bttt
PS!!! And a suggestion on an OS!! I dont need any crap!! word, internal games, and all the other garbage that comes with new!! I want to open the hood and see the engine nothing else!!
Budget - what’s the budget?
It’s about the only real tough question I think :D
These days more than ever, the old hotrodder adage applies: “speed is just a question of money. How fast do you want to go?”
If you want a monster that won’t choke on heavy processing loads, look at the AMD Threadripper processors.
It sounds like your wallet is open!
First, in the era of multi-cores, multiple discrete processors are not needed for a gaming rig. Many of the games wouldn’t make good use of them, and those are mostly used for Enterprise VM farms or possibly hand-coded calculations (stock trading, bitcoin).
So, I will assume you do NOT want to go with the M-series from Apple. (Performance is great but game selection is comparatively limited).
Asus is the leader in gaming motherboards. Supermicros are aimed more at business, but are well built, and worthy of consideration, especially if you just want performance and don’t need extra flashing lights!
I personally go with Intel for the chipsets, but gamers tend to go with a top of the line AMD Ryzen processor. nVidia presently makes the highest performing graphics cards, and for your application, that is as important as the processor. Get high speed on-board m.2 SSD (not PCI-E or USB based).
For Internet playing, get a service with highest throughput, but also lowest latency (no satellite, OTA). Cable connection is probably the fastest consumer option.
Make sure your case/motherboard has plenty of cooling! Don’t skimp on the power supply, many are overspec’ed compared to actual performance.
Finally, if you use the keyboard for your gaming, get one with real switches instead of membrane. I prefer a “clicky” keyboard, but a gamer might prefer short-throw keys.
Tom’s Hardware is a good reference guide for gamers.
The actual build experience should go smoothly if you are step-by-step and careful. Use a grounding strap.
Maybe the most important section is the forums where you can ask people to design a system for you based on what you'd like to do, evaluate a system that you propose to build on your own, and, read what this set of experienced and sometimes insanely intense group of people who build PCs have to say about all of it because there's a lot to learn. In many ways, it's like this place and those science threads that I've marveled at for years over the depth of the discussions which are almost always so far over my head that I'm basically Shane Falco throwing passes underwater at the beginning of The Replacements.
Decide what processor you want..i7, i9..etc. Go to Amazon. Order processor, compatible motherboard, memory, ssd or hdd drive, nvidia based GPU, case , power supply. That’s it. Make sure you have plenty of power because the gpu will be a power hog.
Source: I have built at least 3 pc’s over the years before ditching pc for Mac.
You’ve got quite a few options with an open budget. For 3d rendering I would stick to AMD Threadripper CPU and get an Nvidia GPU - at least an rtx 4070 or better. I’d dual boot windows and Linux with that combo for best experience. Use Linux to render as it’s a bit quicker.
I’m an IT engineer that manages thousands of desktops, but I also do 3D stuff in my spare time. PM me if you want more info.
The past 2 laptops I've bought, I've gotten good deals from HP. Last one was 3 years ago. I'm particular about the speed of processing, RAM (including both size and clock speed of RAM), and drive space and transfer rate (just saying it's SSD isn't enough). I was able to customize a laptop to make it basically a gamer's laptop minus the enhanced graphics, at IMHO a decent price. I didn't build it myself. It came built, but to my spec.
My 3-year-old laptop can casually run DB queries for my homemade projects like studying my solar inverter's telemetry export, while my C# app downloads market data into my investments DB (running in the same MS SQL service), while I'm watching or listening to a game. When I lead financial small groups, I'm sometimes asked, "But why should we invest if the market might go down like it did in year X?". I run a C# app I made that lets us choose a date range and sample portfolios, and within about 2 seconds it connects to the DB, queries it for closing prices of mutual funds within that portfolio, and display the chart to show that a 75% stock/25% bonds portfolio can handle all market downturns in the past few decades as long as you withdraw only 4% per year (as long as it's diversified across mutual funds in at least 40 asset classes).
PCPartPicker.com
If you go with a pc, A couple of points to keep in mind when looking for a “future-proof” pc,
1: thunderbolt 5 is a out to come out which triples the speed of file transfers and such- right now they have thunderbolt 4 which is around 40 gb a second read speed, which is no slouch, but thunderbolt 5 is said to deliver 120 gb- I don’t think it’s out yet though, but should be soon
2: make sure there are a couple of the faster USB 3.2 20 gb ports- this will speed up file transfers quite a bit too over the older USB types
If money is no object, get the fastest ram your motherboard can support- some is ddr5 @ about 3000, while the faster type is up around 7500 or so. No5 sure how much diff it makes, but again, if you’re looking for a “future-proof” machine, night wanna get th3 faster stuff incase future programs need it.
Im reading that intel 9,processors run pretty hot and require large power supply unit- might want to think about liquid cooling if you are going to be running the processor hard.
IF money really is not an issue, the falcon computers are top notch, using quality parts compared to budget pc makers- but they are expensive. I checked out their site just for giggles the other day, but didn’t see any mention of Thunderbolt- might wanna contact them and ask about it, see if they are available.
Long time system builder here. I would stick with an ASUS motherboard and Corsair for Ram and your Power supply. Intel or AMD is a toss-up but cooling is important and All in One watercooling systems are now inexpensive, easy to install and very reliable. Nvidia for your graphics.
For your O/S I would still go with Windows 11 for maximum compatibility for the programs you want to run as well as ease of use. There are hundreds of YouTube videos showing you how to do anything you might need to do as well as videos showing you how to streamline and remove unnecessary bloat. A couple hours of research and Windows 11 can be made to behave and run like a champ. Linux will require a lot more time to learn...
Wait until January when new GPUs are released and the AMD 9800x3d drops in price. Or get the 9950x3d (assuming it’s a great as everyone suspects).
Right now is NOT a good time to buy.
Thanks to ShadowAce and SunkenCiv for the pings!
There is a business in my city that custom builds laptops and desktops. Maybe there is something like that in your city?
Dell can build you a mighty fine computer and it will have a warranty.
For sure you need an nVidia GPU with at least 12 gig of ram in it.
Just curious. You are planning on going with a desktop tower, aren't you? I can't imagine how you can get 128 GB (or more) in a laptop.
I’ve not kept up on the latest. That said, for multi-threaded applications, I’d stay away from Windows...it doesn’t do a good job using large number of cores.
Blender on Linux? I don’t use MacOS so I can’t speak to that. If Blender uses threads in parallel then I’d get CPU’s/GPU’s with the most cores.
RAM is usually not the bottleneck. So long as you’re not hitting a swap file often, adding more RAM isn’t going to help - local caches on CPU/GPU are key, maybe look at CPU’s/GPU’s with larger caches per core. That said, SSD/NVMe/M.2 for drive storage.