I'm thinking of getting a newer model computer which I have now. Not Brand new. A refurbished one will do. Right now I'm looking at this one I found online. Is it a good one and will it run Poser 12 and Blender 2.8? Or should I be looking for something else?

AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 4-Core 3.6GHz (4.0GHz Max Boost) Radeon Vega 8 Graphics 8GB DDR4 3200 Memory 240GB SSD, 1TB HDD DVD+/-RW Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit 13.78" x 6.69" x 14.96" Keyboard & Mouse included

Sounds similar to the one I'm using in overall spec. I also have 8 GB RAM. I could do with increasing to 16GB, and so should you. I run Win7 Pro on this thing, though. No intention of "upgrading" to 10 for as long as I can help it.

Running Poser 11.2 on mine; I don't use Blender. Poser seems to be ok, if a little slow at times, although my processor is slower than the one you quoted, running at 3.10.

Get ready for EEVEE. ?

Ryzen processors with built-in graphics use the system memory. This memory is then no longer available to applications.

You should reserve at least 4, better even 8, gigabytes of memory for the graphics card under Blender. Or do without graphics card support completely (EEVE).

Poser also likes memory for the graphics card. If there is a lack of memory, the preview will only be displayed in black and white.

Regarding the processor itself, it is trimmed for low energy (the G in the name). It is also used in laptops. Low-energy also always means: less computing power. And: Unlike the other Ryzen processors, the low-end things with built-in graphics often don't have hyperthreading (which doubles the number of cores).

If you don't have to buy quite urgently, I would wait a few more weeks if I were you. The Corona crisis has not only disadvantages for everyone: Many companies will close and a lot of excellent PCs will flood the second-hand market. And because there will be such an oversupply, the prices (also for new devices) will plummet.

By the way: DDR4 memory is actually too slow for graphics-intensive applications. In Poser you don't notice that so much, but in Blender you probably do.

Advantage of the computer you describe: You can always add an additional graphics card (preferably one that is fully usable under Poser). In doing so, you also win back the previously used system memory!

Thanks ADP: No, a new purchase definitely isn't urgent.

I only use poser so can't talk about blender, and no-one knows what poser 12 will be.

However the problems I see with the system you have described is that with AMD graphics you will not be able to use gpu rendering in superfly, and the cpu only has 4 cores without hyperthreading (or whatever AMD calls it, this is what allows 4 cores to act like 8 cores) so cpu rendering will not be particularly fast, so personally this is not a machine I would choose for poser

EClark1894 posted at 1:47PM Wed, 22 April 2020 - #4386948

Thanks ADP: No, a new purchase definitely isn't urgent.

Fine.

If you want to have fun with Poser, you should stay away from the small boards/CPUs. They are good for office work and stuff like that. For graphics they are all a bit too weak.

But thanks to the Ryzen processors you don't have to spend utopian amounts of money. If you go for a "tinker-friendly system" that you can upgrade bit by bit, the costs are bearable.

What kind of system are you currently using? Is it possible to recycle some of it? What will/can you spend at the moment?

It's an old Dell laptop Vostro 1520, I think. I don't think it is upgradeable.

Nails60 posted at 8:40AM Wed, 22 April 2020 - #4386951

I only use poser so can't talk about blender, and no-one knows what poser 12 will be.

However the problems I see with the system you have described is that with AMD graphics you will not be able to use gpu rendering in superfly, and the cpu only has 4 cores without hyperthreading (or whatever AMD calls it, this is what allows 4 cores to act like 8 cores) so cpu rendering will not be particularly fast, so personally this is not a machine I would choose for poser

I know I don't really need a Workstation computer, but are you saying I should get one that's good for gaming?

EClark1894 posted at 3:36PM Wed, 22 April 2020 - #4386954

It's an old Dell laptop Vostro 1520, I think. I don't think it is upgradeable.

Ok. Compared to this one the Ryzen 3200G is a racing machine :)

I'm not really a game person. And the last games I really owned were all on a Mac. Well, except for Minesweeper. So I was never really into graphics that much. I tend to use Blender mainly for modeling, so other than to see what the finished product will look like I don't really need EEVEE. Still, I'd like to be able to run the latest version of Blender. And even though Poser 12 isn't out yet, I'd like to be able to have a cent machine capable of running it when it does come out. That includes running the graphics.

The program Blender does not need much resources itself. But the more you do and the more complex the models become, the more memory is needed - and computing power to move the memory areas (objects) back and forth. One thing that should not be underestimated: Each morph is a copy of the complete geometry (the reason why Poser cuts figures into parts; a head morph is only a copy of the head and not of the whole figure). Plus the texture graphics, which are getting bigger and bigger in the 3D world and must always be kept completely accessible. That quickly adds up to a lot.

If you buy a new system, you might want to make sure that it is upgradeable. Memory should be upgradeable. And also the CPU. This is usually not the case with laptops (you have to buy the whole system again in intervals if you want to modernize). In addition, laptops are more expensive than desktop machines with about the same performance.

Another advantage of desktop machines: If you do want more graphics against all expectations, you can simply use a better graphics card.

Well, right now, I intend to buy a desktop computer. And I'm trying to get one with a GPU and Graphics card.

Are you comfortable building one? That way you can plan for upgrade capability. Usually, you want to avoid branded systems; particularly in Dell's case. They modify things so industry standard components won't work. Back in the P4 era, Mikey had the wiring on the Dell desktop power supply altered. The result being if you swapped out a failed PS with a white box unit, you fried the motherboard. If you build and stay with industry standard, you can get replacement parts just about anywhere. With the branded units you almost always have to send it back to the manufacturer or one of their repair centers and pay the shipping and danegeld they demand. Which usually winds up being far more than the thing is worth.

EClark i'm about to build for Blender and Poser.and have decided on these. Maybe not the best but board , chip, memory and case will be around until I'm gone. the rest is upgrade negotiable. the case is $110 and x4 on the fans. The mobo is at $189. the rest are currently correct. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DMbzjp. If you cant get there ill site mail it.

I would recommend a SSD for your startup disk if you can do it. It has increased my productivity by switching to these on my work stations. I use macs so I have no other helpful information other than to load up on RAM for Poser.

WDBeaver posted at 1:06PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387110

Are you comfortable building one? .

Not at all.

EClark1894 posted at 4:29PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387186

WDBeaver posted at 1:06PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387110

Are you comfortable building one? .

Not at all.

Ah, well. If you were willing to experiment, you could put together either a serious beast now, or a decent performer with upgrade options. Going with industry standard parts, you would only need a screwdriver or two, and a pair of needle nosed pliers to get into the tight places. And since all the parts would be white box, you could obtain replacements from almost any distributor.

The beast option would be the 1920X, the 12 core 24 thread 1st generation Threadripper. That can be had for around $250 US. The motherboard I would recommend is the Gigabyte Aorus 399X (there are two versions of this; one is ATX, the other is E-ATX sized and gamer intended, with a wireless capabliity on the motherboard. The gamer version costs quite a bit more). Mainly for the fact is has 8 SATA ports for drives, and three of the M.2 form factor SSD sockets on board (these particular sockets accepts either 2280 or 22110 sized SSD card, which cost the same as standard 2.5" SSD drives. The good part is that the M.2 sockets have direct access to the PCIE bus, so they are even faster than SSD's on a SATA port). Plus the fact it sports 8 DDR-4 memory slots, for a max of 128 gigs. 500 gigs of SSD runs about $60 US atm (either 2.5" format or M.2 format). So this board can handle multi terabyte storage, and enough memory to run your OS and content programs with memory to spare. The graphics card could wind up double the cpu cost, depending on the architecture and VRAM. DDR5-6 vram is at least half the cost of a video card, sometimes as much as 3/4, depending on how many gigs it has.

The above is what I have in my office now. I built a gaming box with the ripper and Gigabyte board, then the main system had a southbridge failure -just- after I got it set up after a rebuild. Since the ripper was still cheap and available, I rebuilt the main box with similar specs as the game beast (although the game beast has a Gigabyte Geforce 2060 RTX video card, and the main box is running the old system's Geforce 960, which is sufficient for the OpenGL support). I haven't bothered trying to use 3D Benchmark yet, but here's an example of just what kind of power one of the Threadrippers has. Without any hesitation or stuttering, I have had uTorrent running a double download, NordVPN running. Opera open on a graphics heavy site. Open Office. P-Booost. Poser 11 with a render of a test animation with LaFemme with Arodana's dynamic hair and Nerds dynamic loincloth and a couple other dynamic pieces I'd have to look up. There was also parallel file transfers through USB going at the same time to different drive locations. And the processor temp stayed below 55c. I have the overheat alarm set that low as I have air cooling.

If you wanted a longer term upgrade (the 3rd gen of threadrippers have a different socket configuration that the 1st and second gen, so they are basically eol), then I would find an AM-4 motherboard. That would give you the entire Ryzen processor line to play in. You could start with the 4 core Ryzen 3, and as prices fall move to the 5, 7, or 9 series. The Ryzen 9 series top end runs more cores/threads than a 1st gen ripper does, and as they add more to the top end, the prices of the others fall. However, you probably wouldn't get the same options regarding storage.

WDBeaver posted at 6:42PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387226

EClark1894 posted at 4:29PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387186

WDBeaver posted at 1:06PM Fri, 24 April 2020 - #4387110

Are you comfortable building one? .

Not at all.

Ah, well. If you were willing to experiment, you could put together either a serious beast now, or a decent performer with upgrade options. Going with industry standard parts, you would only need a screwdriver or two, and a pair of needle nosed pliers to get into the tight places. And since all the parts would be white box, you could obtain replacements from almost any distributor.

I probably could, and at one point about twenty years ago, I did give serious thought to building my own. That was back when there was actually a Radio Shack on almost every street corner and computer parts were easy to come by. I wouldn't even know where to start looking now, even if I were more confident in my ability to build one.

follow that instinct.. watch a you tube video or 2. I'm 73 and have built 15 or so. if I can anybody can. go to the pcpartspicker site tell em what you want to do and how much$ they'll walk you thru and show the best prices for your build. The build I'm doing now is to allow upgrades for at least 3 years. My last build 8 years ago is still running strong and will become the new server. No matter which way you go have fun doing it

I'm not going to be building one. I started this thread because I didn't know what I need to get a decent computer that would run Blender 2.8 and any new version of Poser 12 that might possibly come along. To be honest, I'm not a hard-core Poser user like I once was, but I don't want to keep my computer tied up all night while it renders either. And I can't even start Blender 2.8 because I can't seem to upgrade Open GL to v. 3.1 or later.

Hmmm, what kind of video card do you have? Or is this a laptop? If the latter, then you can't upgrade OpenGL because the GPU integrated into the laptop won't support it. If desktop, then you'd need to check the video card specs. If it tops out at OpenGL2.x, then that's all it will run. Every time they do a whole number upgrade of OpenGL they change something critical based on the hardware used in development. Supposedly it scales, but if the hardware lacks the buffers needed, then it won't function.

Not tying your computer up all night rendering is a different issue. If you intend to only run one computer, then buying the hardware with system ram and processor speed to cut render times will be costly. That was why I was asking about the possibility of building your own. You save a lot of money you can put towards a beefier video card and system ram.

An alternative would be running a distributed renderer. Let it be known that you'd be willing to take old kit off of people's hands. You can build a small rendergarden that way for almost no investment (only things you'd have to buy is a network switch for all the comps, and a KVM switch so you could run them all with only on keyboard, monitor, and mouse). Poser's Queue Manager will run both distributed animation rendering and distributed bucket rendering. I know it worked with the old renderer and Firefly. Don't know if it works with Superfly, so that would need to be asked.

Unfortunately, it's a laptop. No card.

You haven't given us a budget, which makes it difficult to help with a most-bang-for-buck system.

Most AM4 motherboards (which is what Ryzen system use), will take anything from the APU you have listed to an RX3950 (16 cores/32 threads). If finances are tight, A Ryzen 1600AF CPU is a better bet cpu-wise: 6 cores/12 threads for $85.

If you are willing to go used - an HP Z620 (6 cores/12 threads, 32Gb of ram) system can be had off Ebay for $270. Slap an Nvidia GPU in, and Bob's your uncle.

Ebay is a possible source,With the caveat of you being willing to open the used box up. Shipping vibration can and will dislodge system ram or expansion cards, depending on age and form factor. Plus you usually have to open them up and check to make sure they aren't dust bunny colonies.

As for parts, Newegg and Amazon are both the easiest, and there are lots of other sources you can find just by looking with a search engine. A couple of the bigger supply sites have closed due to creator death lately, but others are doing fine.

If you decide to test the rendergarden idea, a laptop can be a viable render node. You have to set them up so that they can get rid of the heat generated, but a laptop can be an excellent first node to experiment with.

I am certainly pleased with the Threadipper I have been using for the past 16 month or so. I had the system built for me and the only problem so far has been the failure of the PSU which I changed, I did receive a refund for as it has a 10 year warranty.

How's your cpu temp, hornet? That Corsair cooler has a square block, so it only covers about 70% of the actual processor. I use a Noctua NHU-12S air cooler, which is one of two air solutions out there. I add a second 120mm fan to it for a push pull air flow system, and so far I haven't had trouble with the 1920 overheating (They send a set of wire clips to attach the fan, and a splitter to run them both off the same motherboard header if you wish). I get near real time running of a Poser animation with no skipped frames with the 1920 and 32 gigs of DDR-4.

ssgbryan posted at 7:50PM Sat, 25 April 2020 - #4387307

You haven't given us a budget, which makes it difficult to help with a most-bang-for-buck system.

Most AM4 motherboards (which is what Ryzen system use), will take anything from the APU you have listed to an RX3950 (16 cores/32 threads). If finances are tight, A Ryzen 1600AF CPU is a better bet cpu-wise: 6 cores/12 threads for $85.

If you are willing to go used - an HP Z620 (6 cores/12 threads, 32Gb of ram) system can be had off Ebay for $270. Slap an Nvidia GPU in, and Bob's your uncle.

I know you can get some good deals off ebay, but I don't trust ebay. I will be going used though. Right now, trying to stay under 500-600 dollars.

Lots of companies sell refurbished machines on ebay.

Just look for a company with a decent feedback rating.

ssgbryan posted at 4:36AM Sun, 26 April 2020 - #4387391

Lots of companies sell refurbished machines on ebay.

Just look for a company with a decent feedback rating.

Right now, I'm looking at New Egg. There are some local shops around here that do refurbished and used computers and I was considering them too before this pandemic hit. Unfortunately, I think most of them are now closed.

WDBeaver posted at 1:16PM Sun, 26 April 2020 - #4387375

How's your cpu temp, hornet? That Corsair cooler has a square block, so it only covers about 70% of the actual processor. I use a Noctua NHU-12S air cooler, which is one of two air solutions out there. I add a second 120mm fan to it for a push pull air flow system, and so far I haven't had trouble with the 1920 overheating (They send a set of wire clips to attach the fan, and a splitter to run them both off the same motherboard header if you wish). I get near real time running of a Poser animation with no skipped frames with the 1920 and 32 gigs of DDR-4.

As you would expect it varies depending on room temperature and load but with all 32 threads running on a Poser render the temp is usually in the mid fifties to early sixty degrees C. Temp here today is 23 degrees C outside and the processor has been doing a render for a few hours and the reported temp at the moment is 53.25 degrees C. If it creeps above 63 degrees C the fan unit speeds up and while not annoying you certainly know the unit is working hard. Most of the time the fan runs at 1500 rpm or below and that just gives a slight hum.

I had the unit built for me by Scan in the UK and there you can select a base unit and then you can modify the configuration, within certain parameters, to suit your needs. The big advantage of this is they are not going to allow you to configure something that will not work or go together as they have to build it and provide the warranty. It also means you don't have to look at the specifications of the components to make sure things like if the graphics card will fit into your choice of case. My choice of processor was originally the 1920 and a different motherboard but the 1920 was not in stock at the time so after chatting with someone at Scan we came up with the 1950X and the Gigabyte board. The board was not an option with the configurator but was actually a few pounds cheaper than the one that was not in stock so that subsidised the extra cost of the 1950X. I was happy to change the motherboard as I have been using Gigabyte motherboards for my last four systems, over 20 years in total, and all of them are still running.

EClark1894 posted at 3:51PM Sun, 26 April 2020 - #4387400

ssgbryan posted at 4:36AM Sun, 26 April 2020 - #4387391

Lots of companies sell refurbished machines on ebay.

Just look for a company with a decent feedback rating.

Right now, I'm looking at New Egg. There are some local shops around here that do refurbished and used computers and I was considering them too before this pandemic hit. Unfortunately, I think most of them are now closed.

you can pick up some extremely cheap (affordable) stripped down, refurb's (most likely off lease) workstations from them.

I've run Wal-Mart cheep$500.00 game pcs.they worked fine. I wonder what a stock $200.00 Dell with out a 3d card would do.any one use thous ?

EClark1894 posted at 7:51AM Wed, 13 May 2020 - #4386981

I'm not really a game person. And the last games I really owned were all on a Mac. Well, except for Minesweeper. So I was never really into graphics that much. I tend to use Blender mainly for modeling, so other than to see what the finished product will look like I don't really need EEVEE. Still, I'd like to be able to run the latest version of Blender. And even though Poser 12 isn't out yet, I'd like to be able to have a decent machine capable of running it when it does come out. That includes running the graphics.

Picking up on that, I do hope that Poser 12 will bring some much needed improvements to Poser's Superfly. I know that I, for one, have been a very vocal critic of Superfly's and Poser 's shortcomings when it comes to rendering. I can create a model in Blender. which uses the Cycles shader nodes, but I can't import them directly into Poser from Blender, because Poser doesn't recognize .blend files from Blender.

Hi EClark1894

Personally I would build own computer there, for example as above mentioned Ryzen 1600AF its great CPU for money, Ryzen 3600 or earlier 2700 or 2700X are good value for money CPU, they're great like in gaming or in rendering there, in rendering they will outperform any CPU which cost 2 times more from Intel

16GB is minimum what I would put to any PC, 8GB is sometimes enough but with 16GB you have bit more headroom although 32GB would be advisable

Get SSD, doesn't matter which one but get one 512GB should be enough for your needs, 1TB doesn't cost too much

For GPU RTX 2060 or any GPU with 8GB would be advisable for ypu if you want to render with GPU, CPU rendering in SuperFly or Cycles is slow or slower than GPU

AMD GPUs are good value for money but sadly their performance in OpenGL is very poor due this I would for now stay away from them

I use their FirePro or Radeon Pro GPUs which have excellent OpenGL performance but they're bit overpriced in my view

Going with refurbished Xeon build, I wouldn't because newer CPU from AMD always will outperform them

I got 5960x whuch is running 4.6Ghz and my CPU is outperformed by 3700 quite easily in rendering and in gaming we are on par

Building own computer its easy and this will take you probably 2-4 hours,just don't be scared to do that alone

There is lots of tutorials how to do it

Regarding the ThreadRipper, earlier 19xx not sure if I would choose, their performance is not best in gaming or in applications which do use only few cores, ThreadRipper 2xxx series as well, they're poorly optimised as well, only newer ThreadRipper would I consider if I would be upgrading

I have used or tried earlier ThreadRipper 1950X and 2990X and 2950X, these CPU I bought for myself but after two or three weeks literally they been sold or been reused in other builds which I have done

Hope this helps

Thanks, Jura

Thanks for the advice, Jura. I will definitely try to follow it, but I will definitely NOT be building my own.

Jura posted at 10:50AM Thu, 14 May 2020 · @4389085 Get SSD, doesn't matter which one but get one 512GB should be enough for your needs, 1TB doesn't cost too much

I get that Solid State Drives are faster, but are they better? I seem t remember that they fail a lot, although, I might be misremembering that.

The original generation of SSDs were pretty limited in lifespan, but TRIM was invented (also known as "wear-leveling") to make an SSD's lifespan competitive with that of a typical HDD spinning disk (and in some aspects longer-lived).

From a mobile-computing perspective, an SSD means longer battery life as well since you're not spinning up and spooling-down a typical HDD motor each time you want to read or write data from/to a disk.

And yeah, replacing an HDD with an SSD is a serious upgrade, even for older computers, since nowadays the CPU and RAM speeds of a 4-year-old computer aren't too much different than latest/greatest, but the I/O speed-up by going to an SSD will actually make an older machine somewhat competitive with a newer machine that uses a spinning HDD.

All that said, if I were buying a new machine (and later this year I may), my big focus will be on the GPU, full-stop. In CG, even the somewhat older CPU/RAM/SDD rigging will be more than adequate, but the big diff is in having a badassed GPU. This will speed up your UI if you're crazy enough to enable a GPU-hungry preview mode in the workspace, but the big diff is in cutting down render-times. If I get a laptop that replaces my current nVidia 1060 GTX @ 6GB RAM with a 2070 GTX @ say 12GB RAM, my render times would likely be cut in half, if not cut it down to an even smaller fraction.

(Example? Even now, I can dork around with the NearMe meshes in a simple scene w/ iRay preview in DS, and the render times are laughably tiny now, and the preview results are to the point where I could almost just take a screenshot w/o running a render and it would have the same level of quality considering their toonish skins.)

Anyrate, yeah, sink your ducats into the GPU... biggest, meanest one you can spring for. If you can get two and connect them viz. SLI or Crossfire, do that.

All the GPUs I see are integrated Graphics. I'm trying to narrow that down to ones that specifically mention a graphics card.

EClark1894 posted at 2:28AM Wed, 20 May 2020 - #4389374

Jura posted at 10:50AM Thu, 14 May 2020 · 4389085 Get SSD, doesn't matter which one but get one 512GB should be enough for your needs, 1TB doesn't cost too much

I get that Solid State Drives are faster, but are they better? I seem t remember that they fail a lot, although, I might be misremembering that.

Hi EClark1894

I have in my PC 4x 2TB SSD, one of them is older Samsung and still holds or rather is still fast as have been at day one, I do lots of decompression and compression files and this takes lots writes to drives

I have written to my Samsung I think 90TB of data within 2 years, I don't think you will ever write so much data hahaha and this SSD still reads 540mbps/530mbps write

If you buy something like Samsung, Crucial and many other makers SSD which have high TBW rate then you shouldn't have to be worried about this

Personally I would recommend Samsung, they are expensive but worth it

Have look, two years ago my main 3TB HDD Seagate failed, literally one day stopped working and on this HDD I have all my files, renders, runtimes etc, recovery would be so much expensive and I never looked on that because of price, I recovered only part of files with few tricks but still several files and Renders I will never recover

I have several now SSD which have been reliable and no issues with them

Tey drop HDD on floor, this HDD usually will be dead, do that with SSD and no issues

They're quiet and reliable SSD, juat enable TRIM as above and enjoy fast computer

I upgraded every laptop like friends or my family with 240-250GB SSD

Please check iBuypower PC, not sure how big is your budget for PC

Hope this helps

Thanks, Jura

Thanks, Jura.

EClark1894 posted at 4:55AM Thu, 21 May 2020 - #4389374

Jura posted at 10:50AM Thu, 14 May 2020 · 4389085 Get SSD, doesn't matter which one but get one 512GB should be enough for your needs, 1TB doesn't cost too much

I get that Solid State Drives are faster, but are they better? I seem t remember that they fail a lot, although, I might be misremembering that.

In their infancy SSD's had issues, life span could be severely impacted by drive size and random corruption/lost data wasn't unheard of. SSD's have improved so much that I don't know a single person in the past 5 years who has had an SSD from a well known manufacturer fail on them. I've got three SSD's in my current system, one was a replacement for a smaller C drive and it was already a very old (in tech years) Samsung EVO 840 that I passed down to another computer that's been using it for several years without any issues. I'm pretty sure that they've become so robust that other hardware will fail way before any of these drives do. That said, I still have a backup and another backup just in case. You never know! D: