GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[Ginger Piglet]

Shit, I might have fucked up, can someone tell me if the below means it takes 5000s I'm getting the funny feeling gen 3 ryzen is different to zen 3?

View attachment 2228104

That means it goes up to a Ryzen 3000, with flashing.

Also you will have to drop in the BIOS your PCIe GPU down to 3.0 because I believe all Big Navis are PCIe 4.0 and if it's expecting that it won't boot. I almost got stung by the fact that the riser cable in my case was only PCIe 3.0 and had to get a fresh one before my 3080 arrived.

 

[New Fag]

It supports up to Ryzen 3000. Motherboards are still plentiful and you can pick up a nice B450 or B550 for a fraction of what that GPU costs.

That means it goes up to a Ryzen 3000, with flashing.

Also you will have to drop in the BIOS your PCIe GPU down to 3.0 because I believe all Big Navis are PCIe 4.0 and if it's expecting that it won't boot. I almost got stung by the fact that the riser cable in my case was only PCIe 3.0 and had to get a fresh one before my 3080 arrived.

Cheers guys, buying a nice MB tomorrow.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Cheers guys, buying a nice MB tomorrow.

Well, with the "free" board you could plop an APU in it, link up a load of drives and use it as a home media server.

 

[New Fag]

Well, with the "free" board you could plop an APU in it, link up a load of drives and use it as a home media server.

I'm probably going to plonk it with a secondhand cpu in my media pc, aka my 4+ year old gaming PC, if passmark.com is reliable it'll be an upgrade on the i5 7600k.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Noctua hopes to release their passive CPU cooler soon and they say it works on anything up to 120W. It's a bit on the huge side so super-slim builds won't be happening, but it is pretty bonkers to be able to run a completely silent Ryzen 9. No one is making good passively cooled GPUs though.

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

Can I get a good rig for 2k that can easily handle Game Development/Architectural Viz/Media Editing, buying it for someone and uncertain where to start?

I might be way off in cost and please tell me if that is the case...

 

[Elysian]

Can I get a good rig for 2k that can easily handle Game Development/Architectural Viz/Media Editing, buying it for someone and uncertain where to start?

I might be way off in cost and please tell me if that is the case...

I reckon you could get someone a decent entry level rig for that kinda advanced stuff for 2k normally, but GPU prices are stupid as all hell right now so good luck with that.

Someone probably knows more than me about the specifics of this stuff lol

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

I reckon you could get someone a decent entry level rig for that kinda advanced stuff for 2k normally, but GPU prices are stupid as all hell right now so good luck with that.

Someone probably knows more than me out the specifics of this stuff lol

Thank you kindly for responding.

Understood on the GPU prices and well noted.

So, 2k is just dipping my toes into the water as that would be entry level...maybe go to 3k.

Thanks again.

 

[Overly Serious]

Thank you kindly for responding.

Understood on the GPU prices and well noted.

So, 2k is just dipping my toes into the water as that would be entry level...maybe go to 3k.

Thanks again.

I would counsel against investing a lot of money until you have a clearer idea of what your actual needs are. Unless you're rich and 3K is just throw away money. I would also say you should be a lot clearer about the actual purpose. Content creation, game development... all this runs quite the gamut and if you narrow it down to what software you'll actually be using it will help a lot. $2K budget is okay, imo. Nobody should be spending more on a machine than that unless they know why they need to. I'm also assuming you're putting this together yourself or else why would you ask here instead of just buying HP's "Worksation Blah" that matches your available budget.

In any case, here's my thoughts on it all:

1. Monitor. This is one of the most important components. Maybe you already have this, maybe you're budgeting separately. Do NOT underestimate it. 60Hz is fine for content development, imo. Don't need some high refresh rate. Look for one with a high colour range. Typically this will be expressed in terms of a percentage of a colour range standard. E.g. 100% of Adobe RGB, 98% DCI-P3, and so forth. If you're doing photo or video editing, you'd ideally want one with excellent colour range. You will also want 4K or higher in this day and age. The most expensive component in my set-up is my monitor and it has been one of the best productivity investments I have ever made. Nothing is more important than being able focus on your work.
2. RAM. This is like the amount of space on a desk you have. More than you need is nice but not that important. But when you have less than you need it becomes a serious impediment fast. For any meaningful development or creativity work I'd look at around 32GB as starting range. If you're doing modelling or video editing then 64GB or even higher is great. But try to get a good idea before you buy. DDR5 RAM is on the horizon and if you want to upgrade your system later it will be nice to only be selling off 32GB of RAM than 128GB of RAM. Particularly if you've bought the more expensive over-clockable RAM (which is a nice to have but way less important than fast CPU and amount of RAM). If you take a baseline of 32GB of 3200 RAM for your first pass at building something that's a good start. You can compromise or go bigger from there according to how your budget is going. On the subject of RAM, motherboards support different amounts and they also have different numbers of slots which affect whether you can use quad-channel or dual-channel memory configurations (note the RAM is the same, it's how it's used that is different so don't sweat about buying quad vs. dual, per se., though it's good to get a set of matching RAM together ideally). A threadripper motherboard likely has 8 slots, for example, with quad channel. This nice for memory intensive software.
3. Motherboard. Toss up whether to list this one before or after CPU as they're closely related. But there's a bit more nuance on the motherboard so I'll deal with this first.
   1. PCI-E lanes. You'll come across this term and it means the amount of connections to the CPU the board has (kind of - there are chipset ones, I'm keeping it simple). Some sockets on your motherboard take up 16 PCI-E lanes, like [most] graphics card slots. Others might take up 4, like an NVMe SSD port. Different CPUs support different amounts of PCI-e lanes which is why a Threadripper CPU which has similar speed to a Ryzen CPU is much more expensive (there are other reasons also) - it supports something like 2x the number of PCI-E lanes meaning a motherboard for a Threadripper CPU can have many more Sata, NVMe, GPU connections than the Ryzen one (for example). For content creation work you will likely want a lot of storage capability and you will want it to be quick. Get an idea for what you want then you can work backwards from that to see what board + CPU configuration will give you it.
   2. PCI-E generation. You're asking your question right on the cusp of a new PCI-E generation, we're moving from PCI-E v3 to v4 which has twice the bandwidth. Right now it's actually not much of a difference and it's not standard yet. The new Intel chips have PCI-E v4 and PCI-E v5 is also imminent. AMD are slightly behind. Their newer processors bring PCI-E v4 which is a desirable thing but PCI v3 isn't bad. It's something that it's okay to compromise on if you need to. Try to get v4 if you can, though.
   3. Network connection. You can get PCI network cards that will give you 10Gb/s ethernet but they're stupid expensive for reasons I can't fathom. So look out for motherboards with onboard 10Gb/s ethernet port as a nice to have. With content creation there's a good chance you might want to have a NAS and if you do then fast connection to it is a big bonus (if it is a high-end NAS that supports that anyway, but in the future it will be more standard).
4. CPU. The engine of the machine. It's a really complex topic and I honestly advise not over-thinking it too much. More cores can be good for a lot of work. You say game development - if you're compiling C code, more cores will go faster. If you need to run multiple VMs for testing, more cores is good. If you're rendering 3D models on the CPU then more cores is good, but if you're rendering 3D models on your GPU then you've just wasted a bunch of money by buying some 64-thread monster. No what software you want to run and this can be refined. I'm just going to leave one basic suggestion that could be revised if you provide more information. Get a low-end Threadripper. You can upgrade to a higher-core count version later if you want and retain some resale value on the current one. I say Threadripper because it has a high number of PCI-E lanes meaning you can get a good content creation motherboard with lots of storage support. It is pretty power-efficient (more than Intel!) and has lots of cache. Generally speaking, it's a very solid workhorse. There's also nothing inherently wrong with buying the last generation one. Hell, even the 1920/1950/blah 1st gen ones are still very respectable and you can probably pick up a second hand one + motherboard for a lot less than new. Threadripper is my default suggestion for a lot of good reasons. Maybe we change that up if you come up with some odd requirements.
5. Storage. Partially covered by the discussion on motherboards. You will want an NVMe m2 drive for your main OS partition. If you could afford it and went Intel then their Optane drives are great for this. But that's definitely something not to get too fussed about as that's going to depreciate in value fast as tech moves on. Look at 512GB to 1TB for your main drive. Less is okay-ish. Don't go below 256GB. Now on top of that you will want at least one other decent sized SSD (1TB+) but I'd get two so that you can set up a mirrored drive for fast data recovery in case of failure. You will further want some traditional harddrives for assets, produced video, whatever. Look at getting 2x 8TB drives or more. Again with the idea that you can mirror them (RAID 1) for redundancy. You don't need to go overboard with all this to start with. If you've followed advice and got a motherboard with plenty of slots you can always add more later. Hell, start with a couple of 1-2TB drives on second thoughts. Just in case your friend / relative / client ends up not following through on using all this to the full. You can go with SSDs instead of traditional drives for your main storage if you like but cost is prohibitive. Similarly you could go all in with a NAS right now but I really wouldn't. Plan that for later.
6. GPU. You're fucked, frankly. Miners have driven costs to insane levels. IF your goal is video editing then you're in luck - something last generation or the generation before with 8GB VRAM will be "good enough" for the time being. If your friend gives up on their dreams because of a little stutter dragging their position through the timeline in Adobe Premiere then they were never going to follow through on this career in the first place. Next year or year after GPUs will be better priced I hope and even if they aren't we're on the edge of the next big jump in GPU capability. Get what you can and check it's good enough to drive the resolution of monitor you have at 60Hz or higher.
7. Power supply. Do. Not. Skimp. For real, my general rule with any purchased goods is don't buy the cheapest, save and buy the mid or slightly upper-mid range. For PSU, I throw that advice out and buy expensive. I'm not advising to buy a 1200W supply for a system that will only draw 700W at most. But I am advising that if you decide you need a 700W supply, buy the most expensive 700W supply there is. Okay, maybe I'm over-selling this point slightly, but not by much. You can use tools like this to calculate the size of supply you need: https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator . Leave a little margin for error. Never, ever buy a cheap powersupply or I will hunt you down and kill you. That's not cruel, it's sparing you the anguish of seeing all your work and investment destroyed because it wrecked all your components. As the light leads your dying eyes, you will thank me for my mercy.

Okay, I think that's a pretty solid start. Anything else has to depend on you saying what software you're using and for what. Remember: Get a good monitor!

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

I would counsel against investing a lot of money until you have a clearer idea of what your actual needs are. Unless you're rich and 3K is just throw away money. I would also say you should be a lot clearer about the actual purpose. Content creation, game development... all this runs quite the gamut and if you narrow it down to what software you'll actually be using it will help a lot. $2K budget is okay, imo. Nobody should be spending more on a machine than that unless they know why they need to. I'm also assuming you're putting this together yourself or else why would you ask here instead of just buying HP's "Worksation Blah" that matches your available budget.

In any case, here's my thoughts on it all:

1. Monitor. This is one of the most important components. Maybe you already have this, maybe you're budgeting separately. Do NOT underestimate it. 60Hz is fine for content development, imo. Don't need some high refresh rate. Look for one with a high colour range. Typically this will be expressed in terms of a percentage of a colour range standard. E.g. 100% of Adobe RGB, 98% DCI-P3, and so forth. If you're doing photo or video editing, you'd ideally want one with excellent colour range. You will also want 4K or higher in this day and age. The most expensive component in my set-up is my monitor and it has been one of the best productivity investments I have ever made. Nothing is more important than being able focus on your work.
2. RAM. This is like the amount of space on a desk you have. More than you need is nice but not that important. But when you have less than you need it becomes a serious impediment fast. For any meaningful development or creativity work I'd look at around 32GB as starting range. If you're doing modelling or video editing then 64GB or even higher is great. But try to get a good idea before you buy. DDR5 RAM is on the horizon and if you want to upgrade your system later it will be nice to only be selling off 32GB of RAM than 128GB of RAM. Particularly if you've bought the more expensive over-clockable RAM (which is a nice to have but way less important than fast CPU and amount of RAM). If you take a baseline of 32GB of 3200 RAM for your first pass at building something that's a good start. You can compromise or go bigger from there according to how your budget is going. On the subject of RAM, motherboards support different amounts and they also have different numbers of slots which affect whether you can use quad-channel or dual-channel memory configurations (note the RAM is the same, it's how it's used that is different so don't sweat about buying quad vs. dual, per se., though it's good to get a set of matching RAM together ideally). A threadripper motherboard likely has 8 slots, for example, with quad channel. This nice for memory intensive software.
3. Motherboard. Toss up whether to list this one before or after CPU as they're closely related. But there's a bit more nuance on the motherboard so I'll deal with this first.
   1. PCI-E lanes. You'll come across this term and it means the amount of connections to the CPU the board has (kind of - there are chipset ones, I'm keeping it simple). Some sockets on your motherboard take up 16 PCI-E lanes, like [most] graphics card slots. Others might take up 4, like an NVMe SSD port. Different CPUs support different amounts of PCI-e lanes which is why a Threadripper CPU which has similar speed to a Ryzen CPU is much more expensive (there are other reasons also) - it supports something like 2x the number of PCI-E lanes meaning a motherboard for a Threadripper CPU can have many more Sata, NVMe, GPU connections than the Ryzen one (for example). For content creation work you will likely want a lot of storage capability and you will want it to be quick. Get an idea for what you want then you can work backwards from that to see what board + CPU configuration will give you it.
   2. PCI-E generation. You're asking your question right on the cusp of a new PCI-E generation, we're moving from PCI-E v3 to v4 which has twice the bandwidth. Right now it's actually not much of a difference and it's not standard yet. The new Intel chips have PCI-E v4 and PCI-E v5 is also imminent. AMD are slightly behind. Their newer processors bring PCI-E v4 which is a desirable thing but PCI v3 isn't bad. It's something that it's okay to compromise on if you need to. Try to get v4 if you can, though.
   3. Network connection. You can get PCI network cards that will give you 10Gb/s ethernet but they're stupid expensive for reasons I can't fathom. So look out for motherboards with onboard 10Gb/s ethernet port as a nice to have. With content creation there's a good chance you might want to have a NAS and if you do then fast connection to it is a big bonus (if it is a high-end NAS that supports that anyway, but in the future it will be more standard).
4. CPU. The engine of the machine. It's a really complex topic and I honestly advise not over-thinking it too much. More cores can be good for a lot of work. You say game development - if you're compiling C code, more cores will go faster. If you need to run multiple VMs for testing, more cores is good. If you're rendering 3D models on the CPU then more cores is good, but if you're rendering 3D models on your GPU then you've just wasted a bunch of money by buying some 64-thread monster. No what software you want to run and this can be refined. I'm just going to leave one basic suggestion that could be revised if you provide more information. Get a low-end Threadripper. You can upgrade to a higher-core count version later if you want and retain some resale value on the current one. I say Threadripper because it has a high number of PCI-E lanes meaning you can get a good content creation motherboard with lots of storage support. It is pretty power-efficient (more than Intel!) and has lots of cache. Generally speaking, it's a very solid workhorse. There's also nothing inherently wrong with buying the last generation one. Hell, even the 1920/1950/blah 1st gen ones are still very respectable and you can probably pick up a second hand one + motherboard for a lot less than new. Threadripper is my default suggestion for a lot of good reasons. Maybe we change that up if you come up with some odd requirements.
5. Storage. Partially covered by the discussion on motherboards. You will want an NVMe m2 drive for your main OS partition. If you could afford it and went Intel then their Optane drives are great for this. But that's definitely something not to get too fussed about as that's going to depreciate in value fast as tech moves on. Look at 512GB to 1TB for your main drive. Less is okay-ish. Don't go below 256GB. Now on top of that you will want at least one other decent sized SSD (1TB+) but I'd get two so that you can set up a mirrored drive for fast data recovery in case of failure. You will further want some traditional harddrives for assets, produced video, whatever. Look at getting 2x 8TB drives or more. Again with the idea that you can mirror them (RAID 1) for redundancy. You don't need to go overboard with all this to start with. If you've followed advice and got a motherboard with plenty of slots you can always add more later. Hell, start with a couple of 1-2TB drives on second thoughts. Just in case your friend / relative / client ends up not following through on using all this to the full. You can go with SSDs instead of traditional drives for your main storage if you like but cost is prohibitive. Similarly you could go all in with a NAS right now but I really wouldn't. Plan that for later.
6. GPU. You're fucked, frankly. Miners have driven costs to insane levels. IF your goal is video editing then you're in luck - something last generation or the generation before with 8GB VRAM will be "good enough" for the time being. If your friend gives up on their dreams because of a little stutter dragging their position through the timeline in Adobe Premiere then they were never going to follow through on this career in the first place. Next year or year after GPUs will be better priced I hope and even if they aren't we're on the edge of the next big jump in GPU capability. Get what you can and check it's good enough to drive the resolution of monitor you have at 60Hz or higher.
7. Power supply. Do. Not. Skimp. For real, my general rule with any purchased goods is don't buy the cheapest, save and buy the mid or slightly upper-mid range. For PSU, I throw that advice out and buy expensive. I'm not advising to buy a 1200W supply for a system that will only draw 700W at most. But I am advising that if you decide you need a 700W supply, buy the most expensive 700W supply there is. Okay, maybe I'm over-selling this point slightly, but not by much. You can use tools like this to calculate the size of supply you need: https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator . Leave a little margin for error. Never, ever buy a cheap powersupply or I will hunt you down and kill you. That's not cruel, it's sparing you the anguish of seeing all your work and investment destroyed because it wrecked all your components. As the light leads your dying eyes, you will thank me for my mercy.

Okay, I think that's a pretty solid start. Anything else has to depend on you saying what software you're using and for what. Remember: Get a good monitor!

This is amazing, thank you so much for taking the time to break this all out for me as I have learned more in reading this single post about hardware than I have in being around or working with computers in all my years; truly incredible.

Find out the software being used as that would dictate the appropriate hardware; check.
GET A GOOD MONITOR; check.

I am going to find out what software he intends to use, degrees to which he uses it and share that with you as you stated it would help a lot in deciding specific hardware.

Sheesh, this is so valuable as I need to get this right on the first go as I am not wealthy and it is investment into a young, creative mind that needs the right tools...

He is my nephew and I am the cool Uncle.

Thank you so very, very much...be back soon with a list of software...you ROCK.

 

[ZMOT]

Noctua hopes to release their passive CPU cooler soon and they say it works on anything up to 120W. It's a bit on the huge side so super-slim builds won't be happening, but it is pretty bonkers to be able to run a completely silent Ryzen 9. No one is making good passively cooled GPUs though.
View attachment 2228430

it's not like my active scythe is that loud to begin with, my keyboard with brown switches is louder.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Power supply. Do. Not. Skimp. For real, my general rule with any purchased goods is don't buy the cheapest, save and buy the mid or slightly upper-mid range. For PSU, I throw that advice out and buy expensive. I'm not advising to buy a 1200W supply for a system that will only draw 700W at most. But I am advising that if you decide you need a 700W supply, buy the most expensive 700W supply there is. Okay, maybe I'm over-selling this point slightly, but not by much. You can use tools like this to calculate the size of supply you need: https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator . Leave a little margin for error. Never, ever buy a cheap powersupply or I will hunt you down and kill you. That's not cruel, it's sparing you the anguish of seeing all your work and investment destroyed because it wrecked all your components. As the light leads your dying eyes, you will thank me for my mercy.

This. Also, if you're going to be running this box all day, get something efficient. 80 Plus Platinum or even Titanium. It will save you money in the long run. In addition because of the fact that to get to Titanium rating you have to overengineer quite heavily, it's more likely to be reliable. However avoid any of the flummeries like RGB or ability to tune your power supply in software, they're unnecessary and stupid.

The power supply I use is a Silverstone 800W SFX-L Titanium.

 

[Overly Serious]

This is amazing, thank you so much for taking the time to break this all out for me as I have learned more in reading this single post about hardware than I have in being around or working with computers in all my years; truly incredible.

Find out the software being used as that would dictate the appropriate hardware; check.
GET A GOOD MONITOR; check.

I am going to find out what software he intends to use, degrees to which he uses it and share that with you as you stated it would help a lot in deciding specific hardware.

Sheesh, this is so valuable as I need to get this right on the first go as I am not wealthy and it is investment into a young, creative mind that needs the right tools...

He is my nephew and I am the cool Uncle.

Thank you so very, very much...be back soon with a list of software...you ROCK.

I'm very happy it helped, in that case.

If this is a gift to your nephew then I'm going to highlight a couple of things. Firstly, you can definitely add in more storage later. What I listed out is a light professional set up (imo). But you don't necessarily need redundant drives for mirroring. You do if you're a professional with a deadline and losing money by the hour due to a drive failure. If not, then you can just order a replacement when (and probably if) you ever need one. Plus as I said, you can always add more drives later so you might want to keep my advice about the NVMe drive for the main OS drive, but pare down the other drive suggestions to just putting a 2TB traditional drive in there. Or a 1TB SSD. Both would be fine for someone who is a student learning this stuff for example. So if that's the case, you can save a few hundred right there. Just make sure when you're calculating the size of PSU that you need, you account for what you might add later.

My advice about a good monitor for professional work stands, but monitors really do have a variety of competing needs and you wont be able to just spend more and more until you get a monitor that is good enough for everything; anymore than you could spend a lot of money to get a vehicle that was both a good van and a good commuter. The technology doesn't exist to make a monitor that is an excellent photo editor and an excellent gaming rig at the same time. So make sure your nephew's expectations are what you think they are. Gaming monitors don't need excellent colour reproduction but it does need a high refresh rate. Gaming monitors don't need 4K resolution (though gamers say they do. ) but something for video editing in this day and age pretty much does. (Because you're expected to produce 4K content, these days). What I'm worried about is, because I don't know your nephew's age and goals, they might want to be messing around with Doom or something and you give them a monitor designed for photo colour balancing. There are compromise monitors. I don't want to have advised you to splurge on something that would actually be disappointing to them. If they intend to use this for gaming, I'll give some more balanced advice. Ultrawides are good for video editing, btw, because you can get more of the video timeline horizontally across the screen in your editor (bottom half of the screen image below):

Based on my impression that your nephew is getting this to learn on rather than immediately begin earning money, I'm leaning towards a suggestion of getting a previous generation Threadripper build. It should be plenty fast enough for serious work, it will mean you don't have to skimp on RAM or storage and will leave you a bit more money. It does mean they'll be on the wrong side of the PCI-E version chasm which limits upgrade path a little. But in all honesty, there's always some component you're buying at the wrong time with computers. And the thing is, they depreciate fast. With computers you have to shake the mindset you have with other big purchases like a house, a fridge, etc. Buy a high end fridge and seven years later, you've made your money back twice over compared to buying and replacing a cheap fridge twice in the same time period. Buy a high end computer today, and seven months later, there's something better available. My upgrade cycle, if you're interested, is every five years with occasional interim purchases as useful in that time, and I work professionally in computers. So don't go all out with this if his goal is to learn rather than meet deadlines.

Also, he will probably want Windows. RRP is a bit expensive but there are grey market sources where you can buy a licence which they've managed to sell lower through some bulk interntional deal or other. Works fine and not illegal, just not how MS want you to buy them.

UCD Keys

You'd better also check he doesn't just want a Mac. But you get a lot less bang for your buck usually with those and there's a growing number of creatives moving away from that (though the M1 is bringing some back).

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

I'm very happy it helped, in that case.

If this is a gift to your nephew then I'm going to highlight a couple of things. Firstly, you can definitely add in more storage later. What I listed out is a light professional set up (imo). But you don't necessarily need redundant drives for mirroring. You do if you're a professional with a deadline and losing money by the hour due to a drive failure. If not, then you can just order a replacement when (and probably if) you ever need one. Plus as I said, you can always add more drives later so you might want to keep my advice about the NVMe drive for the main OS drive, but pare down the other drive suggestions to just putting a 2TB traditional drive in there. Or a 1TB SSD. Both would be fine for someone who is a student learning this stuff for example. So if that's the case, you can save a few hundred right there. Just make sure when you're calculating the size of PSU that you need, you account for what you might add later.

My advice about a good monitor for professional work stands, but monitors really do have a variety of competing needs and you wont be able to just spend more and more until you get a monitor that is good enough for everything; anymore than you could spend a lot of money to get a vehicle that was both a good van and a good commuter. The technology doesn't exist to make a monitor that is an excellent photo editor and an excellent gaming rig at the same time. So make sure your nephew's expectations are what you think they are. Gaming monitors don't need excellent colour reproduction but it does need a high refresh rate. Gaming monitors don't need 4K resolution (though gamers say they do. ) but something for video editing in this day and age pretty much does. (Because you're expected to produce 4K content, these days). What I'm worried about is, because I don't know your nephew's age and goals, they might want to be messing around with Doom or something and you give them a monitor designed for photo colour balancing. There are compromise monitors. I don't want to have advised you to splurge on something that would actually be disappointing to them. If they intend to use this for gaming, I'll give some more balanced advice. Ultrawides are good for video editing, btw, because you can get more of the video timeline horizontally across the screen in your editor (bottom half of the screen image below):
View attachment 2233545

Based on my impression that your nephew is getting this to learn on rather than immediately begin earning money, I'm leaning towards a suggestion of getting a previous generation Threadripper build. It should be plenty fast enough for serious work, it will mean you don't have to skimp on RAM or storage and will leave you a bit more money. It does mean they'll be on the wrong side of the PCI-E version chasm which limits upgrade path a little. But in all honesty, there's always some component you're buying at the wrong time with computers. And the thing is, they depreciate fast. With computers you have to shake the mindset you have with other big purchases like a house, a fridge, etc. Buy a high end fridge and seven years later, you've made your money back twice over compared to buying and replacing a cheap fridge twice in the same time period. Buy a high end computer today, and seven months later, there's something better available. My upgrade cycle, if you're interested, is every five years with occasional interim purchases as useful in that time, and I work professionally in computers. So don't go all out with this if his goal is to learn rather than meet deadlines.

Also, he will probably want Windows. RRP is a bit expensive but there are grey market sources where you can buy a licence which they've managed to sell lower through some bulk interntional deal or other. Works fine and not illegal, just not how MS want you to buy them.

UCD Keys

You'd better also check he doesn't just want a Mac. But you get a lot less bang for your buck usually with those and there's a growing number of creatives moving away from that (though the M1 is bringing some back).

I sat him down, told him to read your post and revealed that he is getting a new computer this year and it is more important to me that I get it right rather than to keep it a secret and be a surprise to be revealed in the next few months.

I shared with him there is an individual on the Internet making themselves available in helping us getting put a rig together and that he needs to follow your direction and write out what his current system details are as well as the software and usage of it.

Some of the details below are most likely unnecessary, although, measure twice and cut once.

I figured by knowing what his current system is could be helpful as it is a baseline:

Current System:​

​

Windows 10 Enterprise​

Intel Core i7-3960 CPU 3.30GHz / 3.30GHz​

Nvida GeForce GTX 770​

RAM: 48 GB​

SSD for the OS​

Various Drives for storage​

Dell Monitor (1920x1080)​

Some things I noted during our discussion:

Notes:​

​

Huge working files​

4k Monitor recommendation would be helpful​

Understands stutter can be an issue in scrubbing the timeline in Premiere Pro especially with 4k​

Is fine with rendering InAndOut of timeline in the working environment for smooth playability​

Would like to work in a responsive After Effects workspace as it crushes his computer especially working at high Composition resolutions​

Would like to leverage Blender3D (EEVEE), eventually, Nanite and Lumen in Unreal​

Understands budget is limited and a rig with a balanced CPU/GPU is totally acceptable as opposed to leaning heavily towards a single computational engine​

The 3D Software will be used 40% of the time and the Adobe Suite is used 60% of the time (He is using Adobe almost 90% although he feels it will shift during his development phase)​

Unreal Engine (with consideration of the newest 5.0 prerelease, Nanite/Lumen)

• Architectural Visualization
• Motion Graphics
• Cinematic Animation
• 3D Game Development
  
  Nanite is Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized geometry system which uses a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high object counts. It intelligently does work on only the detail that can be perceived and no more.
  
  Lumen is the default global illumination and reflections system in Unreal Engine 5. It renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in large, detailed environments at scales ranging from millimeters to kilometers.

Quixel (4k/8K Textures) for Unreal

TwinMotion (Architectural Visualization Breakoff from Unreal)

• Architectural Visualization

3DMax (2017/2020, V-RAY/Iray rendering engines)

• 3D Modeling (Game/Architectural Visualization)

Blender3D (EEVEE)

• Cinematic Animation
• 3D Modeling (Game/Architectural Visualization)
  
  Eevee is a new physically based real-time renderer. It works both as a renderer for final frames, and as the engine driving Blender's realtime viewport for creating assets. Eevee materials are created using the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes.

Adobe Media Encoder/myFFMPEG
Photoshop
Premiere Pro
After Effects
Audition
InDesign
Illustrator

Thank you so much for the time you are spending on this inquiry as it is priceless and will contribute to the betterment of a growing creative mind!!!

 

[Overly Serious]

48GB of RAM on a system with i7-3960 and 770GTX? If that was all done in the day that must have cost quite a bit! 48GB was a lot back then. It's still a lot now.

So you've gotten the impression and I'm an expert. I am in my field but this isn't quite it, so if there are lurkers reading a long in this thread, some second opinions would be welcome. I notice that he wants to use iRay. If that's fixed then the GPU is going to need to be Nvidia which is a slight shame as AMD are the better value right now but it is what it is. 4K/8K textures scare me - working with those is going to eat up the RAM.

I'm going to look up a couple of things and check out some benchmarks but my initial feeling is get a CPU that will meet the necessary requirements to not bottleneck the rest of the system but not too overboard and prioritize GPU and RAM. I may revise my comment about PCI-E v4 as probably going to want to get the max value from GPU and SSDs. But that means buying newer kit rather than saving some money with older stuff. Illustrator and InDesign don't need powerful GPU and frankly neither does Photoshop. All that 3D rendering though is pushing you into a different ballpark.

When you said 2K are we talking $ or £ or € ? @SeniorFuckFace

EDIT: Whatever we come up with, it's going to be a lot more powerful than what he's got though! Hope he appreciates you!

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

When you said 2K are we talking $ or £ or € ?

$2k USD, perhaps $3k.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

​

Would like to leverage Blender3D (EEVEE), eventually, Nanite and Lumen in Unreal​

I had written a post similar to @Overly Serious but I was more geared towards consumer gear for entry level, with some 'gotchas'.

A minimum 8GB of VRAM for anything using CUDA/OpenCL is a good rule of thumb in my opinion, that includes After Effects and other professional programs that leverages the graphics card. Depending on what you do of course, but if the VRAM runs out you're in a world of hurt. Slower cards with more VRAM vs faster cards with less VRAM doesn't make much sense in gaming but in this situation they have the workspace needed to get the job done even if they're a slower worker.

For Unreal and Nanite/Lumen things needs to be broken down into two sides, developer and user. There's a pre-processing cost for importing/converting meshes into UE5, but that only needs to be done once, so how many cores do you need in the end as an amateur as opposed to the studio making the Gears of War aequel? Lumen is a realtime lighting system that should run the same(eeeeeeh) on the finished product so unlike Lightmass, as far as I know, there's not the same need for devs to throw their computational power and time at pre-calculating things for the user experience. Nanite is supported down to Maxwell which is a generation of GPU that he owns. It will run like absolute ass but it's there.

If he's on an i7-3xxx and a 770 then anything remotely current will be a massive upgrade. If GPU prices weren't completely fucked I'd say Nephew could get away with quite a lot for $1200 as a stationary.

Don't skimp on RAM, even if Nephew isn't doing anything terribly complex other than learning there will be browser windows in the background with 20 tabs looking at documentation and google/youtube tabs trying to find out why the documentation is incorrect, in addition to Adobe products, IDEs, game editors and more.


Like Overly Serious said, a good monitor is good as a reference in general. But it is easy to slip into color graders hell and go insane, in my opinion.

 

[TheRedChair]

Unless you're mad about overclocking it's all about noise. Bigger cooler with bigger fans means less noise. A smaller fan on a smaller heatsink will have to work harder to move enough air through to keep temps down.

The Be quiet! Pure Rock Slim 2 is very inexpensive for a tower cooler(~$25) and surprisingly good. Here's a short video/review where they compare it to AMDs stock coolers in temp and noise.

I bought 2 Hyper T2 for under $20.00. One of them is running on my 3600, the other is on my 1800X. I have no problems with both rigs and heat.

I'm bringing this up because there has been NO REAL tech upgrades in these types of CPU coolers. On the Contrary there has been declines on performance for the price you pay now and quality.

Example. The old intel stock CPU coolers had a solid copper core, then they went semi copper-aluminum, and finally all aluminum core... at an increase of cost.

I own one of the solid copper ones. It's on my list of modding to do.

 

[SeniorFuckFace]

I had written a post similar to @Overly Serious but I was more geared towards consumer gear for entry level, with some 'gotchas'.

A minimum 8GB of VRAM for anything using CUDA/OpenCL is a good rule of thumb in my opinion, that includes After Effects and other professional programs that leverages the graphics card. Depending on what you do of course, but if the VRAM runs out you're in a world of hurt. Slower cards with more VRAM vs faster cards with less VRAM doesn't make much sense in gaming but in this situation they have the workspace needed to get the job done even if they're a slower worker.

For Unreal and Nanite/Lumen things needs to be broken down into two sides, developer and user. There's a pre-processing cost for importing/converting meshes into UE5, but that only needs to be done once, so how many cores do you need in the end as an amateur as opposed to the studio making the Gears of War aequel? Lumen is a realtime lighting system that should run the same(eeeeeeh) on the finished product so unlike Lightmass, as far as I know, there's not the same need for devs to throw their computational power and time at pre-calculating things for the user experience. Nanite is supported down to Maxwell which is a generation of GPU that he owns. It will run like absolute ass but it's there.

If he's on an i7-3xxx and a 770 then anything remotely current will be a massive upgrade. If GPU prices weren't completely fucked I'd say Nephew could get away with quite a lot for $1200 as a stationary.

Don't skimp on RAM, even if Nephew isn't doing anything terribly complex other than learning there will be browser windows in the background with 20 tabs looking at documentation and google/youtube tabs trying to find out why the documentation is incorrect, in addition to Adobe products, IDEs, game editors and more.


Like Overly Serious said, a good monitor is good as a reference in general. But it is easy to slip into color graders hell and go insane, in my opinion.

Great, thank you for adding to the discussion.

 

[Overly Serious]

So I have actually followed along a little with UE5 and Nanite. It's exciting technology. It's not my area - you system architecture, infrastructure, DBs, I'm great at that stuff. Graphics isn't my area though I follow it.

This video talks a bit about development for UE5 and Nanite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roMYi7BU1YY&t=656s

So this video says that Nanite isn't very CPU heavy and relies mostly on the GPU (makes sense). For this reason, though I'd love to go Threadripper, I'm leaning Ryzen. You're simply going to need every penny you can for the GPU. :/

I managed to find UE's developer recommendations for hardware for version 4. They're suprisingly low and I think they're out of date but this is them: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/Basics/RecommendedSpecifications/ As you can see, not very high. I'm guessing because you don't need high detail textures to do basic development. For their Early Access requirements for v.5 they have this:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/Welcome/ where they say requirements are the same but have upgraded their GPU recommendation to GTX 1080 or Vega 64 upwards. That still seems low to me but sharing anyway.

So I've started with a rough build because it's easier to start from somewhere than from nowhere. I would love to go for a Threadripper build as I said but I've gone Ryzen because I think that will be fast enough on the CPU for what you need and I'd rather leave as much money as possible for the GPU. I decided it was really worth trying for the PCI-E v4 over v3 because although it doesn't make that much difference right now I think content creation work is one of those scenarios where it is going to help. Again, if you went down to the previous gen that wouldn't be bad. But v4 gets you faster storage for the future and current gen GPUs can make some use out of it.

The killer is the GPU. Miners have devastated the market and that doesn't look like it's stopped. It's become genuinely hard to buy a modern GPU and when you can the prices are double or more what they ought to be. So this is a Ryzen based build sans GPU and monitor which I'll treat separately.

Spoiler

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor ($423.88 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($39.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: MSI MAG X570 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX AM4 Motherboard ($257.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($183.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($183.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Black SN850 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($199.99 @ Western Digital)
Storage: Western Digital Black 4 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($149.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Phanteks Eclipse P300A Mesh ATX Mid Tower Case ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair RM (2019) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($116.82 @ Amazon)
Total: $1606.63
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-06-06 06:03 EDT-0400

As you can see, it's a starter build as far as storage goes but I think that's okay - it has a strong performer for its main OS drive and with 1TB it should be able to put most of the software you'd want on there as well. I've added a 4TB traditional drive for storing the assets, project files, etc. Maybe you could swap it for an SSD but I think based on description you want the space. For RAM, you've got 64GB which is a lot. It's 3200 as well so pretty fast. DDR5 is coming but unless you're willing to put this off for a year I think you have to take the plunge on knowing it's going to be slightly outdated in a couple of years. But it's a poor workman blames his tools - goal here is to get your nephew what he needs to learn and work productively. Slight downside is that if he does want to go higher with RAM there are no spare slots so it's replace the memory sticks wholesale. But to avoid that scenario you'd really need to go Threadripper and we'll be adding around $500 dollars to make that jump.

So now the two big omissions. First up the monitor. I haven't used this personally but good brand and good reviews and good specs:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-32-ultrafine-ips-uhd-monitor-with-freesync-white/6437472.p?skuId=6437472&intl=nosplash

It's got lots of real estate for having IDE, blender, whatever on one side and reference webpages on the other. Good colour reproduction, 4K resolution for video editing.

You could also look for an ultrawide and maybe drop the cost a little with something like this and have a view to replace it in the future. Or just stick with what he has if need be as I don't know what he has.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-34wl500-b-34-ips-led-ultrawide-fhd-freesync-monitor-with-hdr-hdmi-black/6329954.p?skuId=6329954&intl=nosplash

A key thing to look for in monitors is "IPS". That's the panel technology. You don't want to do any photo or video work on a "TN" screen as the colour will be awful.

And now the thing that dominates everything else, cost-wise. The graphics card. Because he's wedded to iRay technology it needs to be Nvidia. As @Smaug's Smokey Hole says, you need minimum 8GB VRAM on it. Ideally you'd go for something like the 3080 with 10GB but that can be over a thousand right now due to miners. It honestly grieves me that I can't point you at something more reasonably priced. Crypto mining has utterly wrecked this to the point only the well-off can comfortably afford this. I myself have been waiting a year to upgrade my GPU because of the situation and will probably sit this generation out entirely because of it. Maybe get a 1080 or a 2080. They wont be bad, they're impressive cards. They're just not as good as you should be able to get for the money.

I might do up a Threadripper based system for comparison but my feeling is you'd be adding on $500 and I don't feel you'd lose too much based on my reading the requirements from UE. You can play around on PC Parts picker and it will warn you about incompatibilities. We might want to check the CPU / motherboard combo in the sample spec I put together as well as it might require a BIOS update to work. So don't click buy on that just yet! It's a starting point. I'd really like to get some input from others on what they'd change.