1st time workstation build

kavo87

Hey everyone,

First time building so looking some help picking parts for it. Have filled out the template below.

1. What is your budget? - 1000 max.

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? - Main function will be Maya 2017 Toon Boom Harmony 14 and Adobe Photoshop.

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? - No have a copy

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? - No brand new build.

5. Do you need a monitor? - No

5b. If no, what resolution is your current monitor and do you plan to upgrade in the near future? -current monitor is 1080p, maybe in the future.

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? - No have all already.

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? - No

8. How can you pay? - Card or PayPal

9. When are you purchasing? - I can purchase now.

10. If you need help building it, where are you based? - No help needed.

Any suggestions are most welcome cheers.

minitrue

Toon Boom Harmony 14 recommends an i7 and a gtx970 and Maya 2017 recommends 16 GB of ram. With a max of €1000 I'm thinking something like the following is probably what you are looking at.

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (€223.54 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: MSI - B350 GAMING PRO CARBON ATX AM4 Motherboard (€131.88 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€146.89 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Crucial - MX300 525GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€149.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB G1 Gaming Video Card (€258.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: BitFenix - Nova ATX Mid Tower Case (€33.82 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - S12II 620W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€64.89 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €1030 give or take a euro or three

kavo87

minitrue wrote: »

Toon Boom Harmony 14 recommends an i7 and a gtx970 and Maya 2017 recommends 16 GB of ram. With a max of €1000 I'm thinking something like the following is probably what you are looking at.

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (€223.54 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: MSI - B350 GAMING PRO CARBON ATX AM4 Motherboard (€91.79 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€146.89 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Crucial - MX300 525GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€149.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB G1 Gaming Video Card (€258.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: BitFenix - Nova ATX Mid Tower Case (€33.82 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - S12II 620W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€64.89 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €990 give or take a euro or three

Thanks for that. How are the new AMD Ryzen? Have always gone with Intel? My current workstation in work uses a k2000 this should be a huge jump in performance? I know Toon Boom struggles with the 12GB I currently have so 16 would be the min required. As far as I know Maya uses the CPU to render I won't be doing full on rendering so the AMD should easily handle Maya?

minitrue

A gtx 1060 is something like 4-8 times the power of a k2000 with treble the ram so a massive jump in performance on the gpu. I picked a 1060 as Toon Boom recommends a 970 and a 1060 is comparable, it will work with less (like your k2000) so if you really think you should move money from the gpu to elsewhere you could drop down to a gtx1050/gtx1050ti (which would be double of more your K2000) though I didn't as Maya doesn't certify those (but it does certify onboard intel graphics so it's not that it wouldn't work on those but it gives you an idea of what they consider as sane). If you think your k2000 isn't that far off but you really want all the cpu you can get, changing to a 1050ti and a R7 1700 would make sense.

I've seen plenty of claims photoshop doesn't really benefit past a quad core and so for it an i7 would probably be a little quicker, but I'm pretty sure Maya and Toon Boom will both lap up everything it can get from Ryzen without caring too much about single core speed and it will be quicker there. Down the road you could probably get a significant cpu upgrade from the AMD platform but if you went with the i7 you wouldn't be likely to have much you could do. When it comes to the interactive work an i7 would probably edge out the Ryzen but once you hit render the Ryzen is going to race into the lead so your question about rendering at the end would reinforce my opinion (and it's just my opinion) that this is a job for Ryzen. I've been an Intel person for a long time, but horses for courses and I think Ryzen is likely the right choice for you.

You can see from the above that you would want another €150 to get up to 32GB of ram and that's not going to take a big drop down elsewhere. It's easy to upgrade that later so unless you think 32GB is vital I'd go with the 16GB and save up for the upgrade if you decide you really need it.

Obviously I just put in a 525GB SSD, if you know 240GB is enough that would open up a little wiggle room, likewise if 525GB isn't enough for you then you'll have to forgo SSD only (which I'd be loathe to do if it's possible) or pull money out of something else.

minitrue

Sigh, pcpartpicker seems to have an error so what's actually on amazon under that link is a different board! Unless someone suggests a different good board for this you can get it for about €130 from mindfactory and drop to a 430W PSU to end up less then €10 over the €1000 budget.

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor (€223.54 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: MSI - B350 GAMING PRO CARBON ATX AM4 Motherboard (€131.88 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€149.52 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Crucial - MX300 525GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€149.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB G1 Gaming Video Card (€258.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: BitFenix - Nova ATX Mid Tower Case (€34.02 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - ECO 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€46.46 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €1007 give or take a couple of euro

Xenoronin

This is essentially the build I specced for a friend last week for a similar budget. Putting it together this weekend. I put the Gigabyte B350 Gaming 3 board in that one, which seems to work well with the Corsair RAM.

minitrue

Thanks Xenoronin, that would squeeze it about €10 under budget even after bumping back up to the bigger PSU Could even have a few case choices then, and even more sticking with the 430W PSU which is enough ... I'm just always a little more comfortable leaving a bit more head-room then that (e.g. scope for swapping the gpu/cpu without needing to change PSU as well as just never running anywhere close to it's rated capacity).

Gehad_JoyRider

kavo87 wrote: »

Thanks for that. How are the new AMD Ryzen? Have always gone with Intel? My current workstation in work uses a k2000 this should be a huge jump in performance? I know Toon Boom struggles with the 12GB I currently have so 16 would be the min required. As far as I know Maya uses the CPU to render I won't be doing full on rendering so the AMD should easily handle Maya?

There amazing the really fast there great at multi-tasking their brilliant for photoshop great in after effects, and their price to performance is unbeatable your going to get 6 cores and 12 threads.

seriously why would you get a 4 core machine ?

TerrorFirmer

I would investigate fully before going with Ryzen.

Ryzen is better in general for multi-threaded apps, but in single thread the i7-7700K dominates the Ryzen 1600, so you really need to check it out fully because the 7700K is affordable in your budget as well.

I don't know much about Maya but I know a lot of it relies on single thread performance. People are way too quick to jump on Ryzen for everything non-gaming but this is still not always true.

There amazing the really fast there great at multi-tasking their brilliant for photoshop great in after effects, and their price to performance is unbeatable your going to get 6 cores and 12 threads.

In fairness that is totally false. The i7-7700K easily beats even the top end 1800X in Photoshop and wallops the 1600.

I say to the OP to ask around with people who use exactly the same software as you do. Ryzen is not automatically the right choice for non-gaming purposes but people seem to treat it like it is.

Serephucus

This might be something to take a look at. I wasn't able to find any Maya benches, but the first benchmark there - Corona - sound like some sort of GI ray-tracing rendering package that can be used with Maya. You'll know better than I will if they're relevant to you or not, but it's the closest I could find on a quick Google.

minitrue

I wouldn't race to jump on Ryzen for everything, but it's the Maya/Toon and particularly rendering aspects here that make me think it's probably the right choice (especially with the faster ram). As I mentioned above an i7 is probably going to best it for the interactive aspects but lose out on the rendering side (at least from what little clues I could find quickly). I did find someone finding an r7 1700 @ 3.8 rendering with Maya 2.5-3 times quicker then a comparable i7-3770 but of course the devil is in the detail as what exactly you are rendering with what sort of pipelines is going to make a difference, possibly a very big one. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/64cybn/ive_just_been_blown_away_by_ryzens_rendering/ Based on that some quick rough calculations suggests to me the stock R5 above would be rendering something like 20-25% quicker then a stock i7-7700K and I think the 7700K would take quite a bit of squeezing into the budget (probably means dropping to a gtx1050ti) and leave no real cpu upgrade possibility.

The sad reality is that it's probably very very hard to get a good read on the impact on your own workflows (not just the tools involved) without simply testing So pushing me over the edge would be the upgrade room that just isn't likely to exist with an i7 now.

Cuddlesworth

minitrue wrote: »

I wouldn't race to jump on Ryzen for everything, but it's the Maya/Toon and particularly rendering aspects here that make me think it's probably the right choice (especially with the faster ram).

For rendering, eg, workstation type workloads that have always been pushing towards more cores Ryzen is the right buy hands down.

If it was just photoshop a 7700k would be the better buy right now. But photoshop like other apps, has been moving towards parallelisation over the years. Considering the single threaded dominence of the 7700k, its not exactly blowing a 1700 out of the water, especially in terms of cost/performance.

kavo87

I have seen a lot of new builds going for a Ryzen setup but most of them seemed to be for gaming rigs.

I don't have a enough knowledge of CPUs and GPUs to know what 100%. From what I'm reading Ryzen seems to be impressive for the money. I suppose my initial thought was Intel as that's all I've every bought. The core programs been used will be Maya and Toonboom so if Ryzen would help me get the best out of them I'll happily go with them.

What would be a rival setup for my budget to the Ryzen. An i7 and compatible mono and could use everything else that was suggested?

minitrue

Let's not complicate things too much with the gaming arguments though photoshop is similar where really the i7 wins out in general as it depends more on single core speed then overall processing power (or at best sees little benefit to extra cores beyond about 4). Maya and the likes have long since been targeting workstations and servers (render-farms) with 6-20+ Xeon cores so they are much better suited to Ryzen.

If you swap over to the Intel 7700K, a B250 board, add a cooler (7700K doesn't come with one) and downgrade the ram to stock 2400MHz you would end up about €1120 (with a €30 cooler). Drop to the plain 7700 with no need for a cooler and it's about €1055 (and have dropped from 4.2GHz to 3.6GHz). So to stay in budget you would have to find some more savings which really means dropping down to a smaller SSD (I'm not even going to say no SSD as that's madness now imho) or weaker gpu (like the gtx1050ti which would still be double the k2000 you are used to but about half the gtx1060).

I'm going to stick to saying that your latest statement saying "Maya and Toonboom" are your core programs means the best bang for buck for you now and longer term is Ryzen and if you found another €100 I'd use to to bump up to the 8 core R7 and not an i7. In fact if you think 525GB is too much and about 250GB would be enough space for you you might even squeeze it in now by also dropping the ram to 2666MHz which is the stock speed for Ryzen, so perhaps I should even have dropped the ram to that already to scrape off maybe €25 as you said no overclocking, but my instincts would say the 3200MHz is worth it even if you don't bump it up immediately.

This is a bit of a holy war territory but I'd like to think I'm pretty pragmatic and in this case Ryzen is the choice I would recommend to you.

kavo87

The more I think about it and the great advice on this ryzen is the way to go. I've never over clocked so that's why I said no. Maybe in the future but for now it'll be a no.

The render farm in work is all powered by xeons so it does make perfect sense to go for ryzen with Maya going to be heavily used.

minitrue

It's "only" a €17 saving to drop the ram from DDR4 3200MHz to 2666MHz and overclocking the ram on Ryzen offers a bigger boost then usual as the cpu interconnect speed is locked to ram so it lets the cores talk to each other faster. If you flat out won't overclock then obviously it's a waste of €17 but I'd be giving it a go and I've never been an overclocker!

How hard would you say your budget is? An octo-core R7 1700 is about €100 more and 25% more powerful then then R5 1600 so it's in reach and worth aiming for if you can. Taking the extra edge off everything without being stupid (so 2666MHz ram, cheapest case, m-atx, trivially slower gpu, A-Data instead of the crucial SSD) you would be about €10 over budget with the octo-core:

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 1700 3.0GHz 8-Core Processor (€320.54 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (€95.89 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2666 Memory (€137.53 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: ADATA - Premier Pro SP900 512GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€139.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB WINDFORCE OC 6G Video Card (€247.94 @ Mindfactory)
Case: Zalman - ZM-T1 PLUS MicroATX Mini Tower Case (€23.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - ECO 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€46.46 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €1010 give or take a euro or two

I'd really rather add the extra 50-100 just to polish things up but if the above is already over-pushing the limit and you really don't want to ever think about any overclocking the above would be worth considering.

Is about 500GB sounding right to you, if you think roughly 250GB would already be plenty you could use that saving to to polish it up. If 500GB probably isn't enough then probably the octo-core or the budget should go out the window.

kavo87

minitrue wrote: »

It's "only" a €17 saving to drop the ram from DDR4 3200MHz to 2666MHz and overclocking the ram on Ryzen offers a bigger boost then usual as the cpu interconnect speed is locked to ram so it lets the cores talk to each other faster. If you flat out won't overclock then obviously it's a waste of €17 but I'd be giving it a go and I've never been an overclocker!

How hard would you say your budget is? An octo-core R7 1700 is about €100 more and 25% more powerful then then R5 1600 so it's in reach and worth aiming for if you can. Taking the extra edge off everything without being stupid (so 2666MHz ram, cheapest case, m-atx, trivially slower gpu, A-Data instead of the crucial SSD) you would be about €10 over budget with the octo-core:

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 1700 3.0GHz 8-Core Processor (€320.54 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (€95.89 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2666 Memory (€137.53 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: ADATA - Premier Pro SP900 512GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€139.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB WINDFORCE OC 6G Video Card (€247.94 @ Mindfactory)
Case: Zalman - ZM-T1 PLUS MicroATX Mini Tower Case (€23.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - ECO 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€46.46 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €1010 give or take a euro or two

I'd really rather add the extra 50-100 just to polish things up but if the above is already over-pushing the limit and you really don't want to ever think about any overclocking the above would be worth considering.

Is about 500GB sounding right to you, if you think roughly 250GB would already be plenty you could use that saving to to polish it up. If 500GB probably isn't enough then probably the octo-core or the budget should go out the window.

I agree I've pushed it to the ryzen 1700 I think it's going to be worth the extra money. I think I'll need the larger drive Maya and PS are large enough installs and file sizes can get quite big so I'll like to have the larger ssd to run all off it. I could also add a second drive at a later stage. When it comes to the mobo is there much difference between them when the there's a price difference of 10-20? I was thinking of a cheap case other than them maybe not been as pleasing to look at then the more expensive ones but would the cable management be harder in a cheap case and airflow been worse?

minitrue

Quick answer as I'm out the door for the day now in a minute.

I think the main motherboard difference (between the 2 Gigabytes) is micro-atx Vs atx which just cuts off some expansion ports (and also means you can put it in a smaller and cheaper case) though it would also have bigger heatsinks on the full atx.

If you aren't bothered by size (or needing to scrape out every last euro) then a bigger atx case (even with the m-atx board) leaves a lot more room for cables and letting things breathe a bit more easily. The cpu is 65W and the gpu 120W so combined they are about the same as a gtx1080 (and significantly less then older generations performance cards), throw in no overclocking and this build really shouldn't have a big issue with cooling.

To be honest the biggest thing to me for cable management is a modular or semi-modular psu, if you end up with another €20 to put in you could get something like https://de.pcpartpicker.com/product/xVkD4D/seasonic-power-supply-ssr450rm which is both semi-modular and 80+ Gold certified (so more efficient which also means a little bit less heat for the system to handle).

No comment on appearances of cases, that's very much a personal thing.

I think it's very much a case of wiggling around the edges of your budget on those small luxuries between budget power and something a little nicer but not significantly different (the jump to the gold psu probably pays for itself in electricity bills over the life of the machine though).

At this point I may be confusing you as much as helping and it might be time for someone else to jump in with another opinion based on all the above info

kavo87

minitrue wrote: »

Quick answer as I'm out the door for the day now in a minute.

I think the main motherboard difference (between the 2 Gigabytes) is micro-atx Vs atx which just cuts off some expansion ports (and also means you can put it in a smaller and cheaper case) though it would also have bigger heatsinks on the full atx.

If you aren't bothered by size (or needing to scrape out every last euro) then a bigger atx case (even with the m-atx board) leaves a lot more room for cables and letting things breathe a bit more easily. The cpu is 65W and the gpu 120W so combined they are about the same as a gtx1080 (and significantly less then older generations performance cards), throw in no overclocking and this build really shouldn't have a big issue with cooling.

To be honest the biggest thing to me for cable management is a modular or semi-modular psu, if you end up with another €20 to put in you could get something like https://de.pcpartpicker.com/product/xVkD4D/seasonic-power-supply-ssr450rm which is both semi-modular and 80+ Gold certified (so more efficient which also means a little bit less heat for the system to handle).

No comment on appearances of cases, that's very much a personal thing.

I think it's very much a case of wiggling around the edges of your budget on those small luxuries between budget power and something a little nicer but not significantly different (the jump to the gold psu probably pays for itself in electricity bills over the life of the machine though).

At this point I may be confusing you as much as helping and it might be time for someone else to jump in with another opinion based on all the above info

Yeah I know what you mean. There's always something extra you can get if you can spare a few more euro. I suppose the main fear is buying parts that end up not been compatible with each other and fit in the case I'll be happy. With so many different manufacturers of the same parts sometimes €1-€10 in the difference was there any real difference between them, I can't imagine so.

I think what you guys have suggested is going to give me a real solid build.