I have a friend of mine who is going to uni to study games development. He can use the software but has no idea at all about the hardware side of things. (Console Gamer o.0) Anyway, I need to build him a rig on a student budget that can run Zbrush, Photoshop, 3dsmax and Unreal Engine. Any ideas on what is necessary for good performance of this software? He was going to buy a laptop but then realised it would take a while for rendering and whatnot, time apparently he wont have as I'm sure he will be ignoring all freshers activities Thanking you all in advance for any assistance.
Seeing as this is [pretty much] what i did at uni... and considering my current rig was paid for with student loan... an i7 is pretty much a must [8-core AMD at a push], 8+ GB RAM, Large [1TB Minimum] HDD and [ideally] an nVidia GPU with a 1GB+ VRAM
RAM. Lots and lots of RAM. Apart from the work machine, if he's planning on doing a lot of heavy graphic design then it might be worth setting aside a bit of money for a NAS of some kind. Whether it's a self-built machine running FreeNAS or any one of the commercially available options it up to him, but it might be nice to have a place to archive all those 3D models and Photoshop files.
I've gone off the Enthusiast Bit-Tech Build. If we dropped the GFX card from a 780 to a 680, would this have an effect on the overall rendering times?
Might affect how well UDK runs and how max copes with high-poly scenes when modelling, but rendering, but as for rendering most of it is still cpu-based...
Thanks RedFlames, he's just been awarded a £1,000 scholarship so adding it to his existing budget will probably do the Bit-tech enthusiast build as is. I'll get it ordered and posted in the build section.
Zbrush and 3DsMAX love RAM. Especially for heavy scenes. An SSD for WIP files would also help, since the larger projects can take up a lot of space(and a lot of load time).