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New PC for 3d coat suggestions. CPU/GPU?


pr1970
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Hi All,

I`ve used 3d coat for a few years on my desktop pc (i7 3.2ghz, nvidia gtx 970, 32gb ram) and looking to upgrade my hardware as at times things can get slow. Any suggestions of what could help speed up calculations and general use...  ie  mulitple 4096+ textures on layers, baking (curvature, ao,etc) ,etc. 
Would a dual cpu mainboard help, and also any of the new nvidia RTX cards have any influence over speed? (some renderers now use them for calculations).

Thanks in advance

Paul

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I think a good AMD Ryzen CPU like the 3800 or 3900X would be plenty of horsepower for the CPU side of things. Faster clock speeds helps, because many calculations in 3DCoat are still single threaded, because they cannot be multi-threaded. I would advise 64GB of RAM, and the faster the better. If you don't normally work with large scenes, you can do fine with 32GB, but 64GB gives you enough headroom to work on a scene with lots of objects with a fair amount of resolution.

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2 hours ago, pr1970 said:

Thanks. Would a dual cpu setup work any better? I`m looking up to £3500 gbp to spend on a setup. 

Probably not. It might if you plan to do a lot of rendering with a CPU engine. I hate to say this, because I am a big AMD fan. Intel sat on their hands for about 5-7yrs when AMD was down, and not very competitive....Intel only coming out with tiny improvements from one generation to the next. I'm glad AMD caught up and really took it to Intel.

However, in terms of clock speed (5Ghz vs 4.2 for the AMD Ryzen 3800X), Intel 9900K might be the best option for 3DCoat. For one, the faster clock speed should help a lot with single-threaded calculations. Secondly, 3DCoat's multi-threading is based on Intel Thread Building Blocks...which is optimized for Intel CPU's. In the past, I noticed quite a bit of difference, but it's unknown if the TBB optimizations hinder the current AMD CPU's.

The 9900K is an 8-core/16thread model, for about $500, while the AMD Ryzen 3900X is a 12-core/24 thread model. I would be inclined to go for the 3900X, for the same price. AMD has really boosted their IPC in this latest generation. The next gen ThreadRipper (3950) is supposed to arrive in November. You might wait and see how well that performs. Otherwise, the 2950X ThreadRipper might be the best option (16 cores/32threads)...boost clock to 4.3

 

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+1 for considering clock speed alongside number of cores.  I got an AMD 1700 a fair while back (8/16 cores) and it was as slow as my much older i5 on many tasks due to low mhz on single threaded performance (i.e. physics engine in blender was disappointing, and single core 3dc processing was no quicker)

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