upgrade old workstation or build new?

[Scott]

Howdy, hoping you might have some advice. I'm a freelance 3d generalist, working mostly in Houdini/C4D/Blender and rendering in Redshift/Octane, I also fire up After Effects quite a bit.

I've been working on an 8 year old HPZ840 workstation which is pretty fast, but the AMD Threadrippers and Nvidia RTX cards seem appealing, especially the RTX.
My current workstation has dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2687W v3 @ 3.10GHz processors and 64GB ram, it also has a Nvidia Quadro K6000 video card. The machine is quick but I'd like to get into a more modern Nvidia card for Redshift/Octane stuff. It seems though, that my case and power supply won't make it easy to stack a couple new video cards in there. So I'm looking at possibly building a new machine but I don't want to invest in something that underperforms what I already have. Hoping you might have any advice on this, I'd be happy to purchase through your affiliate links. Here's a basic build I put together, any recommendations?


CGDirector.com Parts List: https://www.cgdirector.com/pc-builder/?=dn3mn0i0Qnl

CPU: AMD Threadripper 2920X 3.5GHz 12-Core Processor ($494.24)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 ($79.90)
Motherboard: ASRock X399 Professional Gaming ATX TR4 ($257.86)
GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB - Asus Turbo ($605.91)
GPU #2: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB - Asus Turbo ($605.91)
GPU #3: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB - Asus Turbo ($605.91)
Memory: 64GB (4 x 16GB) G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C16 ($359.99)
Storage PCIe-SSD: Samsung 970 EVO PLUS 1TB M.2 Solid State Drive ($167.19)
Power Supply: EVGA Supernova 1200 P2 80+ Platinum Power Supply ($319.99)
Case: Corsair Carbide Series Air 540 ($176.49)
Total: $3673.39

 

[Alex Glawion]

Hey Scott,
Your old dual e5 2687w v3 10 Core CPUs should score about 3300 Cinebench R15 points in total, so the new single Threadripper CPU might not be able to perform better in this regard. It does have higher clock speeds for faster/smoother active work performance, but with its 12 Cores it doesn't reach the multi-core performance of the two CPU E5-2687W v3.

That said, if it's mainly gpu performance for octane and redshift you are looking for, then the 2920X would be a good cpu for supporting this. If you'd like more cpu render power though, do take a look at the 3rd gen Threadripper 3960X.

As for the GPU Performance, I'd suggest to get a single 2080Ti first, and add more when you have the money. With 3x RTX 2060 you already have your PC filled up almost entirely without much expansion possibilities. The 2080Ti is a bit faster than 2x 2060.

The other components look great! Just make sure to get another Motherboard if you do decide to go with the 3960X cpu.

 

[Scott]

Alex,
Thanks so much for the great advice, this is super helpful!