Workstation for Cinema 4D, Arnold CPU, X-Particles

[drymetal]

Hi all. Reading all the posts, and articles, it seems like I'm joining a long line of poor sods that have beaten their head against the wall on this topic of getting a better computer. Misery loves company I suppose.

I want to build a workstation for Cinema 4D, Arnold CPU, and X-Particles. I will be using Substance Designer, After Effects and Premiere too. Part of my push to Arnold CPU is due to the inflation of GPU prices. I have an RTX 2070 now btw.

I was looking at getting a system with either a 3970x or 3960x, but my understanding is that X-Particles will take a hit with these CPUs. If I go with a 11900k or something, then Arnold would take a hit. I was also considering the 5950x, but I don't know that it is as well balanced between those two problems as I seem to think it would be. If I got the 5950x, I could get a 3000 series GPU in addition. Probably a 3070. If I go with the TR CPUs, then I'll stick with my 2070, and upgrade the GPU later when and if the prices ever get normal again.

I should mention that my understanding is that Arnold CPU with a TR, would be pretty fast, compared to a GPU render option.

With all that wonderful stuff being said, Is there a way to balance this? X-Particles and Arnold CPU?
Might it be better to just skip C4D, get the 3970x, and use Maya or Houdini which both have CPU renderers, not to mention that Bifrost and Houdini seemingly utilize multicore CPUs better?
Another option, might it be better to pay an insanely inflated price for a 3090, get a 11900k CPU, and use X-Particles and Redshift instead of Arnold?

I'm "comfortable" enough in C4D, Houdini and Maya to really go with any of them (beginner). The question is just being able to really dive into the software, learn it, and have a system that won't get in my way. In addition, my wife is adamant that it be a system that fills my needs for many years down the line and is upgradable.

My interests now are 3D modeling, compositing, dynamics, and VFX. That may or may not change. Though I've been lightly modelling as a hobby for about 15 years.

Any thoughts on this? Thanks!

 

[drymetal]

BTW, my budget is $3-4k. I also already have a 4TB M.2 SSD, 32GB Ram but only at 2133h. And the RTX 2070 GPU.

 

[Alex Glawion]

This might be somewhat biased, but I love redshift and have no plans to go back to a cpu renderer. You just can't beat the iterative capabilities of gpu renderers, especially for previews.

Additionally, because you can use high-clocking, medium to lower core count CPUs for GPU renderers, you also have maximum active work performance / viewport performance.

With TRs, you get lots of cores, but are a good bit slower in active work.

X-Particles Performance depends on the type of sims you are after, check these benchmarks here. E.g. if you're doing mostly fluids, high ore count TRs are great. For everything else, not so much.

GPU prices are already coming back down, might not be too long until you can buy them at MSRP, just FYI.

 

[drymetal]

Well, let me ask you a couple questions concerning GPU then, if you don't mind.

1. Do you think a single card like the 3070 would be good while learning 3D? (With the intent to expand when pricing comes down.)
2. Would you go with the 5950x or the 11900k if that were the only card? The X-Particles benchmarks seem to imply the 5950x would do the best (though it isn't listed.)
3. Do you think a laptop with a 11900k and a 3080 laptop GPU would work well enough with XP, Redshift, C4D, etc? Or would that be a waste of money? I like the idea of mobility. If I get a desktop, I'm going to use some type of remote app to be able to use it while in the office 60 hours a week. Laptop Example. This says it has 165w for the GPU.
4. Would a single 3070 in Redshift be faster than a TR in Arnold CPU? I can't seem to find any clear way to compare them with benchmarks.

Thanks for responding!

 

[Alex Glawion]

1. An RTX 3070 already is a great GPU in itself. Superb GPU Rendering performance and will accelerate any accompanying tasks and apps sufficiently (like After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere, any 3D Viewport Effects etc.)

2. The 5950X (we didn't have it in our lab unfortunately) would perform better than the 11900k because there are many areas of X-Particles that can make good use of more threads, just not of extremely high core counts. Pairing a medium number of Cores (e.g. 16) with the single core performance of a 5950X, that CPU will lead above the 11900k unless you are only doing sims in very specific areas that only use a single core. The benefit of having at least a couple of more cores than the 11900k's 8 for other workloads apart from X-Particles too is a benefit. Unless you're building an X-particles Caching node with no other workloads.

3. I didn't know there was a laptop with an 11900k available. Laptops use CPUs that draw less power which also means the CPUs perform worse than their desktop counterparts. Because of better cooling, more allowed power draw, a desktop will always perform better than a laptop at similar price points. I'd think that that particular Laptop would be an atomic reactor in terms of temperature and an airpülane at take-off when doing some more demanding work on it. There's just not enough room for efficient cooling. If that doesn't bother you, a Laptop might be a viable option.

4. Depends on the TR. You can't directly compare them because GPUs don't run the same render code as CPUs do, but $ for $ I'd say the 3070 (599$ msrp) should easily pull ahead of a TR 2920X (650$ msrp).