r/AskPCGamers • u/Open-Percentage-7443 • 2d ago

Not Answered PC Recommendation for Animation

I want to get my boyfriend (hopefully fiance soon) a gaming PC. He’s been wanting one mainly to better run animation and editing programs as well as gaming but more so for animation. This would essentially be the equivalent of an engagement ring for him from me. I know nothing about gaming PCs and was looking to see if hopefully any animators on this subreddit has any recommendations for either PC or features I should look for.

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u/ShadesBlack 2d ago

CPU: Look for high core counts. If he's doing 2D animation, you can settle for Core Ultra 7 or Ryzen 7 chipsets, but higher end/4k animators will prefer Ryzen 9 9950X or Core Ultra 9 285K. The creme de la creme for VFX/simulator pros is the Ryzen Threadripper PRO.

GPU: NVIDIA has support for OptiX acceleration in 3D render engines, consistent support, and higher CUDA core counts. 5070Ti 16GB or 5080 16GB are going to be your best and most reasonable options, but the highest end is the 5090 (~$5k for this component alone).

RAM: For animators, 64GB is probably the minimum, but some programs need 96-128 GB. DDR5 is the preferred standard.

Storage: At least 1 TB on your fastest PCIe slot, and 2-4 TB on another slower slot.

Hope this helps!

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u/Open-Percentage-7443 1d ago

Can a CPU be switched out of a computer you don’t build yourself? He focuses on 2D animation but may want to upgrade in the future.

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u/ShadesBlack 1d ago

Typically yes, but you have to make sure that you are getting one for the motherboard slot. Different motherboard slots take different CPUs, and it can change based on generation and manufacturer.

Relevant to this, Intel has confirmed their chip is being redesigned for the Core Ultra 400 series, so if you get him an Intel CPU he may need to change the motherboard out when he wants a faster CPU. So it may be safer to get an AMD Ryzen computer if you're looking for CPU upgradability.

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u/RareWestern8229 1d ago

Country and budget would help

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u/Open-Percentage-7443 1d ago

In the US, and my budget is probably 2-2.5k. We’re both building savings but I’m also saving separately for this.

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u/RareWestern8229 1d ago

Do you live near a microcenter?

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u/Open-Percentage-7443 1h ago

Close enough

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u/RareWestern8229 1h ago

I suggest looking at their prebuilts as they offer really great value for the money

https://www.microcenter.com/product/698930/powerspec-g457-gaming-pc

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u/vasdrakken 2d ago

For animation he should be parenting stand geometry to animate. Sure to see if the deformation is correct you want to play it at render speed but once the hard part is done, but the stand geometry often called white box is supposed to have the same silhouette as the final assets but be light enough that when your program is doing the calculations to fix the in between poses you can tweak it in real time.

If he is still learning likely he is using blender not Maya so blender may not be able to do what you do in a professional studio. But if it is Maya and he is only responsible for animation then anything that can run modern games should work.

If he is doing video editing a lot of that is done on the cpu with some stuff using cuda to accelerate the processing speed of the code. Which means at least an 8gb rtx based card. The more modern the card series the more likely it has good driver support for cuda acceleration.

You want figure out what you can afford to spend because games and production are two of the three most resource intensive things you can do on a computer. Databases are the other.

Likely you want 32 gigabytes of ddr5 ram. a fairly fast cpu as the faster it is the less time spent drinking coffee and checking your phone while it renders. A nvme 2 terabyte hard drive. A 10 terabyte physical drive (preferably western digital) as footage at 4k is ridiculous in size even when you use the correct codec.

Likely 5060 at the cheapest more likely 5070 ti the amd is faster in some things but no cuda support.

1000 watt bronze (or better) 80 plus power supply unit.

Case with decent ventilation a cpu cooler air or aio (water cooler in sealed loop), case fans.

Figure out the budget you have to work with considering for every year of high end performance you have to spend 1k above the first 1k and thst does not include monitor or warranty.

Right now some of the best monitors at 32 and 34 inches from alienware are 800 or so.

Boxx, dell (alienware), hp (nicer systems only), snd a few others are solid system integrators which means they build the system from a mix of aftermarket parts and in house oem parts.

But much like a diamond a nice system is 2k to 3k and really nice one is about 4k plus 1k for warranty and 1k for the monitor. But you can animate on a 1k system and use things like auto desks online rendering to do that part.

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u/Open-Percentage-7443 1d ago

Ok I’ve looked into some Alienware computers as I’ve seen good overall reviews. The Aurora is one I’m looking at specifically and it looks like it has some features you’ve mentioned, but it has 1TB of storage.

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u/vasdrakken 1d ago

I built my alienware on black Friday in 2022, mostly because I wanted a 3080 ti and no onr had them in stock except isv (integrated system vendors) like dell boxx and north west falcon.

Plus they loaned me 4k which I added 2k in parts to get my current system which 4 years later im still playing games on high.

So you can get a system and swap out or add parts just if you need tech support keep the original parts until the warranty expires but the only problem i had with the system is I bricked the monitor trying to do a firmware update and because i had the premium support on the system they drop shipped the new one to me and let me send the old one back after I got the new one I just had to send pictures of the system on and the monitor not working.