PC to be used for animation course in college.

zxxtonyxxz

I am going to do an animation course in college next year and I was wondering if you guys could help. I need a PC which can run applications like it is nobody's business. If you know of any pre-built ones that would suit me better but if not could you guys recommend me any parts price is not an issue at the moment but should be realistic. Thanks!

Digital Solitude

What programs will you be using, and are they CPU heavy or just RAM heavy (assumption)

zxxtonyxxz

Digital Solitude wrote: »

What programs will you be using, and are they CPU heavy or just RAM heavy (assumption)

I am not sure of the programmes but I know for sure it will be both CPU and RAM heavy.

ED E

Fill out the questionnaire from the stickies.

Eoinmc97

revit, autocad, rhino and a few other programs which all share the same driver sets etc as Zbrush, mudbox etc etc. all want high core counts with high speeds across the cores. The FX-8370 and the Xeon E3-1225 V5 are good candidates here.
GPU wise, AMD take the lead here, as CUDA development has stagnated and nVidia are difficult to deal with proprietary stuff. The R9 380 4GB is a great card, that has enough VRAM for high-end 1440p animation rendering (it's not the best, but the 390X is twice the price) and would be drastically faster than if your CPU were to do it.
You shouldn't need 16GB RAM, but then again, if you are going to multitask a lot, then 8GB might run out quickly.
Finally, get a 240GB SSD from the Samsung Evo 850 range. They are more expensive than say, the Crucial BX200, but that's because it maintains a consitently higher R/W speed at all sizes. This will reduce loading times of your applications significantly.

So a recap for the Xeon build:
Xeon E3 1225-V5 €225
Z170A MSI Pro board: €110 (some handy features in this board for office related work)
16GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM: €60
Sapphire R9 380 4GB GPU: €210
Samsung EVO 850 series 240GB ssd: €80
(Optional) 1TB Western Digital Blue HDD: €45
A PSU from Corsair, beQuiet, Seasonic or XFX at 500W: €60
Case of your choice and size (price may vary)
That comes to €725/€770 if HDD included.
An AMD FX8370 build will cost €690/€735 with a 990X Motherboard.

frozenfrozen

few years ago 32gb would have been 300+ euro, but it's so cheap at the moment that you might as well go for it.

You should try find out what programs you'll be using that way you'll know whether you need loads of gpu power or cpu

Eoinmc97

32GB won't be needed. He's a college student, this is really just a stepping stone PC. If he uses it in the professional world, he can always add more if he ever feels a bottleneck, but then again, bottlenecks will be experienced mostly by non-GPU accellerated tasks and Thread intensive programmes runnning simultaneously.
But yeah, I remember when DDR4 16GB kits touched the €200 price point. Especially Corsair's.

Recurve360

Out of interest where will you be doing your course?
I know LIT Clonmel do an animation course and the main animation program they use is Toon Boom and Flash. Its not that intensive. You could get away with an i5 and somewhat decent graphics card. The Xeon build seems good value for money.

If its in clonmel I could let you know what subjects and software you would mainly be using...

zxxtonyxxz

Recurve360 wrote: »

Out of interest where will you be doing your course?
I know LIT Clonmel do an animation course and the main animation program they use is Toon Boom and Flash. Its not that intensive. You could get away with an i5 and somewhat decent graphics card. The Xeon build seems good value for money.

If its in clonmel I could let you know what subjects and software you would mainly be using...

I will be doing it in the I.T in Tralee.

Recurve360

Ok cool, Cant go wrong with Eoins Xeon build above. You could save a little going for AMD but youll lose out slightly with render times His build would be fine

Skerries

what kind of monitor would he need for this?
would you need something more up market or would a basic panel do?

Recurve360

Skerries wrote: »

what kind of monitor would he need for this?
would you need something more up market or would a basic panel do?

Honestly for the duration of college 1080p screen is plenty, will usually render out at 480p or 720p at most. No point going 2k or above until he needs to. It will be more affordable then. If anything I would just get a 1080p monitor and a second hand 17 or 19" to use as a second screen for plugins. But even thats not that important. Im doing 3rd year animations/3d work on a laptop most of the time and it does the job.

I have an Xeon build for anything taxing on the CPU.