What kind of render box could I get for $1500?

[megaplayboy10k]

Just the tower--CPU, power, RAM, HDD/SSD, Vid Card--no keyboard, mouse, monitor or software other than the OS.
My impression is that the minimum render card would be something like a 1060 or 1660 with 6 GB. I'm trying to figure out what I could get on the cheap. I have a computer or two already, but they're way out of date and not really suited for content creation.

Thanks for any useful tips.

 

[polywog]

 

[megaplayboy10k]

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This looks promising. 1500 on the nose--Ryzen 7, 16 GB RAM, 2070 with 8 GB, 512 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD.

 

[VRule34]

For cheap and rendering? Try to get your hands on a used AMD Threadripper 1920X for about 200-250 USD. 32GB of RAM, a nice board and a 2070. The TR 1920X should be a bit faster (except maybe gaming) than the R7 3700X. (

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)

Should be around 1200-1300 USD. Educated guess

 

[Synx]

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This looks promising. 1500 on the nose--Ryzen 7, 16 GB RAM, 2070 with 8 GB, 512 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD.

You should never buy a premade system. They often take shortcuts to cut down costs. Like the RAM has 2400 MHZ which is low, especially for the CPU it has. I got the ryzen 7 3700x and through my research every site says you want to pair it with atleast 3200 MHZ ram, but preferably 3600 MHZ ram.

For rendering it highly depends on what program you use. I read in another threat that if you are using DAZ you want an nvidia graphic card with as much GRAM as possible. People recommended a 1080ti. I got no idea how expensive they are though. Dont buy them used as 1080ti was used for Bitcoin minning and running them on full for 24/7 for months really does a number on the GPU.

 

[megaplayboy10k]

You should never buy a premade system. They often take shortcuts to cut down costs. Like the RAM has 2400 MHZ which is low, especially for the CPU it has. I got the ryzen 7 3700x and through my research every site says you want to pair it with atleast 3200 MHZ ram, but preferably 3600 MHZ ram.

For rendering it highly depends on what program you use. I read in another threat that if you are using DAZ you want an nvidia graphic card with as much GRAM as possible. People recommended a 1080ti. I got no idea how expensive they are though. Dont buy them used as 1080ti was used for Bitcoin minning and running them on full for 24/7 for months really does a number on the GPU.

A new 1080 Ti looks like it would jack up the price well out of my range. It's nearly a grand by itself and I'll need a bigger power supply for one, most likely.

 

[VRule34]

The 1080 Ti is end of life anyway. If you can get it for about 200-250 USD it would be okay. But the performance gap between the old technology and the newer cards just gets bigger in future applications. Even if it's still a pretty powerful card right now.

Stick to the 2070. Thats about the best bang for your bucks. Do you want to build the system yourself (to be prefered) or do you want to buy a prebuild one? If so, got a favourite shop we can take a look at? Let's see if they got something decent. Otherwise a part list is pretty easily done too.

 

[megaplayboy10k]

This looks pretty good to me:

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i7/9700(3.6Ghz), 32 GB RAM DDR4-3600, RTX 2070 Super 8 GB, and a 1 TB SSD. I'm only going to use it for renders and gaming, so that could work. Micro center has done fairly well by me.

 

[VRule34]

Not the worst system. Would do the job. But very much overprized. The TR 1920X option would give you better performance for way less money. 8 threads vs. 24.

 

[megaplayboy10k]

My current rig, such as it is, takes 2 hours(!) to do a simple one character(G8) and one environment render, no special lighting or anything else. The machine is an All-in-one from 2013, so that doesn't surprise me, but I need at least a tenfold reduction in render time to have a viable shot at producing any content at all.

 

[Synx]

This looks pretty good to me:

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i7/9700(3.6Ghz), 32 GB RAM DDR4-3600, RTX 2070 Super 8 GB, and a 1 TB SSD. I'm only going to use it for renders and gaming, so that could work. Micro center has done fairly well by me.

Thats a decent priced PC for the hardware it has. It seems if you would build it yourself you would be able to do it around 1450-1500 dollar. The motherboard in there sucks a bit as it has very limited room for upgrading in the future. And i dont know if you would be able to put a large HDD in it (you kinda want a large HDD to store all your DAZ stuff as it takes a shit ton of space)

Anyway are you looking for a prebuild computer or are you comfortable of building one yourself? Building one yourself often gives you more power for the money, but well you got to build it yourself .

Not the worst system. Would do the job. But very much overprized. The TR 1920X option would give you better performance for way less money. 8 threads vs. 24.

Threads isnt everything. A ryzen 3700x is better then a TR 1920X according to every comparing site. And the i7-9700 is better than both (costs a fair amount more).

 

[VRule34]

A ryzen 3700x is better then a TR 1920X according to every comparing site.

Take a look at the benchmarks I've linked above. It's about applications and rendering, not pure gaming. Sure, you could squeeze a few FPS more with an 3700X or Intel CPU in games, but thats not relevant. The i7-9700 is just ... bad ... when compared to other CPUs on the market. If(!) you focus on productivity.

The 1920x recommendation was based on an absolutely aweseome price/performance value (when bought used). You want to bring out the big guns for a reasonable budget? Go for the Ryzen 3900X or 3950X.

 

[Synx]

Take a look at the benchmarks I've linked above. It's about applications and rendering, not pure gaming. Sure, you could squeeze a few FPS more with an 3700X or Intel CPU in games, but thats not relevant. The i7-9700 is just ... bad ... when compared to other CPUs on the market. If(!) you focus on productivity.

The 1920x recommendation was based on an absolutely aweseome price/performance value (when bought used). You want to bring out the big guns for a reasonable budget? Go for the Ryzen 3900X or 3950X.

View attachment 689966

You don't use the Cpu for rendering in Daz. There render engine is designed for Nvidia GPUs and does well on that, but absurdly bad on anything ells.

If he was using a different program/render engine I would agree with you. Besides I wouldn't buy anything used (except if you know where it has been used) nowadays with all the bit coin mining going on.

 

[SeventhVixen]

a good CPU is important for several reasons (specially heavy multitasking) but for a "render box" it's on the farest end.

If you want it to render the card definitely can't be a 1060... The card should be the more expensive piece of the build. I rendered with a 1060 and I would never go back to that. Forces you to cut down quality, or render for ages for the most simple things. Even a 1070 is an impressive improvement over a 1060 (the only that matters is the number of CUDA cores). Also you want a secondary card for the monitors/do other things while rendering.

Something like this takes 30-40 minutes with a 2080 Ti, but could be 2-3+ hours with a 1060, and cutting down quality textures because will not fit in 3-6gb

 

[khumak]

a good CPU is important for several reasons (specially heavy multitasking) but for a "render box" it's on the farest end.

If you want it to render the card definitely can't be a 1060... The card should be the more expensive piece of the build. I rendered with a 1060 and I would never go back to that. Forces you to cut down quality, or render for ages for the most simple things. Even a 1070 is an impressive improvement over a 1060 (the only that matters is the number of CUDA cores). Also you want a secondary card for the monitors/do other things while rendering.

Something like this takes 30-40 minutes with a 2080 Ti, but could be 2-3+ hours with a 1060, and cutting down quality textures because will not fit in 3-6gb
View attachment 690296

The VRAM issue is a big one for me that people might overlook when fixating on benchmarks for speed. I find that many of the scenes that I want to render take more than 8GB of memory before I start trying to optimize. Some of them take as much as 12-16GB. Tweaking things so they fall under the 11GB mark for a 2080Ti would be easy but if you get down to 8GB or less you start seriously degrading quality by scaling textures way back or removing things from the scene entirely.

My current card only has 4GB and I can say for sure that my next card will definitely have at least 11GB, preferably more. You could just render with the CPU but that takes forever. Personally, I would say for a render box any card with less than 8GB of VRAM is just automatically disqualified. If you can't afford a card with that much, wait until you can...

 

[megaplayboy10k]

a good CPU is important for several reasons (specially heavy multitasking) but for a "render box" it's on the farest end.

If you want it to render the card definitely can't be a 1060... The card should be the more expensive piece of the build. I rendered with a 1060 and I would never go back to that. Forces you to cut down quality, or render for ages for the most simple things. Even a 1070 is an impressive improvement over a 1060 (the only that matters is the number of CUDA cores). Also you want a secondary card for the monitors/do other things while rendering.

Something like this takes 30-40 minutes with a 2080 Ti, but could be 2-3+ hours with a 1060, and cutting down quality textures because will not fit in 3-6gb
View attachment 690296

Well, that render looks fairly complex--multiple figures, multiple scene props, a fire, multiple light sources and a complex environment--but I'm guessing a 2070 Super 8Gb is both in my price range and requires less scene tweaking?

 

[SeventhVixen]

a GTX 1080 TI has more cuda cores (3.584 cuda cores) than a RTX 2070 (2304 cudas cores). the TI versions have more cuda cores than the non TI versions (Like the 2080 TI, 4352). So with a 2070 you may get a better card for gaming, but not for rendering. You can practically convert the speed in cuda cores.. a 1080 TI will go 1/3 faster than a 2070. So if the card is for rendering only check at cuda cores.

I am no expert here and everything I'm saying could be bullshit, there is lots of devs more experts on graphic cards, but that is more or less like that from checked on my flesh rendering with 3 different cards in the last year and what I read/heard around.

CPU goes good for render initialization (for example a better CPU is better initialization each frame of an animation), but once is rendering, practically all goes to cuda cores.

Also one need a Lot of ram. A scene with some characters and a enviroment can be 12-13 gb of ram, that duplicates on rendering. (I'm rendering a quite simple scene now, only daz and google, and I'm using 27gb of ram). Usually I work on various scenes at the same time so is common to have 30-45 gb of ram used. If you don't have enough ram, goes to virtual memory, so to HD speed, and that's not good, so you can't overlook that either.

But, it is going in the end of what kind of rendering you're going after. rendering sprites in a transparante layer, rendering animations with a transparent layer, for sure need lots less of specs than "fullscreen scenarios".

 

[SeventhVixen]

The VRAM issue is a big one for me that people might overlook when fixating on benchmarks for speed. I find that many of the scenes that I want to render take more than 8GB of memory before I start trying to optimize. Some of them take as much as 12-16GB. Tweaking things so they fall under the 11GB mark for a 2080Ti would be easy but if you get down to 8GB or less you start seriously degrading quality by scaling textures way back or removing things from the scene entirely.

My current card only has 4GB and I can say for sure that my next card will definitely have at least 11GB, preferably more. You could just render with the CPU but that takes forever. Personally, I would say for a render box any card with less than 8GB of VRAM is just automatically disqualified. If you can't afford a card with that much, wait until you can...

Yes, the major problem I had in quality in the first hours of my game, while I was using the 1060 (3gb), was texture quality. I had to do lots of loops and tricks to make the big scenes I like to make. You can cut down a lot the VRAM by resizing textures that are not important (eyes not need to be 4k textures when they're 2 pixels on screen), but is easy to make mistakes and do some bad renders here and there not changing textures back.... And sometimes is just impossible unless using layers

 

[SeventhVixen]

Well, that render looks fairly complex--multiple figures, multiple scene props, a fire, multiple light sources and a complex environment--but I'm guessing a 2070 Super 8Gb is both in my price range and requires less scene tweaking?

Correction, the 2070 super has 2560 cuda cores, some more than the non-super, but still, have that in consideration.

 

[megaplayboy10k]

a GTX 1080 TI has more cuda cores (3.584 cuda cores) than a RTX 2070 (2304 cudas cores). the TI versions have more cuda cores than the non TI versions (Like the 2080 TI, 4352). So with a 2070 you may get a better card for gaming, but not for rendering. You can practically convert the speed in cuda cores.. a 1080 TI will go 1/3 faster than a 2070. So if the card is for rendering only check at cuda cores.

I am no expert here and everything I'm saying could be bullshit, there is lots of devs more experts on graphic cards, but that is more or less like that from checked on my flesh rendering with 3 different cards in the last year and what I read/heard around.

CPU goes good for render initialization (for example a better CPU is better initialization each frame of an animation), but once is rendering, practically all goes to cuda cores.

Also one need a Lot of ram. A scene with some characters and a enviroment can be 12-13 gb of ram, that duplicates on rendering. (I'm rendering a quite simple scene now, only daz and google, and I'm using 27gb of ram). Usually I work on various scenes at the same time so is common to have 30-45 gb of ram used. If you don't have enough ram, goes to virtual memory, so to HD speed, and that's not good, so you can't overlook that either.

But, it is going in the end of what kind of rendering you're going after. rendering sprites in a transparante layer, rendering animations with a transparent layer, for sure need lots less of specs than "fullscreen scenarios".

Thanks. I'm pretty sure a 1080Ti is still more expensive than a 2070 Super, and I'm trying to get the best but stay within a budget that's realistic for me at the moment. I think if I can get 32 GB Ram instead of 16 that's a plus, too, from what I've read. So, 1) Fast nVidia card with a decent amount of VRAM, 2) Lots of fast RAM, 3) Fast CPU, 4) A good SSD and(eventually) a decent sized HDD to hold files. Do I have that about right?