Advice needed for digital art/3D modelling pc build

[Rardain]

Hi everyone

I want to update my current digital art rig which is getting long in the tooth now.

I use Corel Painter, Sketchbook Pro, Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint but I also use MODO and Zbrush so I have a bit of a line to tread between 3d modelling and digital art.

My current pc spec is:

Asus Sabertooth X58 mainboard
i7 950 running at 3.07GHz (4 cores)
24GB DDR3 (pc3-10600)
Nvidia GTX950 GPU
Hiper Type M880 PSU (860Watts)
Samsung SSD 840 Evo 250GB for my system drive
Samsung SSD 850 Evo 1TB for my internal storage

I have a Wacom Cintiq pro 24 and an additional 27" Asus monitor for reference work.

I am primarily looking to upgrade the motherboard, CPU and memory and after doing some research am considering the AMD Ryzen 3900X or XT and 64GB DDR4 but have no idea what motherboard to go for and what clock speed for the memory.

I don't like the idea of liquid cooling (to my mind liquid and electricity don't belong anywhere near each other) so I was thinking of going for a Dark Rock Pro 4 cooler.

I also have an Nvidia GTX 1070Ti (8GB GDDR5) that is about to be swapped out of my gaming rig so wondered if this would be good enough to use in my art pc?

The Hiper PSU certainly has enough wattage but I'm not sure if it will have the right connectors for a modern motherboard and it's not modular - it's been a good few years since I last built a pc and I haven't really been keeping up with the tech, hence my quest for advice here.

I have a budget of around £1500 ($1890)

Thanks.

 

[Alex Glawion]

Hey and thanks for asking!
At current pricing I can't recommend getting the XT variants of the 3rd gen ryzen cpus. You get a small performance boost at best. The 3900X is a great pick and should be available at a reasonable price.

You'll need RAM that is clocked at 3200Mhz or 3600Mhz to get the best performance from 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs. We have a RAM for Ryzen Guide here if you'd like to read it (https://www.cgdirector.com/best-memory-ram-amd-ryzen-cpus-3600-3700x-3900x/), or here are some recommends:

64GB (4 x 16GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 C16
64GB (4 x 16GB) G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C16
64GB (4 x 16GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 C16

The Dark Rock Pro 4 Cooler is excellent and we like to recommend it for many CPUs. I am currently running a 3950X in my workstation with this cooler and it performs excellently.

The Hiper m880 should be fine powering the new Motherboard. It has all the connectors require (1x 20/24-Pin, 1x 4-Pin ATX12V, 1x 8-Pin EPS12V, 2x 8-Pin PCIe, 4x 6-Pin PCIe, 4x SATA, 7x IDE, 2x Floppy ). It's not the newest ATX standard, but the 24pin and 4-pin 12v are there.

I suggest going with a x570 Motherboard for the 3900X - some good picks are the following:

ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE
ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus
MSI X570 Tomahawk
MSI X570 Unify
ASRock X570 Taichi

(or B550 would we good to, if you don't need the x570 features)

 

[Rardain]

Hi Alex, thank you for the excellent advice.

As I mentioned, I will have a GTX 1070 Ti going spare once I upgrade the GPU for my gaming pc, however, I am wondering if this will be a significant bottleneck when it comes to render times in MODO and Keyshot for Zbrush. I don't expect it would cause any problems for things like Photoshop or Painter though.

I have been looking at some quite reasonably priced RTX2070 Super GPU's like the Ventus

MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8GB VENTUS GP OC Turing Graphics Card

Buy from Scan - MSI GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER VENTUS GP OC 8GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing Graphics Card, 2560 Core, 1605MHz GPU, 1785MHz Boost

www.scan.co.uk

 

[Alex Glawion]

A 1070 Ti is still a really decent GPU for many workloads. It won't be a bottleneck even in rendering, but of course there are more powerful GPUs

I'd say do some work and when you notice after a while that you spend lots of time waiting for your renders to finish, get a better gpu. Maybe the Nvidia RTX 30xx gpus will be out by then.

 

[Rardain]

Cheers Alex, much appreciated

When I have my rig built I will post up some photos.