First PC Build advice; 3D and motion graphics

[Jade W]

Hello. I'm a 3D motion design student looking to build a PC

- What's your Budget?
My budget is $1500 which includes the monitor, so I guess it's really around $1300-1400.

- What are your main workloads and secondary workloads?
I use a couple of different things. Blender (and cycles render), Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop. For Cinema 4D I use both Arnold render and Redshift render on my college campus and I like both, but I'm thinking about going with Arnold in the future. (So I guess i'm looking for a more balanced build?)

- Are you looking to upgrade the PC in the near future?
I'm trying not to have to upgrade too soon into the future, maybe give it at least 3 years.

- What country will you be shopping your parts in?
USA

I tried the PC Builder and got a variety of results based of the purpose I chose. This one is for Motion Design for $1350:

CGDirector PC & Workstation Builder - CG Director

The CGDirector PC-Builder lets you quickly find the best Computer Parts for your PC & Workstation Build. Use cases include 3D-Modeling, Animation, Video-Editing, Motion Design and more.

www.cgdirector.com

This one is for 3D Modeling & Animation, also for $1350:

CGDirector PC & Workstation Builder - CG Director

The CGDirector PC-Builder lets you quickly find the best Computer Parts for your PC & Workstation Build. Use cases include 3D-Modeling, Animation, Video-Editing, Motion Design and more.

www.cgdirector.com

Not sure what direction I should go in and this is my first PC build ever (We use iMacs on campus here) so any advice would be life-saving. Thank you.

 

[Alex Glawion]

Usually I'd recommend an AMD Ryzen 5xxx series system right now, but since cpus are out of stock almost everywhere you might find a faster deal on the parts in the lists above. If you can wait a few weeks, go with an e.g. AMD Ryzen 5600X Systems, hands down.

If you need a new system now and can't find any 5xxx Ryzens in stock anywhere, the 10600k system int he list above will run your workloads well.

 

[xbigcheezx]

The only real difference between these two is the processor and the lack of a secondary hard drive on the 3d build, although it does have a slightly better motherboard. I would go with the motion graphic build to be honest, the extra 2 cores are actually better for 3d work, plus you can overclock that 9700k to about 4.2ghz with good cooling. I would suggest an AIO cooler instead of either of those top mount fan coolers, even a simple one-fan model from coolermaster or corsair.

Also, consider replacing second SSD for 2x 4-6TB traditional hard drives and mirror them RAID 1 for your project storage. Use the 1TB NVME as your primary+video content drive for current projects, and your raid drives for video archival and 3d work. This would give you the speed you need for video editing on your primary, and the redundancy benefits on your secondary drive for about the same price.