Best motherboard for 3d animation/video editing?

[mackenzie999]

Newbie here looking to build a beast hackintosh workstation for graphic animation. Looking for something that can handle at least 64gb ram.

I started looking at the recommended boards, but all I saw were Gigabyte and I didn't see any that exceeded 32gb. Also, I saw a lot of really negative reviews about Gigabyte on Amazon. I know people tend to bitch more than praise, but I'm wondering if that should concern me.

I'm not overly tech savvy, and am hoping my ability to follow instructions will get me through building a stable system. So, I'd like to avoid anything that could be problematic for someone like me with very limited experience in this area.

Any suggestions and/or recommendations greatly appreciated! Also looking for recs on video cards.
Thanks!

 

[trs96]

started looking at the recommended boards, but all I saw were Gigabyte and I didn't see any that exceeded 32gb. Also, I saw a lot of really negative reviews about Gigabyte on Amazon. I know people tend to bitch more than praise, but I'm wondering if that should concern me.

There are also Asus, MSI and Asrock that are recommended. Don't take any Amazon or Newegg reviews seriously. They are a miniscule sample size, mostly of fanboys or girls, of some other brand. Also some
people will get a defective one, 1 per 10,000 and then gripe and complain about it because they didn't send it back before the 1 month return period is over. People with good ones more than likely post nothing at all.

If you need 64 GB of ram your choices would be X79, X99 or the newer Z170 chipset. Do some reading of User Builds with all 3 of those kinds of systems and see what is required to get them fully working.
Would be best if you have someone, nearby, that has previous experience in hackintoshing, if you go
with other than a Z97 system.

 

[Fumomono]

Hi,
I don't think you can get this amount of RAM on z97 boards, you prolly need the x99 plateform but it's more complicated to have a fully working system. 64 Go is a very high amount of RAM unless you're running a lot of VM for instance, are you sure you need to go that far ?

Can you describe your workflow and the softwares you are planning to use ? Material is highly dependent on what you do (notably because of optimization for OpenCL, CUDA...) so 1 GPU can be a beast with one soft and quite subpar with an other one.

About gigabyte, it wouldn't be advised in the buyer's guide if people kept having issues with them ;-) for myself it's working great, wells designed and sturdy, but that's only 1 feedback.

 

[mackenzie999]

Can you describe your workflow and the softwares you are planning to use ?

My typical workflow begins in Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop, often continues in Adobe Premiere, often Maxon Cinema 4d, and pretty much always ends up in Adobe After Effects.
It is my understanding that After Effects can use as much ram as you throw at it, but I am the opposite of an expert and could easily be wrong.

I'm used to working on mid-level workstations, but Cinema 4D is something I am currently learning and seems to be the software that runs slowest on my existing systems. Maybe ram is not the best route to helping that? I really have no idea.

What I ultimately hope to achieve is a system that works well for me, and that won't require too much expertise to build and maintain. I feel capable of following directions but my experience managing hardware is admittedly limited. the hackintosh route appeals to me because I feel it is significantly bigger bang for the buck, and money is unfortunately an object. My christmas bonus just came in and is better than expected, so my budget for this is $2-3K.

 

[Fumomono]

The trouble with the softs you use is that every part of your hardware is relevant

First thing I would do : take your most demanding project and watch how much RAM you're using during render in the activity monitor. AE can definitely use a lot of RAM, but it depends on projects, what you do might not require as much as you think, only watching the monitor can really tell you.

Next I would consider a very powerful CPU. If you go the easier z97 (limited to 32Go RAM), an i7 4790K is prolly your best bet. If you have some time and good cooling you can overclock it. CPU is very important because all of your softwares cannot, to my knowledge, use the GPU for rendering.

Next is the GPU, I'd go with a Gtx 980ti because it has CUDA and isn't so bad at openCL either. For your specific tasks you could prolly buy better, but at a much higher price and I don't know how well a hackintosh can handle them. I don't know what you use with C4D but if you go with Octane for instance it can use CUDA for rendering.
Please note that you need to check if AE can use the latest CUDA version, I don't know if it has been updated yet for Maxwell cards.

Also, you can't neglect the hard drives. I would use 2 SSD, one for the system and a second (bigger) one for your documents and AE cache.

Now what I have described is the easier and "money saving" path. For sure going x99 (which means more of everything) and specialized GPU would give you higher performance, but it will cost a lot and since its support is patchy at best you may have to tweak a lot to make it work. In the "user builds" forum you have different posts reporting success on x99 builds, you should give it a good look to see if you're ready to accept the downsides. For sure that's not something I would consider for a working station.
And if it's not urgent and you can wait a few months, maybe monitor how z170 support is developing.

 

[mackenzie999]

I don't know what you use with C4D but if you go with Octane for instance it can use CUDA for rendering.

Could you explain this? I understand the CUDA part but what do you mean by "go with Octane?"

EDIT: nevermind, looked it up. Interesting stuff I was unaware of (am still pretty new to C4D).

 

[Fumomono]

As you probably saw, C4D has a great internal render engine, but you can also use external ones that all have their specificities. One using CUDA to its highest extent will give you faster rendering if you have a powerful Nvidia card like a GTX 980Ti (with proper cooling it can match the rendering speed of the titan, although it still has less memory). I believe C4D engine use the CPU (and would benefit from multiple cores).

Since you're starting with C4D you can go for the fastest render engine you can find depending on your hardware and funds, that way you can check every step with fast renders. Once you can tell precisely what your scene will look like without the need of intermediate renders, you can just find your favorite engine and stick with it.