I'm not angling for 120fps. More along the lines of 5-10 year old games from my steam library. 60 or even 30fps is just fine for my needs. I mean...Lego Star Wars is only so demanding.
That said I would really like my renders to be fully GPU optimized so that I'm getting things done in minutes instead of hours using CPU on a mac. To be fair...it's a beefy mac and only 1 year old so it isn't terrible.
Thanks for the great tip on the new cards! I'll keep my eyes open!
I'll check out your benchmark thread! That's great!
Thanks to your information and encouragement I fiddled with some AMD/Intel builds. Really appreciated your help.
This is the Intel build I came up with. I've not spent a lot of time digging in but these seem to be high enough without sacrificing power.
My budget is $2k or less US.
I am not going to do any overclocking. This is going to primarily be a rendering machine and secondarily something to play games (Think Skyrim and not CS:GO or Fortnight).
Any thoughts or recommendations on the build?
NOTE: I will wait for the new cards to come out as you note...I just wanted a base to start from so that I can easily swap in something different in the GPU department.
I'd lean AMD personally but that's in the ballpark of what you should be looking at. A roughly $700 GPU is what I'd expect in a $2k computer so you have the right idea.
And yeah, the countdown clock is on for new GPUs to be announced. When they actually launch is hard to say, that will be part of the announcement. But the announcement is now just 5 days away. 5 days!
A whole bunch of information has largely been confirmed, too. There will be a 10GB 3080 released. So that will offer 2 more GB of VRAM, and of course it will be a lot faster. The question is what its price will be. It may be $800. There may be models at $700. We just don't know, in 5 days we will. The 3070 will also be a viable option, too. It will likely offer 8GB like the 2080 Super, and it may well be faster as well...again we don't know. But the 3070 should be a cheaper card, so even if it is just as fast as a 2080 Super, the price will almost certainly be cheaper. It could be $500 or 600. Again...we don't know. Also the 3070 may be a launching a month later than the 3080 and 3090. But if I were you, I would be looking at either the 3070 or 3080.
If you are not super into high frame rates, then yeah, you can skimp a little on that CPU and save some cash which you can put into a better GPU...like a 3080. But that is entirely up to you.
Oh, and one last thing, the "RTX" part of newer GPUs are a big deal for Iray. The dedicated ray tracing cores help Iray calculate ray tracing through geometry a lot, and the new 3000 cards will have an even more advanced version of ray tracing than the 2000 ones. So for Iray this means even better performance improvements than you see in video games. I honestly think you might freak out the first few times you make a render and see how much faster these are.
There's some great info here! I hope to have money by the end of September to build my own computer. Maybe the timing for the GPUs will be good for me? The more I read about prebuilt PCs, the more I'm convinced to build my own.
In general, prebuilt comes in two categories, one is for people looking for a cheap computer => cheap, noname components, integrated GPU:s, poor expandability and upgradeability.
The other one is targeted to business users with hefty pricetags, they may be equipped with Xeons and Quadros but you can build a rig that runs around the prebuilt one in circles at half the price yourself - Even on Intel platform
There are good pre builts but you pay a hefty premium (25% at least). They just aren't available from Dell or HP.
I ran the rendering benchmark that outrider42 mentioned. On my swanky 2019 iMac it takes an hour (cpu only). I was looking at the thread he pointed out and some machines are doing the same in 6 minutes or less. Mind already blown...lol....
Aabacus, I was a fanatic Mac user for around 13 years. But I grew tired of waiting for renders, etc. That's why I decided to abandon Macs, and get my own PC.