Advice on PC Spec Please
MoreTN
Posts: 303
I've specced the following PC and would appreciate any advice I can get. Anywhere that I can save money without seriously compromising performance? Any critical bottlenecks? Any other things I should think about? I want to be able to render Stonemason sets, Ultrascenery with probably 3 to 4 characters max. Will this cut it? Does the price look reasonable?
Thanks for any input.
Case
PCS 6003B BLACK CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Six Core CPU (3.7GHz-4.6GHz/35MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard
ASUS® PRIME B450-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.1, 6Gb/s) - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
12GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3060 - HDMI, DP
1st Storage Drive
2TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 256MB CACHE
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Power Supply
CORSAIR 450W CV SERIES™ CV-450 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
PCS FrostFlow 120 Series RGB High Performance Liquid Cooler (AMD)
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Card
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
Wireless Network Card
WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD
USB/Thunderbolt Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KUK-00001]
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Windows Recovery Media
Windows 10 Multi-Language Recovery Image - Unlimited Downloads from Online Account
Office Software
FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft 365® (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus
BullGuard™ Internet Security - Free 90 Day License inc. Gamer Mode
Browser
Firefox™
Warranty
3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Subject to stock availability on pre-order products
Price: £1,291.00 including VAT and Delivery
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Comments
Looking quickly, I'd be concerned that 16GB of system RAM is not enough for a 12GB video card. I'd also be concerned about only having a 450W power supply. I would also want Windows 10 Pro for more control.
Just my 2 cents FWIW.
- Greg
It depends on what your goals are, but I have the same concerns. If you plan on using the full 12GB of VRAM on the 3060, then 16GB of system RAM is not enough. The way Iray works is that the entire scene is held in your system RAM, then Iray will compress this data and send it to GPU. The amount of compression can vary a bit, but it can compress the data a fair amount. It is totally possible to run out of RAM before you run out of VRAM. In my own scenes, I have ran out of RAM a couple of times, and I had 32GB. My 1080ti with 11GB of VRAM was near capacity, but so was my RAM. In this situation I would never have been able to make that scene with just 16GB RAM. We had a user who has a 24GB 3090 and 64GB of RAM actually run out of RAM when he only had 17GB of VRAM in use. That should give you an idea of just how much RAM can be used in a scene compared to the VRAM. It can be compressed 2 or more times.
But if you don't plan on using that VRAM so much, then you may be ok. However I wouldn't want to bet on that. I would suggest going for at least 32GB here. The good news is that RAM is a simple thing to upgrade if you plan for it. Your motherboard has 4 slots for RAM. You can buy RAM in 16GB modules, which would allow you the option to expand down the road. If you bought just 8GB modules, then that would kind of make that trickier. If you went with 8, then you would cap yourself at 32GB. But if if went with 16, you would be able to max your board at 64GB.
I would also be wary of that power supply. Iray is unique in that you can always throw more hardware at it. In the future, instead of replacing the 3060, you could buy a second GPU and have them combine their CUDA resources. This would provide a much larger performance boost than replacing the 3060 with a faster card. But to do that you need more power. Having a bigger power supply gives you more options.
That is a big part of building a computer, and all of these decisions are up to you. You can build your PC for just right now, and it would be good enough for just right now, but if you do a little planning ahead, you could give yourself room for more upgrades in the future rather than needing to build a new PC again. When it comes to Iray, the CPU is not a big deal, so I believe a 5600X will be fine for several years to come. That means you could just focus on upgrading your GPU parts. Maybe down the road you find you can buy faster GPUs, or maybe a second 3060. You can nearly double your performance just adding a second 3060. That would be a relatively cheap upgrade (assuming prices come back down to earth) for the performance you can gain.
So I would think long and hard about what you want to do. Personally I like having the options for upgrading, but maybe you don't. But I would go for the 32GB at least.
1. Get at least 32 Gb of RAM
2. Get a 750W or more Powerful PSU
3. Get a NVMe M.2 drive as an OS/Appz drive (use the HHD for Data)
Yeah, what Greg/algovincian said...
If you're gonna be running Iray in DAZ Studio, it tends to require about twice as much system RAM as the GPU VRAM, and if you're gonna have some complex scenes that take the entire 12GB of GPU VRAM you'll need something like at least 24GB of system RAM.
And with the power supply, you'll probably be okay since the GPU is rated at 170 watts, and usually won't use all of that, and it's the biggest power draw on the system. I've got 2 GPU's (1080ti and RTX 2070 Super) and my entire computer, when rendering with both GPU's, barely gets up around 420 watts total. But if you're thinking you might add another GPU in the future you might want maybe a 650 watt or something. No biggie.
And I noticed it has water cooling, which might be more cost and trouble than it's worth. So if there's a cheaper option without it, then personally I'd go for the air cooled option.
I'm on my phone atm, but I think that mobo is only PCIe 3 - will it support a second 3060?
- Greg
It will certainly support it, pcei is back compatible. The question is if it effects performance, and I don't think it effects the performance any versus 4.0. We have a variety of setups in the bench thread and I am pretty sure we have some multiGPU sets with 3000 series cards on pcei 3 boards. I'd have to check.
I agree 100% with both. I would be especiially concerned about 450 power supply. Seems a little under powered for that system. I would recommend at least a 650 wat by Seasonic or Corsair.
Personally I am not a big fan of water cooling. I much prefer a tower fan like the Deep Cool Gammamax 400 version 2 or Cooler Master Hyper 212.
If you can afford it, I would recommend watercooling, watercooling systems use a radiator usually mounted on the chassis with a near zero profile block for the CPU freeing up the space inside the case for proper airflow for other components. Under full load, the GPU(s) and generate heat upward to 80°C and without proper airflow, the interior of the case can get fairly hot.
A 650 watt or higher would allow for future hardware upgrades - adding a 2nd gpu, more hard drives (I have 7 internal in my Windows 10 Home computer - used as my main Lightroom/Photshop & 3D computer).
I used Windows 10 Pro at work (now retired for 3 years) and Windows 10 Home at home. Home does everything I need and even supports Windows Storage Pools which i use on another computer configured for file sharing. The only thing Windows 10 Pro at work did that I can not do at home was to login to a network supporting Microsoft Active Directory. Which I do not need on my simple Windows & Linux samba file sharing network.
Seasonic and Corsair make the best power supplies. Seasonic make power supplies for other power supply companies as well as sell their own line of power supplies. At home I have three Corsair and two Seasonic. Seasonic come with a 10 year warranty and most Corsair have 3 to 5 years.
The only fear I have with watercooling is leaks. A few friends at work had this happen. Not sure why or how.
Cheers & enjoy your new hot rod...
Nvidia specifies a minimum of 550w PSU for the 3060. You should go for at least that, or more.
Keep in mind that in the past, Nvidias reccomended PSU specs have been considered a safe number, and you would be fine with something under what was reccomended by Nvidia as long as it was good quality. That changed with the 3000 series cards. The people who test hardware have all said that you should now go higher than what Nvidia reccomend on the PSU. It has been stated many times by trusted sources, such as LTT, gamers nexus etc.
I'd like to know what supplier you are referring to who is telling you otherwise
Corsair do 10 year warranties on their premium models. The AX models at least, not sure about the others. Corsair are the only brand of PSU i will buy. I would consider Seasonic too, but for some reason they dont have much of a presence in Australia
There have also been a few cases here on the forums which indicate that DS+IRAY can put the PSU under more stress than any game and even some testing programs => Computer rebooting all of the sudden.
...also don't forget that the OS, your AV software, and various system processes also require system RAM. Same for any other programmes you have active at the time (for example, a single instance of Chrome takes around jsut under 1 GB when open - currently I am using 15% of system memory [24 GB] with Chrome, Word and Notepad open and my AV/VPN running)
The supplier is PCSpecialist. They have a good reputation, but the advice was from their automated configuration checker, not a real person, so it's sensible to ignore it in favour of the advice above.
...I would still try to find some way to go with 32 GB.
I have a 12 GB Titan-X and upgraded to 24 GB System RAM but for a short while I was still running W7 Home which only supports16 GB (had yet to install 7 Pro) and even a moderate sized scene came close to hitting the available RAM limit (without any other software than the Daz Programme and scene open).again due to the portion of RAM taken up by the OS and other necessary processes. With the system on and no other software running (and Windows Superfetch Service in stopped mode) Task Manger reports about 1.8 GB in use which left me with just a little over 14 GB of available memory.
Going with two 16 GB sticks would leave two slots open for future expansion to 64 GB.
Have done some testing to see how much RAM and VRAM are being used while Rendering in IRAY.
I'm using W7 Ultimate, 64GB RAM and RTX2070 Super (8GB). W10 does use more RAM and VRAM.
Case 1) was single G8 figure with clothing and hair loaded on to an empty scene
Cases 2-4) were four G8 figures with clothing and hair in an interior scene, increased SubD between renders to fill up the VRAM until rendering dropped to CPU
As a lot of people have already said, DAZ Studio hogs a lot of memory, even if you render on the GPU.
So more RAM would definitely be the first thing I'd look to get.
A tiny caveat from my side regarding RAM upgrades: There can be compatibility issues with adding more sticks at a later date.
Some people have had no problems doing that, but for others, even memory from the same manufacturer and with the same specs caused problems.
From personal experience, I've seen both. 4 Sticks from 3 different manufacturers worked pretty much seamlessly in one machine.
But there were also cases where only one of two different modules was recognized, mismatched sticks caused frequent crashes or diminished performance.
Especially AMD platforms have in the past been a bit sensitive when it comes to RAM.
Edit: After a bit more research out of curiosity, it seems that with DDR4, these problems have been reduced by a lot. So I retract my comments. Have a nice day!
Just something to keep in mind. If the budget isn't there, of course, upgrading later would be the best alternative to getting more memory from the beginning.
Wow, very interesting figures. Thank you. So 16Gb RAM will only give me very simple scenes, 32Gb would give me more complex scenes but at low Subd, and I'd need 64Gb for the same scenes with higher levels of Subd. Have I got that right?
As for VRAM, I'm not sure what the figures mean, but 12Gb is as much as I can afford. I guess my question is, at what point does RAM stop being the bottleneck, and VRAM becomes the bottleneck instead?
Thanks for the heads up - clearly I need to look at different suppliers. You went air cooled, I see - I might have to reconsider on that. Ah, decisions, decisions. But interesting and exciting ones, so happy days!
If the price of RAM for more than 16GB is a problem, then make sure the motherboard has four memory slots and get your 16GB as one 16 or two 8's and you can always add more later if you find you need it. Whatever the case, getting exactly the same RAM can avoid wierd memory problems in the future.
Note: One memory card works but you lose out on the potential double speed, dual-channel, feature of your RAM. Get your memory in matched pairs. And for fewer potential problems, stay consistent in manufacturer, type, model, size, speed & latency(CL) for the whole memory population. So, pick your memory carefully the first time.
Higher speed RAM is more expensive but doesn't necessarily mean faster throughput. Good video here:
With 16GB:s of RAM, you will be using your HD to cover the missing memory => Operation will be slower and your computer will become sluggish/unresponsive.
SubD... Matter of opinion, if higher SubD is needed unless doing closeups (of pimples on the nose), with full figures in scene from ankles up, I didn't see a difference between SubD 2 and SubD 5 except on the usage of RAM and VRAM and the time it took to render the last one.
12GB:s VRAM is quite enough, although there are environment, building, clothing and hair products that have been made without thinking the resource usage, but to accomodate those you would need two or three 24GB 3090:s connected to each others with the NVLINK.
My God this forum software is such a pain to use. It is 2021 somewhere, but apparently not in Daz's office in Utah.
Actual RAM spec doesn't apply much to Daz Studio and Iray, aside from the obvious capacity. You can have DDR2 and be fine. This only applies if you are a masochist CPU rendering, and you really should NOT be CPU rendering with Iray (apologies to those who may do this, but come on). Iray is nothing like most software you use, once the scene is loaded into VRAM your RAM has done its job, it is up the GPU to do the rest of the work. Also Linus did a video about mixing up memory modules and found that things went quite well most of the time even with completely missmatched memory. They did have some issues, but that was from using very obviously unmatched memory modules. If they are close, it will work fine. Modern CPUs and motherboards are capable of using different size addresses and they will clock memory to match the slower spec.
Of course I'd still recommend buying the same memory for all the banks you use, but the old wisdom that these things must be exactly the same, or even bought at the same time from the exact same package and binning...well it is old and outdated.
All I am doing is offering options. If the user can only afford to buy 16GB of RAM right now, it is still better to do that in a single stick. This idea allows them to hit 64GB by using only 16GB sticks. It is better to buy RAM in pairs, but it is not the end of the world if you don't. If they instead buy 16GB as pack of two 8GB sticks, well they just made it harder to upgrade down the road by taking up two of their available memory slots for just 16GB.
Also, no, you do pass GO and use the hard drive when ruinning out of RAM with Daz Studio. Daz Studio CRASHES. So if you did not save your scene, you will lose everything you made and all the time that went into it. That is not good. If you run out of VRAM, you may not crash, but the scene will drop to CPU only rendering. Sometimes Daz will crash when it doing this as well, but even if it doesn't, you don't want to be rendering a giant scene on a desktop CPU. It might take...days. No joke. It is important to not confuse RAM and VRAM, I know it can be easy to do so.
As for how much VRAM is "enough", that is purely in the eye of the beholder. One user's enough may be just 6GB. Another may be the 3090's 24. It just depends on what you want to create. But I will say that every year it seems the how much memory is needed goes up as the content for Daz uses more and more of it. Some fiber mesh products can devour your memory. Some clothing may have tons of different textures all in use. Some characters use very different material settings, and the new 8.1 adds a whole new UV map to the equation which can easily translate to more memory. 3D environments can vary wildly on how much memory they may use. Any nature like environment that uses a lot of foliage will likely use more memory. There are products available in this store right now that will eat up almost all of a 1080ti's 11GB of VRAM all by themselves. The demand for quality often means using more memory. High quality textures and mesh are going to naturally use memory. It is not that Daz Studio is a memory hog (kind of, but people over state this), but rather the quality of assets you use.
Of course users can optimize their scenes to decrease memory use. The thing is, how much time do you want to spend needing to do this? Having some extra RAM and VRAM is a time saver in this regard, as you will not need to optimize as often for what you do. You can just plug in your characters, clothing, poses, and hit the render button without a second thought about "OMG will this fit my memory??" It is a time versus money question.
Had to comment on this... If the memory usage of a product was about increasing quality, then it would be ok. One could take the the quality down a notch and still use the product with lesser resources, but often the huge memory load is the result of bad planning/execution and you may not be able to "fix" the problem.
Here's my take on your budget. Since you are focusing on GPU rendering, you do not need a 6 core CPU. Drop your CPU down to a Quad Core Ryzen 3 and that frees up a bunch of space for improvements.
Total price is £1,296.00 inc. VAT
CPU = Ryzen 3 3100
Motherboard = B550
RAM = 2x 16GB DDR4 3000
HDD = 4TB Seagate Baracuda (More storage)
M.2 SSD = 500GB Seagate Firecuda (For windows install)
DVD Drive = None (USB Flash drives are a much better choice now days)
Power Supply = Corsair 550W (A bit of extra headroom if you want to add a second RTX 3060)
CPU Cooling = Standard AMD Cooler (The AMD Coolers are all you really need)
Wifi Card = AX200 (Wireless N is obsolete)
Yes and no. The products that do this are environments. Depending on what that environment is, there is not a lot of wiggle room in design without making a sacrifice in turn. Again, looking at foliage here, the geometric complexcity of a tree with leaves adds greatly to memory. But if you reduce that tree too much, it is going to look like crap, or like it came from a video game. Some other large items involve houses. There is a large mansion that eats up memory, I cannot remember exactly what it was. You may need that detail depending on your shot.
That is the nature of 3D in a nutshell. There is always some form of sacrifice made, with these done for either memory or rendering speed, or both. There is literally no limit to the amount of hardware you can throw at rendering. If it is possible to chain 100 GPUs together in a render farm, you could use that. You can use a super computer, or two or three. Even the big Hollywood studios have to make certain sacrifices in order to deliver a finished product. Most CG in movies is actually rendered at 2K, even in a 4K film. They do this because of production times. It is also why nature documentaries and other raw footage make the best demonstrations of high resolution content, you don't see CG used very often in store demos on TVs for this reason.
But you still have options. Daz sells the Decimator plugin so you can reduce poly counts of any item. There are several scene optimizing products that automate the process of compressing and saving smaller textures. So there are options out there, and these things can be done without the products. But it comes at the cost of time.
I do like it when PA's include extra textures or settings for different quality options. However then you get some users complaining about the large size of the downloads for such products, since they have extra stuff. You just can't make everybody happy, LOL.
...indeed, if you look at the MBs memory support specs ,you will see several speeds listed with "(OC)" after them which means "overclocked". Generally he highest speed listed without the "(OC)" (on this board, 2666) is the cap, so say if you have DDR4 3200 it will run at 2666 unless you overclock your memory. I would go with highest speed the board supports without overclocking to save a little bit of scratch
As LeatherGryphon mentions, two sticks are preferable to one as then you can take advantage of additional memory channels (which with Ryzen CPUs is 2). Intel i7 and later as well as Threadrippers will support 4 memory channels.
...yeah I'm looking to upgrade my render system to 48 GB DDR3 (yes this can be, and has successfully been done with X58 MBs). The trick is finding a full 6 stick kit. Most full kits are ECC unbuffered memory and proprietary for specific workstation brands (like Compaq, Dell, and HP). There are no 6 stick PC kits available. As I am running with a Westmere X5660 Xeon, the CPU will support for more than 24 GB (24 is the limit for an i7 of that era), it just requires tweaking the MBs BIOS to support it. So the only route I have to go is getting 3 pairs of 8 GB sticks (16 GB).