3ds Max Workstation (including Render with Corona)

[omerozdemir]

Hey everyone,

 

first of all, I'm not a professional in this field, I am looking to surprise my girlfriend with a new PC so please excuse my ignorance of some of the terminology.

 

She works at an ArchViz company and uses 3ds Max and the engine Corona for rendering at work. She does staging and full renders, but from what I know it's mostly interior design visualization (again, I'm sorry if I'm off with my terminology).

 

I love her work and I know she has been looking to pick up some freelance work if she could, but her PC at home is really old and mine isn't any better, so presumably she won't be able to work on it at all.

With my i5 2600k I just assume it will not be enough to work with (comfortably, if at all). Plus please keep in mind she will have to use this PC for rendering as well.

That's my motivation for building a new PC.

 

 

for the CPU, I am considering the AMD Ryzen 9 3900x. I checked out a few benchmarks and I feel like this is a good compromise between performance and price. But if you think that the performance just will not be enough then I'd rather spend a bit more here and get a 3950x (or maybe a threadripper?) than spending less on it and then the whole thing turns out useless. What kind of a cooler would be good here? I'd rather not deal with liquid cooling as I just don't feel comfortable with setting it up myself. I doubt I will do any overclocking on this, but I'm not sure if the stock cooler will be enough to make it run cool enough under load and prevent thermal throttling.

 

The mainboard I am not sure at all what to go with. Will she need the faster PCIe 4.0 stuff for super fast nvme SSDs on the x570? Or would one of the the 2x 1TB SATA SSDs I currently have (Samsung 860 EVO) alongside a 4TB HDD be enough or should it all be SSDs? How does it affect her work? If she doesn't need the faster PCIe 4.0 then is a b450 mainboard enough? Or how about I just get a cheaper x570 for about 250€?

 

RAM wise I am thinking of going about 64GB, is that enough? Is it important to get faster RAM here, as in the 3200 variant? How important are those CL timings? I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information and things to consider here.

 

Keyboard, Mouse and Monitor are already there. I had asked her before if we shouldn't get her a bigger monitor but she said she'd rather have a 2nd one of her current 21 inch screen than a bigger Monitor.

 

I think we can use her PC case that she currently has. It's a midi tower. I am not sure what kind of a PSU is in her PC though, should I get a new one?

 

From what I could gather from a bit of googling is that the Corona engine uses the CPU, so I assume the graphics card will not be that important? But I am not sure if a lack of performance would affect her negatively during the modelling in 3ds Max if I got a too low performing graphics card. So what kind of a graphics card should I be aiming for here?

 

 

For the start I am thinking to get a 1 month license for 3ds Max, what else will I need to buy? Do I need to get a license for the Corona engine as well? Is it also a per month subscription?

 

 

Thanks a bunch if anyone could find the time to reply to any of these aspects. I very much appreciate any input from you.

Take care and be safe!

[Tommy L]

There's a lot to unpack there. 

The first question is budget.... how much you can spend will influence every decision. But there are two or three other work processes you need to consider: 1- will rendering be done locally or in the cloud? 2- do you want to use one machine for work+rendering, or offload rendering tasks onto a machine built to do just rendering? 3- will corona be the only render engine or will some GPU intensive (UE4, VRay Next etc) processes be forthcoming? 

If you build a machine to work+render, you will make a compromise in both. You also create a production bottleneck as a machine currently rendering is not a great workstation. 

The ryzen CPUs are better than the Intel for rendering. Im not convinced they make better workstations. 

I think the 'surprise' may have to be less of a surprise than you think, as you may need to have an in depth conversation with the surprisee about the best components to choose.

[omerozdemir]

15 minutes ago, Tommy L said:

There's a lot to unpack there. 

The first question is budget.... how much you can spend will influence every decision. But there are two or three other work processes you need to consider: 1- will rendering be done locally or in the cloud? 2- do you want to use one machine for work+rendering, or offload rendering tasks onto a machine built to do just rendering? 3- will corona be the only render engine or will some GPU intensive (UE4, VRay Next etc) processes be forthcoming? 

If you build a machine to work+render, you will make a compromise in both. You also create a production bottleneck as a machine currently rendering is not a great workstation. 

The ryzen CPUs are better than the Intel for rendering. Im not convinced they make better workstations. 

I think the 'surprise' may have to be less of a surprise than you think, as you may need to have an in depth conversation with the surprisee about the best components to choose.

Thank you very much for your reply, Tommy! I have indeed chosen to just come out and talk about the setup with her instead of getting her a useless PC in the end. She said she'd be getting the software herself so I can use my whole budget for the PC. My budget is around 1500€ soft cap so to say, but if that way it will turn out useless then I'd rather spend up to 2000€ (or maybe more if necessary, I'll rob my piggy bank) and get her an actually decent PC.

To 1: Our Internet connection is unfortunately dodgy at the best of times and we have no alternative to our ISP at our location so the rendering will have to be done locally.

To 2: It would be ideal if she could both work and render on that one PC.

To 3: She said she would really rather stick to Corona and at least for now doesn't consider switching to / using any GPU based render engine.

I understand and appreciate the comment about the work+render machine, but in a way we kind of have to stick to this simultaneous work+render machine in the short term. It actually sounds very enticing to have a separate machine for both the work and the render, but unfortunately neither of us have the knowledge to set up the network infrastructure for that and I'm not sure if my admittedly quite limited budget allows for a dual PC setup. How would this affect the licences we have to buy? Do we have to buy a 3ds Max license for each machine?

Like I said in the first place this is about her picking up some freelance work, I am not sure she will have so much work lined up (at first - at least) that she would need to worry too much about not being able to work while the machine renders, am I wrong about this? We are after all just looking for a machine that she can work with, pick up some freelance projects and maybe set her on the road to become her own boss way down the line.

 

This is the list of components we had picked so far, nothing set in stone.

Motherboard: Gigabyte x570 Aorus Elite (rev. 1.0) for 200€

CPU: Ryzen 9 3900x for 440€

Cooler: BE QUIET! Dark Rock Pro 4 for 70€

RAM: G.Skill 32GB (2x 16GB) Trident Z Neo DDR4 3600MHz CL16-19-19-39 for 230€

I couldn't make heads or tails about if the timings or frequency is more important, so I pretty much picked something that "looked" fast?

I suggested we get 64GB, but my girlfriend said 32GB would be enough and we could get more later if we needed to. What would you suggest?

SSD: Kingston A1000 SSD 960GB, M.2 for 140€

As well as a normal 4TB HDD from my system I'm using right now which has stayed empty for the longest time.

I suggested to maybe get a 500GB of the PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD for 110€ but she said she’d rather have the higher Capacity of this and that the Performance is good enough.

Case: NZXT H500i for 90€

PSU: Corsair RM750x – 750 Watt Gold Efficiency for 120€

Hopefully this is enough or do you suggest we look for another PSU perhaps? Unsure about this one.

Graphics card: We were looking to get a RX 5700 XT cause I was worried that she might have problems during the modelling if we went with something super low-end, but my friend talked me out of it saying they get too hot. He offered me his barely used GTX 1080 Ti for 350€. It’s in a really good condition and fully functioning. I know it's an older graphics card, but it is still very potent right?

All in all that's a bit less than 1650€. If this machine would work fine this way for her to work and render on it I'd be very happy. If by spending a bit more I could make it work drastically better I'd be down with that too, though. If this is practically useless the way it is right now then I'm OK with spending up to 2000€, if more is needed then I'll bite the bitter pill, too. But to be perfectly honest, my budget was 1500€ to start with and with about currently 1650€ I'd be glad if it could stay this way or change minimally.

Thank you very much for your reply again and any further replies in advance!

[Tommy L]

You will need 64gb of RAM, for sure (for rendering high res multi-element, the buffer takes loads, max runs etc when rendering)

Cooler: Im no expert, but I like Noctua for air cooling. 

a 500gb SSD or M.2 SSD as a primary drive, but you'll need a storage drive min 2 TB regular spinning hard disk drive. And something to back that up to. 

Case: just make sure your components will fit.

GPU: I'd stick to a NVidia card. The 1080 should not cost 350 used, I dont know what your friend was smoking, the 1080 is the hottest card out there, draws alot of power. Should be a lot less than that, its outdated since the RTX cards came out. RTX 2070 is a good choice, or equivalent.

MB: Im not familiar. 

All that said...... You could potentially use the i5 machine you currently have as a workstation. You'd just need a decent GPU. Then you'd just need to build a render node instead of a workstation. The advantages of offloading your render tasks would far outweigh any performance hit you take on the workstation. Many operations in 3ds Max do not take advantage of multi-threading. Rendering relies entirely on multi-threading, which is why I mentioned a compromise earlier when you make a work/render machine. Lots of slower threads in a render node, fewer faster threads in a workstation.

A node would consist of the fastest Ryzen you can afford and build the node around that. 

 

[Tommy L]

oh, just as an example....

My workstation is a i7-6700k based machine. 

My render node is a AMD Ryzen 3990X based machine.

My render node cost about 2x what my workstation cost. It feels like I drive a VW and leave the Ferrari in the garage, but its what gives the best efficiency. 

[kevin miller]

I am posting this in the event someone else finds this thread through a search like I did.

If you plan on doing any work in unreal, I would consider avoiding the Ryzen series of cpu processors.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1864073-noticing-light-build-time-difference-on-project-between-amd-ryzen-and-intel-i7

As for the use with offline renderers like vray or corona, it seems to do quite well so far.