The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Buying a Computer for Blender

[@MWSculpts]

Personally the timing of this could not have been better as I am currently researching a build specifically for Blender use. Thanks Grant for this fantastic video!

[@anthonyzornig]

Thanks for sharing the info that you are/ were sponsored. Great transpenrency ! Thx !

[@only1schmiddy]

Completely new to Blender and rendering in general but I tinker in AutoCAD for 3d printing so I'm trying to use Blender sculpting in particular for the more organic forms that autocad battles with. But once you start with one thing in Blender it's a rabbit hole with all it can do. Love your videos as they are easy to follow and very informative. Thanks for all the hard work you put into your videos.

[@bumstudios8817]

Wait til you slide to unity or unreal… lol real time is the way to go!

[@jeremythompson1905]

Normally I tend to frown at videos over 10 mins, bc ppl tend to ramble on or fumble a lot. This is so concise and you cover so much data that I don’t think is being talked about. Like you want fast renders? You want to push your computer during development? Start here. Not that you can’t optimize but this is how you get the bang for your Buck.

[@derekmoore1387]

You’re a blessing for novices like me who are growing into things. As always, I appreciate everything you do!

[@thebritishengineer8027]

I have built one or two performance machines in the past from work stations, to servers and gaming PC's. My current build was designed purposely for Blender where I regularly work with 3.8+ Gigabyte model files. My advice, you must have PCIe 4.0 and two fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives a 500Gb for the OS (Linux is best and 25% faster with Blender) and a 1Tb for your work in progress, I also use a 2Gb standard SATA for on machine archive. Video card, due to the price hike I'm still running an 8Gb RX 5700 which is a good card for Blender. Going AMD/Intel well that's personal preference, I like AMD's Ryzen 7 5800x it has a decent Core clock and is well priced. Your going to to torture the mainboards VRM's, MSI build some nice X57 mainboards with this in mind but read the reviews... they have also made some crap my own board is the the MSI Tomahawk X570. For power a decent PSU with true 700 watt delivery. 16Gb of RAM in 2x8Gb's, it's cheaper and your going to need another 2x8Gb's... yes your going to populate all four memory slots eventually. CASE be conservative it's a metal box spend your cash on performance. Cooling, don't skimp. Air cooling is cost effective water cooling is quieter if you know what you are doing. Clossed loop stuff off the shelf is good if you can get good deals I got a Corasir H81 for the CPU that seems to do a geat job. Screens.. I use 2x 27" curved screens on a 3rd party central mount. Try and get something with 140+MHz refresh it's better on your eyes, anything over 2K is bollocks. Your eye can't actually see it and it's pointless for Blender.(I assume I will get comments on that). Audio for tunes while you work.... sorry PC speakers/headsets market is so full of cheap crap with a high price tag I'm lost. If your listen to anything after 1986 or rap buy any old crap. I used to sell decent Hi Fi (no boss or bang & olufson) so I have a trusty pair of Bowers & Wilkins MM-01's for film and classical music. You may not get what you want for £1200, but you can move towards it. Buy what you need now with a view to adding to it. One last point. empty your temp folder every week and don't fill your SSD's past 84%. Well that's it from me, this was a bit long but hope it helps.

[@JordanMatyka]

wow, is Blender really that much faster on Linux? Is that for any specific Blender aspect (sculpting, sims, rendering?) or overall?

[@peca007]

@@JordanMatyka AFAIK it is due to bad Windows task scheduler. May be there is another reason but at overall Blender is way faster on Linux even in rendering.

[@JordanMatyka]

@@peca007 I really need to start using Linux at home

[@capawesome3d988]

Ill resume it: Get at least a Ryzen 5 5600X,, RTX 3070 (3060 is good enough), 32gb ram and SSD. thats it. :D

[@grabbitt]

m.2 SSD i think just for the extra tiny bit of speed :) also 16GB of RAM is ok and on testing the machine with some dense scenes it worked fine

[@eliaslns7143]

@@grabbitt i do have 8 ram

[@rizkyirawan5952]

You guys think i5 12400 gen 12 good enough ? Need the budget for upgrade my gpu to 3070, right now im using rx570

[@InferomInferthAMANth]

@@rizkyirawan5952 Bro have you settled for 12400?

[@notdarkpark]

Is 3050 good? Found a pc that’s in my price range but it says 3050

[@BMH1965]

Don't go above 16 core CPU as the extra cores not only cost a lot more there is a huge core speed drop off above 16 cores (meaning single speed is reduced). The current cost of GPU mean that the new 40xx mid-level examples are closely priced to the low-level.

[@ShagunDamadia]

I use RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5 3600, works pretty good for me. Sometimes it crashes when using 4K textures, but with patience it does good job.

[@chaosordeal294]

A 3060 should be able to toss around 4K textures like nothing.

[@ShagunDamadia]

@@chaosordeal294 You are right, but when having a lot of models, it's not really butter smooth. Example, when I first tried Kitbash 3D set, everything had 4K textures but it continued to crash again and again, then I had to work in new file with few 4k files and some 2K. It can happen with any GPU to be honest, it's important to learn how to optimize your workflow rather than blaming the setup every time.

[@stuartfury3390]

@@chaosordeal294 12gb vram is barely enough for 4k textures a lot of the time.

[@Gavrev]

Nice oversight man! I find it interesting that your latter day general recommendation sits around the £1200 mark, which was pretty much bang on to my total purchase cost at the end of 2017 - a self-built affair, and a very welcome upgrade, from a 10+ year old PC. At the time GPU's were a bit over RRP (not as bad as it has been of late), but I managed to offset the cost (an EVGA GTX-1070SC) with the CPU (Ryzen 1600) which was only £136 at a time when the going RRP was £229. All in all I've been happy with it but it's nice to find you making this video. A lot is often spoken of about gaming performance but not so often with productivity. The most crucial part does seem to be the complexity of the various ways in which software like Blender may choose to use your system resources, which appears to make the difference when it comes to component priority. In this respect I get the feeling the quality of PC's lifespan with respect to performance doesn't actually change as much as I imagined, or maybe that's just my perspective having last made good on a 10 year iteration! Perhaps with all the above in mind my own system will be plenty good for at least another five years before I'd notice a significant difference.

[@iandonkin6762]

The best video I’ve seen to help with blender specific PC’s - it’s a minefield out there, but I am pretty sure that my son is going to be happier for me having watched this and being able to guide him from a better informed viewpoint. Of course he will want to game on the same PC so it’s still not going to be all plain sailing! Thanks for sharing your thoughts 👍

[@yorkipudd1728]

I bought Lenovo legion 15 Ryzen7 5800h 3060 to use on external monitors. Faster than the suggested 5600x in laptop form. Screen is crap, but it flies after swapping for 32GB 3200ram. £899 Currys UK plus 90 for memory. I'm happy with it. 2 bios updates in 2 months made it cooler and a little quieter fan wise.

[@kellya.9219]

Great video! I've been using blender for about 2 years. I've upgraded my laptop partially for gaming and partially so I had a machine that could handle several design programs open at once without lighting on fire and crashing. I invested in Alienware r7 with Nvidia 3080 and Intel i7. Hope it does the job well with blender 🤞🤞

[@kenkioqqo]

I always gain a lot of vital information about Blender-related subjects from all your videos, Grant. Am planning to assemble a PC for Blender next week, and this is just the kind of advice I needed.

[@aasciutti]

Got to this video now that I'm buying a new PC, but been using Blender for 2 years in a Intel i5 3rd gen, 3.00ghz, 16GB, Radeon 550 4GB. I never use Cycles, only for Bake, but Eevee can be used for very complex scenes, with high level of details. Render do takes a lot even in Eevee, but is possible to make short animations. It was perfect to learn and start showing some art work.

[@SaltedMallows]

Using chapter categories for a video like this would be majorly helpful for referencing this guide.

[@grabbitt]

Thanks I completely forgot

[@SaltedMallows]

@@grabbitt Thank You for considering them

[@tvs3497]

Good to know. I've started putting a system together; i7 10th Gen 16 core CPU, 32GB RAM, Win 11. I wasn't sure what GPU to get so for now I just stuck an old GeForce 1030 2GB in it. It does okay in Eevee rendering but Cycles is out of the question. I suspect the graphics card is going to be 40% of my total budget, maybe more since I plan on using this box in a commercial endeavor. Thanks for the info.

[@BlackoutGamingChannel]

you need to put 0:00 in the timestamps to get it to show as official chapters otherwise its just links to time locations. still works but may as well take advantage :)

[@grabbitt]

Thanks

[@BlackoutGamingChannel]

@@grabbitt I think it's a bit silly that it doesn't recognize it if you don't out 0:00 timestamp but hey, here we are

[@BlackoutGamingChannel]

@@grabbitt you might need to title it like 0:00 intro

[@Snowaxe3D]

I have GTX 1660 6Gb, and It's not the best but it does the job nicely. And I agree with the point that, It's better to get a tower PC instead of a laptop, Hardware sounds the same but performs differently. Before this, I used to work on a 7yr old laptop with AMD r5, The rendering time for me had changed a lot, previously at 500 samples my laptop took about 1 hour to render 1 frame, My New PC render the same in just a few seconds.

[@RoseKindred]

Thank you. I really needed this. I am looking at pre-builts now because I want to move on to sculpting and my current one weeps thermal paste.

[@proudindian0212]

Thanks Grant, I've been looking for such a video for quite some time but there was none until this came. Thanks mate!!

[@gdog8170]

I am running lates blender on my a4-5300b by a miracle blender is indeed amazing

[@thereturnofX420]

grant always coming through with great content for the blender community

[@goosel8955]

Bro... Right time.. Just searched it for help. You popped up again!!!!!!

[@mitthrawnuruodo1730]

Video came at the perfect time! I have a Mac but realize that it isn’t the best for blender and was wondering about getting another laptop.

[@smeech5177]

Thank you for this. I couldn’t do much with my water damaged MAC 😅. So this video is perfect and have been saving up money for something really good!

[@thelaughinghyenas8465]

A nice, clear discussion that goes through the issues. Little if any BS.

[@Larry-Jiao]

Love the looping computer programming background for selecting computer hardware 😂

[@grabbitt]

yeah that's cool and from Pexels. they have lots of CC0 videos :)

[@were2man]

quite informative and timely video. thank you

[@constantinezh7156]

Normals enabled in viewport with Eevee, man. That's what slows mine down the most. Gotta disconnect them all when working with eevee viewport, then connect before rendering. A plugin to enable/disable all normal maps in Blender with one click would be magnificent.

[@paranoiia8]

That would be cool to have as actuall option but sadly they can't put simple switch for swapping green channel on normalmap node when you work on dx normals format... So yeah... We can just dream about it..

[@paranoiia8]

Honestly you work on what you got, if you can afford to throw 100k for computer no one will stop you. If you have like 500 bucks you can also find computer for work... Is it gonna be good? Nope, but it will work. For many years I was working on laptop with slow Radeon GPU and bottom line Intel cpu unless I was working on scene with less than 3 million tris it was good for modeling. As for rendering? Not much unless you keep it over night. Most of modern hardware from middle price tag or even low end is really good for blender and comparing to more expensive stuff it will be really few sec faster so is it worth? Huge number of blender user, if not most, work with modeling objects and characters for other engines. They don't render scenes they don't do fluid simulations or super hi res sculpture so do they need best of the best hardware when even my current rig that is average as hell doesn't really use half of its power when I work... So why bother? And if someone render complex scenes and animations... Well even with quantum computer you will still be sitting in front of the desk sweating as hell after hitting "render" as blender sadly is still not very stable... In other hand I think that having slower pc thought me to optimize everything and this brought me lots of good point with clients and bunch of ideas. Now most of people that work on models do the same thing as game developers: they throw everything on scene and call it a day. It doesn't work for someone? Tell them to get better pc. And it would be cool if that throwing would bring some massive boost on quality but no. I still see people slapping 4k textures on background objects far from scene that you never see from close. Not using mip enabling real time shadows and reflections on every single object. Or Rendering in some insane settings without realizing that it will not improve quality... So yeah. Sometimes having tad slower pc teach you a lesson and some tricks that speed up work flow way better than few seconds faster rendering...

[@devformation]

Right on time! Upgrading my machine)

[@thearcanegearsmith4885]

I am learning Blender. Just had my old computer die after a power outage , mainly a bad system on my NVMe but it convinced my wife for me to upgrade instead of paying someone $250 to come fix the computer. it was a 5930K on a Asus Rampage V (10th anniversary board) 64gb ddr4 2133 and a 1660 Super. Graphics card is still good. There where already issues with the board and GPU not liking each other. Anyway, COST and availability are key for fast replacement. Was wanting to wait for Zen 5 but prices are going to be crazy expensive and I am semi-retired on a limited budget. I just bought a MOSTLY basic AM4 system . I am cash strapped. Ordered a B550 Taichi (which I had already ordered a couple weeks ago to begin upgrades). With a $450 budget I got : 32gb G.Skill Ripjaws V cl 18 3600mhz kit, a 5600 (non x) because I can't wait 10 days for it, I will upgrade to a 5900x or 5950 when I can. Even the 5600 will more than DOUBLE the speed of my current CPU, and the 5900 0r 5950 is QUADRUPLE the CPU performance. I plan on working in Blender a lot more. I will be getting a pen display after I learn more in Blender.

[@Justin_Black]

Wow, thank you so much! this is exactly what I was looking for!

[@chaerazard]

Thank you this information was very helpful for me, I really appreciate the hard work you put into this video

[@ChillieGaming]

Excited as I will be getting a new pc after 6 years.

[@Pesto-64]

I needed a laptop for travel and wanted to do some Blender on the road and learn Grease Pencil. So I bought a Surface Pro 8 (16 GB RAM) mostly for the pen support. I hope it can handle my “lighter” Blender scenes and GP stuff

[@joshuagalang5247]

Thank you for this video! Now i wasnt wrong choosing 5700x and 3060ti instead for my blender since i was having hard time sculpting from 5600g.

[@8Steady]

Thanks for a great video. It's a good concise overview of a complicated topic.

[@Vulguse]

I got a 1060, i5-8400 and 8 GB of RAM, It's sometimes struggling with big scene or detailed models but I actually prefer to wait for the rtx 4000 release this year. I'll get 32 GB of RAM at the same time.

[@ChillieGaming]

dude get 64gb pls trust me bro. 32 is the new 16. get 64 they are cheap like only $300 to $400 just 100 dollar more than 32gb ram. 64gb ddr4 are cheap nowadays so get this one.

[@hugodus]

Thank youu!! This video is exactly what i was looking for!

[@CGSTUDENT15]

ah thnx for this looking for this type of video for a long time thnx

[@banano24]

Perfect I was planing to buy a pc soon

[@derivepi6930]

Blender Benchmark needs to put a script together to properly test CPUs. Just built my own Blender computer and it is a 5600x with 3070 ti 32 gb 3200 ram and 1 tb SSD. Fiddled with it and got it to outperform on Blender Benchmark score.

[@DilophoMS]

I use it on an old Phenom II 955 with R9 290 and 8GB RAM without major problems.

[@eliaslns7143]

Hey great video idea , i use a matebook to design and it works kinda good , again great video idea

[@asafilms]

Cool! And i want video like this about laptop for blender

[@Ziqver]

I switched from an expensive iMac to a laptop PC for half the price and I couldn’t be happier. M1 chips can’t even be compared with navida. Even if the hardcore M1 chip people would like it to be. I wrote PC specialist and said, hey I am going to use this and that. Same day, they replied “ Here you go! “ While Apple will sell you anything and say that it will work. But it doesn’t, not if you want to make a complex scene.

[@dwuk99]

Just came across your excellent video. Spent quite a while yesterday specing up a PC (by coincidence PC specialist) and using the blender benchmarks, I am currently using a Mac M1 - and it is working quite well on EEVEE - but really slows down on Cycles. Compared lots of configurations and what I am thinking is a Ryzen 7950X CPU, Nvidia 12gb 4070 Super, 32GB Ram, 1TB SSD - CPU benchmark 554 - which is 583% my Mac, GPU benchmark 6361 which is 2,485% my Mac. Comes out about £1,645 on PC specialist. Interesting what you say about Linux - might try that when I get it is it speeds up the rendering. Am thinking that will mainly continue using the Mac for the actual modelling, with the PC possibly in another room (due to noise) for the rendering.

[@eliaslns7143]

Almost 400k let's go 😃

[@capalmer2495]

Very good and helpful. Solid advice. Appreciate it!

[@simpmaster6240]

Really good video,i like the way you go with this because you are talking a lot about regular medium spec rigs,not a PCs that cost 20k plus lol. For blender you can really work fine with any medium range chip 2-3 years old,but i think GPU must have at least 8GB of ram. So for people who dont have lots of money to spend Ryzen 5 2600x and RTX 2060super with 16gb of ram would work just fine with blender,all this components are 2-3 years old so not that expensive but still nice. But there is a catch for serious sculpting and modeling in milions of polygons requirements are far higher than this,so for this job you need i9/ryzen9 cpu anything bellow would just be pain in ashh. On the current marker best CPU for this job is a Threadripper PRO 3995WX,it would literally wipe the floor with every i9 or any other ryzen CPU,but yea lol...it's a $7.000,this is only for rich kids :D.

[@johntnguyen1976]

This was a stonkingly great video!

[@grabbitt]

🙂

[@bme4285]

Great video as usual

[@vishalsahu3579]

Now, that's how analysis should be done.

[@theresan534]

I'm using a 13inch laptop 8gb ram without dedicated graphic card, it's enough for me to learn different tools and create something light, only one single object in each creation.. I'm 3 month in. if my level goes up more and I still doing it by end of this year I will upgrade

[@suanarts6033]

Thank you so much for this wonderful video

[@Trav2d3dArt]

Maybe this will help someone too but I have a pc from 2018 that I upgraded over the years I will list the specs I7 8700k Intel processor Rtx 2080 graphics card 64 gb of ram M.2 ssd 1tb processor for storage And it still runs really well even on a 4 year old machine. It runs unreal engine 5, substance painter/designer as well

[@23bobjr]

Thats because your system is still considered high end.

[@PowNyTales]

Using MacBook Air M1 absolutely ok with it. 500 Gb & 16 Gb + Magic Mouse 🐁

[@agungwidi799]

My laptop, intel core i3, 4gb ram, 500gb harddrive, nvidia GeForce ... Great to play Solitaire and ms office

[@void_guy_yt]

I am going for a 4070 super 12gb vram and 32 gb ddr5 RAM, I am confused between AMD Ryzen 7 7700x or Intel i7 12700k...Should I consider intel for productivity or amd for performance & futureproof for Blender?

[@DanielTDesign]

Thanks for this video! 👍

[@hasnatkias7376]

Finally !!!!! Thank you Grant

[@3DBlendMix]

Great important tutorial thanks

[@stephsnerdystuff1656]

This was amazing timing, thank you! I've been looking at the Ryzen 9 5950X and after hearing you say it was in yours, I'm sold on it haha. Can I ask what cpu cooler and mobo you use for your set-up? Thanks!

[@grabbitt]

I'll try and find out🙂

[@MusicalGeniusBar]

The 4000 series are coming out in June, wait a month and get the 4060.

[@D2Kprime]

I'm still trying to get my feet wet with Blender. There is a lot I still don't understand about the sculpting process which is really what I want to do. I built a machine 2 years ago that at the time was a monster. Ryzen 9 3900x 12-core 24-thread CPU 3.7 GHz per-core nVidia RTX 2070 GPU 8GB of RAM Corsair Vengeance 64 GB of DD4 RAM 1 TB NVMe Samsung EVO 970 Plus SSD 1 TB M.2 Samsung SSD Noctua NH-D15 CPU fan Tuf Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi) Motherboard I regularly run software like 3DS Max, Photoshop, After Effects, Clip Studio Paint EX, and everything run pretty smooth for the most part. One good thing about having a monster-rig is that it's easy to tell where the issue is that you are taxing the PC too hard vs that particular software (or game) has not been well optimized. Altogether I spent about $1500 US dollars on the machine so that's not too bad. It still punches way outside of it's weight-class. At some point I will have to upgrade the GPU when I get the money. It's a shame that when I had the money there was a such a huge shortage of GPUs out there. Now that they are in stock in most places, I'm broke!!! 🤣

[@D2Kprime]

@@thecreator359 Thanks

[@keithkool]

That 3900x is a beast. I need to change my air cooler as it is not sufficient for cooling. Ordered a Noctua too. Hopefully that will keep the demon under control.

[@usmankakka]

What a timing.... Thanks for not posting this earlier

[@UlfricStromcloak]

Grant I think you forgot to mention something. if you are doing any kind of animation, even if it's some 15-30 second clips, It's better to keep the polygon count & other particle features as low as possible, and also render it on Eevee. Otherwise, it would take you an eternity to render them on Cycles. For a single frame illustration, or some other jobs like pre visualization or look dev (in which case you would need only one or two frames) even a weak PC is fine. It will take probably half an hour to render something on Cycles with 8K texture, 4096 samples at high resolution with intel denoiser for a weak PC. So that's doable. But don't ever think about creating animations with a weak PC. Even an Ocean simulation for 5 sec clips will take you 2-3 hours.

[@grabbitt]

I mentioned about keeping low poly at the start

[@timedriverable]

PCSpecialist are in the United KIngdom and dont deliver to the U.S. Great presentation though. Also you might have touched on monitors as well regarding hz.

[@zupraner]

A note on Macs: I run Blender on an intel-based MacBook Pro (2019) with a built-in AMD Radeon Pro 5500M. As of MacOS 12.3 Blender supports GPU compute on my machine and Cycles renders 4-5 times faster than it used to.

[@jameslabs1]

Thanks very helpful.

[@richardshenton4371]

One aspec id like clarity on is the use of multiple GPU's , from what i have read there seems to be a case for using them esp for rendering.

[@grabbitt]

Yes. They have to be the same but yes it makes a big difference

[@hamed-kavoosi]

thank you

[@maaaksikk2122]

thx you helped me a lot

[@innerc8951]

The reason Nvidia GPUs is better than AMD GPUs isn’t just because of the OptiX denoiser, OptiX isn’t just a denoiser, it is a ray tracing API, and it fully utilize the ray tracing cores in RTX GPUs, which is also more powerful than those that are in AMD GPUs; since ray tracing is exclusively how Cycles renders a scene, it is a massive boost to performance, since OptiX actually utilized hardware accelerated ray tracing compared to AMD’s HIP API, and Nvidia’s ray tracing core is also faster than AMD’s. The denoiser is just bundled in as a part of the OptiX package that utilized the Tensor cores (AI accelerators in RTX GPUs) to do AI denoising.

[@amofilmes1]

Great Video. Your audio does have a lot of noise most likely a tabletop fan / air conditioning / pc fans) so i would recommend use a level threshold or a nosie reduction plugin

[@carstenbang3410]

Hi Grant Abbitt. Thanks for a very informative and explaining video. As I'm in the research of my next build, a Blender rendering PC. It would be even better if maybe you can reveal which motherboard, PC Tower, and Power supply you have in your setup. Thanks in advance for addressing this topic....;-)

[@grabbitt]

I will have to put that together at some point

[@anzdes219]

CPU potentiates the gpu, so you better have a good cpu first, secondly u can denoise using nvidia gpu with optix or cpu if it's intel with open image

[@mrtzahazm-gr6hs]

I have Ram16 I7 10700k Gtx1660 ti Is this good?

[@grabbitt]

Its a bit old but it will work

[@user-fo9ce3hr5h]

Hello. I want to buy i5-13600k or i7-13700k. But my preference is to spend less money. For me, it is only important that the software does not lag or get stuck and the speed is low when working for 3D work and heavy rendering. Long output time is not important to me. I wanted to make sure if the i5-13600k can run 3D programs and rendering for heavy tasks smoothly and without problems. thank you.

[@grabbitt]

Rendering is more about the gpu

[@atillameteturedi1700]

Hey Grant, thanks for all the content. Wondering if you are planning to do an optimization video on PC configs like drivers and NVIDIA settings and so on to get the most out?

[@grabbitt]

Not got any specific plans for that

[@BennieHFX]

Base form of a MacBook Pro is gonna have to do for now.

[@jamestaylor3805]

If Blender is your "job"(40 plus hours a week in that program, or similarly demanding applications) then you need to aim for a minimum of mid tier last generation tech for basically every component. If Blender is a hobbyist or artistic pursuit, a cheap as dirt refurbished Dell OptiPlex($100-$200 depending on exact model) and an a2000($300, effecient small form equivalent of a 3050ti) graphics card will do you just fine with a reasonably small form factor. May be able to shave a little off the graphics card if you can find a 6600/6650xt that fits in that case. This is likely to be slightly bottle necked by the CPU for sustained graphics performance(like gaming and rendering). In most cases there is an upgraded CPU that can work with any of the motherboards and overcome this for very cheap. In the realm of customs builds, the most overlooked topic here is the motherboard, which dictates so much about everything else your computer is capable of doing. Number of PCIe slots, BIOS and operating function, M.2 slots, number and types of ports, presence of wifi and ethernet without additional slot consuming add ons, higher end audio outputs without a sound card... a solid feature rich current gen motherboard despite the expense will be the single most important factor in you enjoyment and avoidance of aggravation with a new custom build. How you populate that current gen board will never produce a machine that's unusable(excluding conflicts of course), and can always be piecemeal upgraded as you find areas you WANT to improve. Even with a monster custom build that $300 a2000 graphics card would still be enough to hit the ground running if the motherboard forces you into saving up for one of those monsterous new 7000 series or 40x0 series cards that all cost over $1000.

[@Spacecookie-]

£1,200+ is high end. My PCs always cost less than £900, and it depends on the deals you can get on components when you put your own together.

[@KoltPenny]

This is going to be my main reference when getting a new computer. Thanks. P.D Your pronunciation of Linux really caught me off guard 😅

[@bumstudios8817]

I think you can render farm on blender.. I’m just getting into this stuff my situation is a gifted refurbished laptop very thankful to have but graphics card is lacking so I’m already looking to the future for upgrades. But I also have a raspberry pi, and an old 2014 Mac mini.. I would love to use them to have more power but idk if I can or if it’s worth it. I currently am using unity and unreal 5 more than blender for rendering as real time is the way to go imho. Also with my research you can rent out computer power through virtual machines, from my research it could be expensive assuming you were using it 24-7 but you might only need it a few hours a month for render… in which case 10-20$ a month for as needed computing power is very reasonable!

[@grabbitt]

Yes check my video on vagon. I talk through this exact scenario

[@drivebye2709]

Thanks. Helios just blew. Looking for a desktop upgrade. Hopefully the government will let me have some of my own money back this year! If not, I'll be forced to do absolutely nothing about it! Yay!!

[@Silmerano]

I hate that Blender doesn't support my graphics card. I have a RX 580 with 8gb vram it's still a decent card despite being older and I can't use it.

[@t.mustonen2105]

I'm using old iMac with intel cpu and 2.93LTS. Fortunately, it rarely crashes. One of the problems I ran into was when I was doing sculpting. My computer became sluggish and I clenched my teeth in frustration. Other than that, I experienced a bug unique to Macs when mixing textures. I've been thinking about buying a PC for Blender for these reasons. Thank you, Grant sensei, this video is really helpful.

[@thearcanegearsmith4885]

I have an old imac as well. I added more ram and an SSD and it helped , but it does still have sluggish moments. I work a lot in 3D printing, and when print files get larger the whole machine can slow to a crawl, almost like it crashes but the CPU / GPU is working at 100 % it is just super slow.

[@t.mustonen2105]

​@@thearcanegearsmith4885 Speaking of ram, my iMac has 16gb. I guess this capacity of ram has been of some help for modeling and sculpting without crashing. Anyway, I'm getting tired of waiting for the right moment to buy a PC. I should probably forget about M2 processor, Raptor Lake, Ryzen 7000 and RTX 4000 series.

[@thearcanegearsmith4885]

@@t.mustonen2105 My iMac has 64gb of ram and I still have the issues (2019 5K iMac). IT is bottlenecked by to GPU and CPU. this is a problem with the NON M1 Macs. They are underpowered for the price. My AMD system even though it is basic will allow me to upgrade the CPU and GPU when I can. It will have 3x the performance of the iMac, more if I upgrade the other parts. I steered clear of Intel this time around. My new system will be up and running tonight and I should see 2x CPU over my old system with the same GPU.

[@t.mustonen2105]

@@thearcanegearsmith4885 You know a lot about computers! I hope your new system will run successfully. I'm a computer noob, so I'll make a plan to purchase a middle class PC using this video as a reference.

[@vishalsahu2344]

Hey, how much time your computer take to turn on?

[@grabbitt]

about 30 seconds

[@vishalsahu2344]

@@grabbitt thanks man, are you using SSD or HDD. Your video is good and you have mentioned everything although you need to write all the specs of your computer in the description, you have written only RAM, processor and GPU

[@grabbitt]

@@vishalsahu2344 ssd

[@gdog8170]

Thinking to buy a pc close to these specs and wanted to know if they are good enough for low-medium budget. GPU: Gtx 1650 CPU: I5 10400f Ram: 16gb

[@grabbitt]

Have a check on the blender bench make but I think you'll be ok👍

[@gdog8170]

@@grabbitt Will do, thx!

[@GundamGunpla]

What do You think about: i5-13600KF, RTX 3070, 64 GB RAM? Will be it fine for Blender? Albo isn't it better RX 6800 XT 16 GB?

[@vincdivine]

Apple m1 studio is potentially made for Blender

[@iKaGe01]

I thought my PC was okay until I tried running Plasticity. Just bought a 3060ti and 32GB ram to max out my MB. Cost just over 300. But now I have an issue that my i7 is only a 2nd gen 2011 build LOL 😂

[@MuhibMisbah]

i5 10400 16gb ram rtx 3050 when i render it says " system is out of GPU memory " which component I should upgrade?

[@grabbitt]

the graphics card but also try optimising your scene

[@aquss33]

I don't think anyone would say that the motherboard is the most important lol. Literally a cheap 40€ Asus A320M-A can run 64GB of 3200MHz RAM with a Ryzen 9 5950X3D and an RTX 4090. Of course that would be dumb, but that is a thing that can work. And, the performance will be just as good as in any other motherboard no matter the price (except maybe getting a PCIe 4.0 motherboard will improve GPU performance or you can get marginally faster 3600MHz RAM, just that the investment isn't always worth it, a B450-M or b550 is a great all rounder motherboard)

[@BMH1965]

What M/B is on Grant's machine, I suspect not a B550 board...

[@NameUserOf]

GPUs do many different redenderings. So you can't say that Cycles rendering benchmark is accurate representation of what you get with said GPU. How does it work in the viewport and in what modes? In most cases AMD gpus of similar price level are better than Intel's ARC but in the rendering Intel might be a bit better, at the cost of more power consumption though. And AMD GPUs are quite good with the new HIP and even better with ZLUDA(which saidly is discontinued). In addition to that Nvidia puts less VRAM than AMD for a similary priced GPUs and Intel puts all VRAM it can. So depending on the price you're willing to pay some AMD cards would be more preferable that some Nvidia ones and maybe there is a room for Intel's ARC. So just because Nvidia has the top card that would wipe the floor in Cycles rendering doesn't mean that you should automatically consider lower level Nvidia product as situation might be very different on another price level.

[@grabbitt]

It's actually down to option that I would recommend nvidia

[@goofyop7551]

Can you tell me which gpu will be good for a blender, gtx 970 4gb or Rx 480 8GB?

[@grabbitt]

Check the benchmarks

[@goofyop7551]

@@grabbitt any good website you can suggest, please

[@IrocZIV]

Good info. I wish Blender had a built in benchmark for edit or sculpt mode. I'm very curious how memory speed and cache affect usability. Looking at CPU render times seems almost pointless, with GPUs being so fast. When I tried to render with my GPU and CPU it actually slowed the render down, vs just rendering on the GPU

[@stevenlitvintchouk3131]

This is well known, to the point that some of those "Blender for Beginners" tutorials recommend setting Blender to NOT render on both the CPU and GPU.