Hi all, I'm looking for some advice around building my brother a new machine for use in 3d modeling, rendering and animation. He's going to be using Maya, Houdini and z-brush mostly. Could someone spec me a build for around £500(£600ish with Gpu), no peripherals or software just hardware. For build wise I've been thinking about using an AMD 8-core based processor as from what he's been telling me all of his work is very core dependent and 8-cores vs 4 with 2 threads seems like a good choice. Also ideally he wants to fit a BitFenix Prodigy case but it's not a huge deciding factor. He's currently thinking of buying my 7970 Ghz edition as I'm thinking of upgrading to a 1070 / 1080.
For what you need, I'd say forget buying new. You can get 16 (legit, Intel) cores and 32 threads close to budget on a system that will blow any Intel iX or similar AMD system out of the water. I've just built a stonking server using these same parts (albeit with more RAM) almost all second hand barring mobo and PSU. It completely eclipses any performance PC I've ever owned in terms of multi threaded workload. It uses only 15w more power at idle and approx 20% more power at full tilt than my outgoing gaming machine (but gives 310% existing CPU performance) ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 Server Board ~ £245 (if you want future RAM expandability) or can get the non-D16 board for cheaper 64GB DDR3 ECC Reg RAM ~ £100 2 x Intel Xeon E5 2670 ~ £100 Add in a PSU (wattage dependent on GPU), an SSD and any two LGA2011 CPU coolers and you're laughing. In total, you'll probably hit the £600 mark without a GPU, but the performance of the machine will be FAR beyond what you would have otherwise achieved for the money.
