Advice on PC Spec Please

PerttiA

outrider42 said:

PerttiA said:

outrider42 said:

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.

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.

Yes and no. The products that do this are environments... [snip]

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.

No, I'm talking about UV maps created and used in such a way that just one material for one surface wastes almost a gigabyte of memory without increasing the quality of the rendered image one iota.

Attached is just one sample in which only the "UV Placement" area was used on a surface (the only surface) and the texture and maps (five all together) were all 8192x8192 in size which you couldn't reduce as the used area was already as small as it could be and even if you took the texture and maps down to 4096x4096, you noticed it in the rendering.

MoreTN

I think I am close to finalising my spec now. I've increased the budget by £120, but I think it's worth it to give me more capacity now and allow me more flexibility for upgrading. Key changes, following all the great advice I've received and for which I thank you all -

CORSAIR 175R RGB MID TOWER GAMING CASE

ASUS® PRIME B550-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.2, 6Gb/s) - ARGB Ready! - I have to admit, I'm not sure about this one

32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 16GB)

512GB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2000 MB/R, 1100 MB/W)

CORSAIR 650W CV SERIES™ CV-650 POWER SUPPLY

CoolerMaster Hyper 212 (120mm) Fan CPU Cooler Black Edition (in place of the Liquidflow cooler)

Removed DVD Rewriter (to allow more airflow - I'll buy an external if I find I really, really need it)

I stayed with Windows Home on cost grounds - that's the version I use at the moment and I've not found anything I want to do with it that I can't do.

If anyone has any final comments, I'd love to hear them :)

prixat

I would not skimp on the CPU. With a basic graphics card like the 3060 a fast CPU will help.

Some rough testing with a 5800X show it contributing a significant 8% to 9% of the total iterations, reducing render times by as much as 12% compared to the 3060 on it's own.

MoreTN

Well, I've ordered it. (@prixat - thanks, but I really couldn't afford to push the budget any further). Now I just have to wait until it arrives. Oh well, I can usefully spend the time planning how to migrate my DAZ implementation to the new pc. I'm half-inclined to start again, only downloading stuff as I need it.

takezo_3001

joseft said:

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

There are other components that draw from the power supply than just the GPU, a 750 is a good investment in case they want to upgrade!

Damn, should have read further before posting...

jd641

MoreTN said:

I stayed with Windows Home on cost grounds - that's the version I use at the moment and I've not found anything I want to do with it that I can't do.

I know you already ordered everything but I was hoping you'd opt for Win10 Pro. One of the worst things about Win10 is the forced updates and the potential for updated drivers to cause issues. With W10P you can have full control of updates and you can disable any of that auto update nonsense. Mine is set for full manual control with update searches set to completely ignore my graphics card even if there is a new driver for it, so I don't have to worry about iray breaking with an update.

MoreTN

@jd641 Thanks, in a perfect world (well, perfect for me anyway) I would have gone for Win 10 Pro and a better CPU as prixat suggested but I had a limited budget, which I overspent even with the compromises I made.

ebergerly

@MoreTN, I think you'll be fine. I've had W10 Home for many years, and I disabled feature updates long ago and everything's fine. Forget exactly how I did it (a quick edit of the policy stuff or disabling the service?), but for me the important thing is that the often-buggy feature updates and driver updates get delayed until I specifically request them, while the important security updates happen automatically. And usually I wait 6 months or a year after a feature update is released to actually download it. 

And regarding the CPU, I think nowadays few software apps (especially in the graphics world) utilize the CPU, so a powerful CPU might be wasted. I have an 8 core, 16 thread Ryzen that basically sits there with only a few threads used at any one time. I think some video editing software still uses CPU's for some stuff, but otherwise I think most of us could do fine with a 1980's Intel 80-286 

Matt_Castle

prixat said:

I would not skimp on the CPU. With a basic graphics card like the 3060 a fast CPU will help.

Some rough testing with a 5800X show it contributing a significant 8% to 9% of the total iterations, reducing render times by as much as 12% compared to the 3060 on it's own.

As a general rule, I recommend keeping CPU rendering off (although there are reasons to leave CPU fallback on). It contributes only a few percent, for which it uses proportionally far more power, kicks out additional heat (which can theoretically cause the GPU to reduce its boost) and tends to make the rest of the system bog down for any other purpose. And, as has been found in various testing, it can actually be detrimental to performance in some scenes, actually slowing iteration rate.

Hardware-wise, I think numbers that small aren't worth chasing; fifteen minutes or so on a three hour render doesn't make much difference.

As far as that specific example, although I only found out after buying one myself, the 5800X is known to have fair number of less than ideal chips in circulation. I've seen videos where one was hitting 90 degrees C even when on a water cooler. My specific one seems okay (although I have also undervolted it for the sake of improving thermal performance), but I wouldn't buy one being confident that you'll be able to render on it without it cooking.

MoreTN

Yay, it's arrived. Now I'm going through working out what I have to move across to new PC and where I need to put it. Going from a PC with only one drive to new one with C drive for programs and D drive for data. This may take a while....

droidy001

That was pretty quick considering you have 30 series gpu. Where did you get it from? Might be worth buying the lowest spec 3060 prebuilt just to get the graphics card the parting out the rest to get some money back.

outrider42

I have a 5800X but I'm not using it to render even though I could add it to my GPUs. It just isn't worth it. If you seriously want to CPU render then you probably need to water cool. The 5000 series can get pretty warm, too, I'd rather not deal with the extra heat. That is a lot of bother for so little gain. You get way way more bang for you buck putting that money into GPU power rather CPU power. 

After all, the difference in going from a 5600X to a 5900X you could buy an extra 3060 for that price and render many times faster. Of course assuming you can get a 3060 at MSRP. It makes no sense to try investing in CPU for Iray.

MoreTN

droidy001 said:

That was pretty quick considering you have 30 series gpu. Where did you get it from? Might be worth buying the lowest spec 3060 prebuilt just to get the graphics card the parting out the rest to get some money back.

It came from PCSpecialist. They're a UK company whom I've dealt with before and they've always been great.

MoreTN

outrider42 said:

I have a 5800X but I'm not using it to render even though I could add it to my GPUs. It just isn't worth it. If you seriously want to CPU render then you probably need to water cool. The 5000 series can get pretty warm, too, I'd rather not deal with the extra heat. That is a lot of bother for so little gain. You get way way more bang for you buck putting that money into GPU power rather CPU power. 

After all, the difference in going from a 5600X to a 5900X you could buy an extra 3060 for that price and render many times faster. Of course assuming you can get a 3060 at MSRP. It makes no sense to try investing in CPU for Iray.

I intend to stick to the GPU for Iray and do most of my renders using Iray. CPU will only be for the occasional 3DL render. That's the plan anyway.

prixat

I've posted some results in the Benchmark thread:

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6642516/#Comment_6642516

I'd be interested to see if your CPU/memory/motherboard combination has an effect on GPU performance.

(I've since had to dial back the GPU overclock a tiny bit because Horizon Zero Dawn complained  )