3D Rendering PC Build [$1500]

[louis_nguyen]

Hello guys. I am currently getting into the 3D field as I am learning Maya, modeling and rigging. Therefore, I want a PC build that fits nicely, has full support with Maya and maybe a little bit of high quality gaming for entertaining purpose
I am having myself 3 builds that very confuse me right now. They are different in term of RAM and VGA. All of your advices are very appreciated

1.

- CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo Boost ) Ivy Bridge LGA 1155
- Air-cooling: Cooler Master X6
- Mainboard: Asus P8Z77-M Pro
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 16GB ( 4x4GB ) DDR3 bus 1600 cas 9
- VGA: Asus HD 7970 DirectCu II TOP 3GB ( 384 Bit ) DDR5
- SSD & HDD: owned
- PSU: Corsair Gaming GS800 V2 800W 80 Plus Bronze Active PFC
- Case: Corsair 300R

2.

- CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo Boost ) Ivy Bridge LGA 1155
- Air-cooling: Cooler Master X6
- Mainboard: Asus P8Z77-M Pro
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 16GB ( 4x4GB ) DDR3 bus 1600 cas 9
- VGA: Nvidia Quadro Fermi 2000
- SSD & HDD: owned
- PSU: Corsair Gaming GS800 V2 800W 80 Plus Bronze Active PFC
- Case: Corsair 300R

3.

- CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo Boost ) Ivy Bridge LGA 1155
- Air-cooling: Cooler Master X6
- Mainboard: Asus P8Z77-M Pro
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 8GB ( 2x4GB ) DDR3 bus 1600 cas 9
- VGA: running SLI on 2 cards GTX 570 Direct CU II 1280MB ( 320Bits ) DDR5
- SSD & HDD: owned
- PSU: Corsair Gaming GS800 V2 800W 80 Plus Bronze Active PFC
- Case: Corsair 300R

 

[Draven35]

Go with a NVidia 660 or 670 Ti for your GPU. Don't worry about the Quadro and don't bother with SLI.

 

[unksol]

Go with a NVidia 660 or 670 Ti for your GPU. Don't worry about the Quadro and don't bother with SLI.

Except neither of those cards are in his list, both are slower than the 7970 for games, and both are significantly slower of Maya....

The Quadro is best for Maya of those 3, but if you want to game too the 7970 is the perfect balance.

www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-Maya-2013-GPU-Acceleration-166

 

[abbadon_34]

If you afford it I'd definately go for a 6-core 12-thread Sandy Bridge-E , and go for the current high end AMD graphics card for uncrippled OpenCL performance. The current 6xx Nvidia series is crippled on OpenCL to protect their workstation cards. It is likely you'll find a workstation gpu that will out perform the gaming cards on specific rendering apps, for a price, money and game FPS. But this is more of a heavily threaded workstation build than a gaming build, right?

 

[louis_nguyen]

If you afford it I'd definately go for a 6-core 12-thread Sandy Bridge-E , and go for the current high end AMD graphics card for uncrippled OpenCL performance. The current 6xx Nvidia series is crippled on OpenCL to protect their workstation cards. It is likely you'll find a workstation gpu that will out perform the gaming cards on specific rendering apps, for a price, money and game FPS. But this is more of a heavily threaded workstation build than a gaming build, right?

Thanks for your mentioning, I did some researches on CPU cores and finally concluded that I would need as many cores as I can afford while rendering in Maya. Therefore, the cost of the CPU as well as the mobo go up and there's nothing I can do but reduce the VGA, due to my fixed $1500 budget Moreover, I think that I won't need such an Quadro card at this point because I am still studying the basic of Maya so the GTX 660 probably fit with me for maybe a year. Then, I will upgrade to the Nvidia Quadro Series, depends on my work.

And here some changes in my build. Please take a look and give me some more advices.

- CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Sandy Bridge-E LGA 2011
- Air-cooling: Cooler Master X6
- Mainboard: Asus P9X79 Gen3 LGA 2011
- RAM: 2 kits of Corsair Vengeance Blue 8GB ( 2x4GB ) DDR3 bus 1600 cas 9
- VGA: Asus Nvidia GTX 660 Direct CU OC 2048MB ( 256 Bit ) DDR5
- SSD & HDD: owned
- PSU: Corsair Gaming GS600 V2 600W 80 Plus Bronze Active PFC
- Case: Corsair Carbide Series 300R Windowed Mid-Tower Case

 

[abbadon_34]

you need a quad channel memory kit with the Sandy Bridge-E