Need a new PC for 3D Graphics and VFX - What do I look for?

I’m almost about ready to buy a new PC. My old one is outdated, slow and chuggy, and really can’t cut it. It’s pre-HD, pre-CUDA, heck, it’s pre-PCI-e!

So now I need to put myself in a position where it can handle all I will be throwing at it for the next five years.

This is not for gaming. I may chuck on a game or two, but that is not its primary purpose. I will be using it for 3D Modelling and Animating, and Visual Effects compositing, and things of that ilk. Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and the 3D software I use is Lightwave.

I think prices in US$ are somewhat cheaper than here in Australia, but let’s say my price range is from US$1000 to a maximum of $US1500, including at least one monitor.

What are the specs, brands, acronyms, prices, and expectations I should be looking for?

If you were doing cad work I would recommend a proper workstation with a mid range quadro card (which would eat into your budget like there’s no tomorrow). But you’re doing 3D modelling in lightwave… I haven’t touched lightwave in a few years but they were behind the times a bit in terms of leveraging GPU power for much of anything other than real time rendering.

Hopefully that changed, but regardless I think, for your needs, I can recommend a non workstation GPU.

Of course if you are running one now, you might miss some features. Take a look at Nvidia’s list of features for quadro cards and see if you can live without them: NVIDIA Quadro Legacy Products

Applications like most of adobe’s suite will take advantage of any modern gaming GPU to accelerate many functions, which is why I would say stick to that unless you know a workstation card like the quadro is something you really need. All prices US $, sorry, hopefully they aren’t that much more expensive down under.

You want this baby to last and to do a lot of number crunching so I would recommend an intel “sandy bridge” processor. The i7 2600K will serve you very well, as will the cheaper i5 2500K. The “K” series allows for a lot of overclocking headroom, giving you more bang for your buck in terms of performance.

  • i7 2600k $315
  • i5 2500k $219

Any compatible motherboard (socket LGA 1155) would be fine. You want as many SATA 6 ports and USB 3 ports as you can get for an affordable price. You’ll need at least 1 PCIe X16 slot as well for your GPU. You should be able to find something for $80-$150.

For your GPU I’d go with an Nvidia GTX 560 ti. I doubt you would get much of a noticeable boost in performance going with anything more powerful, at least not int he applications you plan on using most of the time. And it will max out most modern games at 1080p resolution, and should handle tomorrow’s game just fine as well.

  • GTX 560 ti $230

RAM is something you want a lot of. It’s cheap and its something your type of work gobbles up. HIgh resolution images, high resolution video, effects, textures, etc, etc all need a large buffer. 16 GB is no something I’d recommend to a gamer, but you would benefit.

  • 16GB DDR3 1600 $100

Hard drive space is yet another thing that you probably want lots off. It’s also cheap. You should be able to pick up a2 TB spindle drive for around $100. You might want to invest in an SSD as your primary drive where you have your OS and programs running, while keeping the 2 TB one for a storage drive. It’s how I roll, and the responsiveness of my PC is now something I would not want to give up. SSD’s are expensive however, so look for a sweetspot between space/performance and price.

That’s the core of your PC. You’ll also need a Power supply, I’d recommend you don’t skimp there. Choose something with a high efficiency and at least 600 Watts.

The case is all about what you like aesthetically, and the features that make assembling your PC easier.

You’ll need a 64-bit OS to handle the RAM Kinthalis recommends.

Excellent. I’ll check out what’s available down here from that list, it sounds very much along the lines of what I’m after.

64-Bit Win7 is definitely the plan.

I was going to piggyback this thread as I need a new computer.

You lost me at lightwave however.

(Cicero, who was feeling smug for fitting a new graphics card last week).

Beware cheap monitors. Get yourself an IPS monitor rather than a TN for better colour rendition. You may also want to investigate 10 bit colour, for which you will need a professional graphics card. You should be able to pick up large CRT monitors very cheaply.

I don’t think I need such a high quality monitor, as nice as that would be. I’m not after the perfect machine, just something a step or two up from what I have now. Certainly I have no interest in getting a CRT alongside it; I’ll be happy if I never see one of those again.

Okay, but do beware the cheaper TN monitors: they are often only 6 bit colour and fake being 8 bit.

If you go with just a mobo and the I7-2600K, the processor itself has an excellent graphics core built in, and it is designed to blaze through transcoding and such. I’d start there, and avoid an extra graphics card, at least till you try the built in one.

Absolutely not.

The built in graphics core in the sandy bridge APU’s is an intel part.

Or in other words, it sucks. Specially for 3D rendering. It also lacks many of the features that are open to developers of the types of software the OP uses for hardware accelleration.

Even the current APU’s from AMD (which have 10 times better GPU parts) are not up to par for anything more than console level gaming, but their CPU parts are way behind intel.

He definitely needs that discreet GPU.

An update.

I bought my new PC, sticking very closely to Kinthalis’s recommendations, and it is marvellous. It handles all I’ve thrown at it with ease, with alacrity, and at speed. It only seems to choke on particles, which is nothing new; everything else is a doddle.

Thank you for the suggestions, I sleep easy knowing this machine will handle all my needs for a good few years to come.