Nossgrr

That brings up an interesting question, would you be able to live without Cuda? Not only in 3DC but other apps as well? I'm going to take a long hard look at AMD's GPU offering but at the same time have to weight in if Cuda is still a big factor enough to stay with NVidia.. AMD has stated that they're going to skip RT-Raytracing for Navi, take a more of a wait and see approach.. Which means Navi could be very attractive price wise..

Sure thing... For the motherboard I bought the GIGABYTE X470 AORUS Ultra ($150Cdn BF deal). It was either that one or the ASUS PRIME X470-PRO.. Had my eye on both so when Black Friday came, price and availability was the driver for the purchase. Ram I bought the G.Skil 3200 \ DDR4 16GB. The motherboard picked up the XMP memory profile right away and maxed the frequency at 3200. For the GPU, I already had a decent one so I did not replace it. I'm running a Geforce GTX 1070 STRIX edition, bought this one before all the bitcoin madness for $424 Cdn. After extensive reading on the 20xx series and all following the post you guys did, I thought it best to skip it.. RTX is just not mature enough to benefit from it and the new cards failure rates raised a red flag.

So just an update on my new Ryzen 2700x cpu\mobo I purchased last Black Friday.. I absolutely love the thing, a real workhorse. First thing I did was to fire up 3D Coat, Blender and ZBrush.. All pretty much used every core available. Blender and ZB had a more even spread of the workload. 3DC also used up all the cores but the difference was that it also maxed out one of them.. User experience wise, definite improvement over my previous setup. Something to note, when I installed Windows 10 I used an old ISO I had lying around and that ended up causing me issues \ long install times \ freezes.. After an hour+ in of installing Win10 updates and a few freezes, I just canceled everything and reformatted.. I ended up using the Windows media creator from MS to create a more recent build of Windows. It created a v1803 build of Windows.. Once I had that, it was probably one of the fastest Windows install I've ever done, under 8-10 mins and I was up and running with all drivers found. I updated with vendor specific drivers and then everything was solid.. I've had zero instability \ freezes \ crashes since Black Friday and have been running the rig non stop.. Overall I'm really impressed with it, would definitely buy again (hey it's half the price of Intel equiv).. Feel free to ask questions or run a specific task to get numbers..

L'ancient Regime, I bought that exact same processor earlier today from the link you listed at Amazon.ca for $344 (Ryzen 2700x), I guess it went back up later today.. Bought this from your recommendations ty! It's not a Threadripper but it'll do pretty good I think.

That's nuts! The 20 series will take a hit reputation wise...

All of this is mostly relevant to servers, data centers and cloud computing where there's many tenants per hosts.. The fear is that one tenant could potentially eavesdrop on others using those cpu exploits.. For personal use as a workstation at home, I wouldn sweat it. Yes a local exploit could be used locally but then they would listen to what? If they're in your system, they have access to everything already anyways.. A good anti virus will do just fine for home use.

I'm leaning towards AMD for CPU. The socket compatibility is definitely a feature I'm interested in, if it where like that with intel, I could of went to a newer CPU and kept the rest of my rig.. For GPU, my GTX 1070 is still plenty fast for what I do and totally agree about RTX, I'll skip this gen and re-evaluate once more apps support it. Thanks for the suggestions,

My aging 4th gen intel cpu will get a refresh come Nov Black Friday. I was looking at the i7 8700 but someone mentioned the Ryzen 2700.. I'd love to support AMD but their offering has to be rock solid and competitive. That's for the CPU, for the GPU my current GTX 1070 will do for now. Any advice? PS, dont want to hijack the thread, just saw ppl talk about cpus and black Friday

I used to run NOD32 a while back. Mad props for being written in Assembly Language! Now this one might surprise you, it's an old dog too :)

I happened to stumble on this cool video, dont ask me how.. lol Anyways, I thought the workflow for their "Curves" implementation looked really solid. Same with the boolean like workflow. Anyways, didnt know Spore had such a elaborate creature creator.

Not sure where to post this so feel free to relocate the post... Every time I hit the following link on 3DC forums I get a malware attack attempt that gets intercepted by AVG.. If I reboot my system and hit that page with Chrome, I get that pop up about 3 out of 5 times.. Needless to say, dont hit that page unless you have some sort of web shield enabled but should probably be addressed.

Was browsing my Pluralsight subscription this morning and noticed this course.. It's part of a multi application pipeline training using ZB, Marmoset, 3DC. The first few chapters are using 3DCoat for Retopo, UVs.. Will add it to my watch list and get back to you(s). Modeling and Texturing Animals for Games

And it's up for Download, Houdini H17 Download

Last night's Presentation is up!

No updates on Twitter or SideFX's web page this morning.. Must of been a good party