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I'm building a PC. Tell me whether it sucks.

polycounter lvl 18
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Steve Schulze polycounter lvl 18
My old faithful gaming laptop can't quite handle Substance Painter, so it's time for a major upgrade. It's been years since I've paid any attention to hardware so I'm not overly sure whether the random assortments of numbers and letters are the right ones.

Take a look and see what you think.
5KsU0TR.jpg

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  • Hayden Zammit
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    Hayden Zammit polycounter lvl 12
    Not familiar with that motherboard or GPU, but everything else sounds good.

    I'd get a gtx 980 for the GPU. They're excellent.

    Get a aftermarket cooler for sure as well. Don't use that shit that comes with the CPU. Get a Noctua cooler. Best brand there is IMO. Bit pricey, but insane quality and if something goes wrong, their customer service is scary good.

    Also get some Noctua case fans too. Like 4 of them. Throw out the ones that come with the case.

    Matter of fact, throw out the case and get a Fractal Define r4 as well. It's pretty much the same setup as that Coolermaster except you can get it in white and then your PC looks like some sort of futuristic bar fridge.
  • Steve Schulze
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    Steve Schulze polycounter lvl 18
    Motherboard
    http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1150/49972-B85M-G
    GPU
    http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Graphics_Cards/AMD/59694-R9_390_GAMING_8G
    I saw the GPU recommended on another Polycount thread and it's markedly cheaper than any of the GTX980 models. That said, I don't really know anything about this stuff so I'm happy to defer to the superior knowledge of the folks here.

    I'm not too concerned about looks. It just needs to make arts without running like the proverbial dog.
  • lovingsaskia
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    lovingsaskia polycounter lvl 6
    If your going to go with windows 10, get windows 10pro. It will allow you to choose your updates (If I understand correctly), unlike the home edition which forces them upon you.
    Also that power supply max load might be a little on the low side. 88 watts for your cpu, 200watts for your graphics card, you'd struggle if you decided to add another graphics card later on, that's not including everything else.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4790k-devils-canyon-overclock-performance,3845-9.html

    Doing a brief search shows also that the R9 390 can pull over 400watts at peak load. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2707809/390-600w.html

    Never under estimate your PSU, I have fallen foul of that a couple of times.
  • skyline5gtr
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    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    Pick a different motherboard Chipset. Video card is only worth it if you plan to go multi-monitor or 4k. Skylake is right around the corner i would jsut wait for that, plus dddr4. Not much point dumping that kind of money into a chipset that will be gone in a few months

    That card for a single monitor at 1920x1080 is overkill unless your rocking a 144hz monitor. Not a fan of the ATI R9 series, yes they are pretty powerful but run super hot

    Power supply is not even close to what you want get at least 750watt , if your spending the mone make sure it can support all the neat hardware you want. Make sure the 12v rail is strong.
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    So I think a few people are missing the point of why OP is choosing the R9 390.

    8GB of video ram.

    Substance Painter, especially @4k, will eat video ram. A friend of mine decided to go with the 970 and regrets his decision as he needs more than 4GB of VRAM for next get assets in Substance Painter (AAA stuff though..).

    My only change would be to bump your RAM up to 32GB and maybe a larger power supply (not 100% sure about that).
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    Looks like a good build overall.

    The monitor doesn't seem to have much in the way of reviews online, so my gut tells me its not very good.
    Windows10 is still very new so you might have some problems there as well. I'd only go for it if you really want DX12.
    Pick a different motherboard Chipset. Skylake is right around the corner i would jsut wait for that, plus dddr4. Not much point dumping that kind of money into a chipset that will be gone in a few months

    Skylake is already out, and the performance difference between its top end chip (6700k) compared to the 4790k is negligible (about 10% improvement in most cases). And don't forget this is Intel we're talking about, the chipset will almost certainly be dropped for the next generation of cpus after skylake.
  • skyline5gtr
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    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    beefaroni wrote: »
    So I think a few people are missing the point of why OP is choosing the R9 390.

    8GB of video ram.

    Substance Painter, especially @4k, will eat video ram. A friend of mine decided to go with the 970 and regrets his decision as he needs more than 4GB of VRAM for next get assets in Substance Painter (AAA stuff though..).

    My only change would be to bump your RAM up to 32GB and maybe a larger power supply (not 100% sure about that).

    I follow, but the monitor he selected is only 1920x1080 and is not 4k capable. Its only 23inch. In order to get the use our of that card he needsa bigger monitor or it wont matter.
  • skyline5gtr
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    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    PolyHertz wrote: »
    Looks like a good build overall.

    The monitor doesn't seem to have much in the way of reviews online, so my gut tells me its not very good.
    Windows10 is still very new so you might have some problems there as well. I'd only go for it if you really want DX12.



    Skylake is already out, and the performance difference between its top end chip (6700k) compared to the 4790k is negligible (8-10% improvement in most cases). And don't forget this is Intel we're talking about, the chipset will almost certainly be dropped for the next generation of cpus after skylake.

    Yea that is true, they swap the chipset every 2-3 3 years to stop people upgrading
  • Axcel
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    Axcel polycounter lvl 14
    Steve, what site have you screenshoted?
    I will be building new pc next month, the same problem with substance painter. :) but I will buy i6700k, ddr4 etc.
    I wonder if GF980 would give me more performance in this app, comparing to gf970. Anyone could tell? From what beefaroni sais, it will.
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    I follow, but the monitor he selected is only 1920x1080 and is not 4k capable. Its only 23inch. In order to get the use our of that card he needsa bigger monitor or it wont matter.

    That makes no sense at all.

    Painting @4k resolution. Like, a 4096x4096 texture map. Substance painter stores each layer in the GPUs RAM. Each uncompressed 4k layer takes up quite a bit of video memory. Even if he's using Mari it will still benefit from more video memory.

    Nothing to do with the size of the monitor.

    Again, it depends on what you're doing with painter. If you're shooting for 4k next gen assets, then for comfortable painting, the lowest Nvidia card I'd go is a 980ti with 6GB of video memory. I still believe the 390 is the best price/performance right now.

    You know what, I'm just going to link their guide from the site.
    Channels are uncompressed, this means that when working with multiple textures/channels (height, basecolor, metallic, roughness and so on) you end up with 4 or more textures at the resolution of your document that need to do some back and forth between the software and the VRam (the GPU memory), you end-up with a lot of bandwidth consumption. A 32bits height map will be around 190mb for example. The uncompressed map per channels adds up quickly in size, in addition to all the substances and materials than need to stays in VRam in order to be able to compute the result of the blending. So very quickly the VRam will be filled. Therefore Substance Painter end up doing a lot of back and forth with the GPU. A 4K by 4K texture set can consume something like 4 to 8 GB per second on very complex layer stack.
  • skyline5gtr
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    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    I stand corrected, I thought that the resolution was directly relation to the pixels on the monitor in regards to vram.

    Nice Info beef
  • Steve Schulze
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    Steve Schulze polycounter lvl 18
    I've bumped up the power supply to this 750W one
    http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Power_Supplies/ATX/52925-CMPSU-CS750M

    Running through the rest:
    * Motherboard chipset is the component I know the least about. I picked a core 1150 one with 4 RAM slots. What else do I need to look out for?
    * I've got two monitors on the shopping list. 23 inches with IPS http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Monitors/23-24_inch/59470-23M47VQ-P
    * There's been some contention over whether it's worth having 32 GB of RAM. I've bumped the ones I have up to DDR4. Does the Ram speed make a great deal of difference?
    * Graphics card - How serious is that heat problem on the R9? That sounds a little concerning.
    * I think I might see if I can find a copy of Windows 7 to install.

    Thanks for the help, guys.
    Axcel wrote: »
    Steve, what site have you screenshoted?
    I will be building new pc next month, the same problem with substance painter. :) but I will buy i6700k, ddr4 etc.
    I wonder if GF980 would give me more performance in this app, comparing to gf970. Anyone could tell? From what beefaroni sais, it will.
    That's Scorptec's custom PC building site. They're an Australian store, so may not be of much use to you. I guess It's a convenient way to pick and choose your parts.
  • skyline5gtr
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    * Graphics card - How serious is that heat problem on the R9? That sounds a little concerning.

    I have the MSI 390 and have 0 problems with heat. It gets up to about 85C at full full load, which is completely fine for a GPU. Just make sure you get a non-reference card.

    Edit: Wow, their temps are a bit lower than mine. They must have some nice airflow in their case or the fan profile is a little more aggressive. Either way, pretty solid.
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    go with a geforce... most cg apps a re working with cuda... and that is only supported by nvidia... for example the new iray in substance...
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    oglu wrote: »
    go with a geforce... most cg apps a re working with cuda... and that is only supported by nvidia... for example the new iray in substance...

    Other than iray (which can use CPU as well), what game oriented 3d applications benefit exclusively from CUDA? I can't think of any.
  • PhattyEwok
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    PhattyEwok polycounter lvl 9
    Your current rundown is a bit contradictory.

    If this build is for gaming and not work related stuff then an i7 is overkill. Most games don't even use hyper-threading and the extra cost you spend on the feature can be used towards a better GPU. An unlocked i5 will more than suit your needs.

    I recommend the i5 4690k

    If this build is for work related tasks though then keep the i7 you'll see better performance across all adobe products and your 3D packages.

    The GPU is great for a gaming setup no sense grabbing a GTX card if you aren't going to be utilizing that CUDA functionality. You'll miss out on a few bells and whistles like hairworks/HBAO but nothing major in the long run

    However if you are using this rig for use with Adobe products then bust out a bit more and go for the GTX. All of adobe's products work much better with the CUDA core integration then say AMD's OpenCL. You'll see much better viewport response and streaming in stuff like premiere and after effects.

    Other than that the rest of list looks solid.

    -2 cents
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    more or less all GPU renderer... cause a lot of them are optix based like redshift...or the new QMC stuff in renderman and vray... aslo some simulation stuff...


    sure there are openCL solutions but AMD is in this area behind...
    if yfou dont render or silumate... its no problem at all..
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Also xNormal's CUDA baking and 3DCoat takes advantage of CUDA.
  • beefaroni
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    beefaroni sublime tool
    ZacD wrote: »
    Also xNormal's CUDA baking and 3DCoat takes advantage of CUDA.

    I've had better success with XNormal's Open RL baker vs. CUDA baker. Also, I'm curious if CUDA is too important with 3d-Coat since they also have a OpenGL version.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Cuda is/was only for the voxel sculpting in 3D Coat, and is the fastest option for it.
  • m4dcow
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    m4dcow interpolator
    PolyHertz wrote: »
    Skylake is already out, and the performance difference between its top end chip (6700k) compared to the 4790k is negligible (about 10% improvement in most cases). And don't forget this is Intel we're talking about, the chipset will almost certainly be dropped for the next generation of cpus after skylake.

    While Skylake is only a little bit faster and the boards might change in 2 years after Kaby Lake, you get the benefit of DDR4 which you could actually drop into a build down the line. Also there are certain features with the z170 chipset like m.2, usb 3.1 that would be pretty nice to have.
  • Axcel
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    Axcel polycounter lvl 14
    Is Intel going to release a successor for i.e. LGA2011 i5820k with 4-channel support?
    i6700k is a successor for dual-channel supporting i4790k.
    How big difference 4-ch makes?
  • m4dcow
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    m4dcow interpolator
    Axcel wrote: »
    Is Intel going to release a successor for i.e. LGA2011 i5820k with 4-channel support?
    i6700k is a successor for dual-channel supporting i4790k.
    How big difference 4-ch makes?

    The channels refer to memory channels and they don't really make that much of a difference in practice. The successor to 5820k (haswell E) will likely be skylake E, which I think is supposed to release late next year.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Yeah, there shouldn't be another 6 core processor anytime soon. Ram makes very little difference, as long as you have enough. A good SSD and more VRAM are typically much more useful and provide a bigger performance gain. There's some certain uses where ram speed might be a bottleneck, but not really for games or game art.
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