ZBrushCentral

Any recommended PC builds?

I just graduated and have been waiting to upgrade my equipment. Currently I’ve been jumping between a 5 year old laptop and a 2 year old laptop, so I really need to upgrade. I’d like to get a desktop set up since I know that will handle everything better, but I haven’t got a clue what to look for. Obviously lots of memory and a strong processor, but I don’t really know what else is important to have.

Would someone be willing to share their build so I can get a better idea of what to look for? Or, possibly a place I can learn how to figure all this out? Anything would be useful at this point.

Mostly I’ve been working with Zbrush, Maya, 3DSMax, and Blender on occassion. I also am making use of the Unreal engine to test my creations, so I need something that can support that as well. Any help is appreciated cause all this tech talk is going over my head. Thanks all.

Hi, this page will give an idea of the kind of specs you might want to consider for a PC workstation:

http://www.arbico.co.uk/Workstation-p-1-c-436.html

(I’m not related to this company in any way)

As a very basic rough guide:

Qaud core CPU
8 Gigs memory (if you can afford 12, 16 or even 24 it would be better, more is better is still true)
64 Bit Windows 7 Operating System (ZBrush 5 will have a 64Bit version, all the other applications you list already do)
For Graphics you might want to consider an Nvidia Quadro Graphics card (or similar alternative), but they aren’t cheap compared to consumer cards

You might also check out Dells workstations to compare with the above, hope this is of some help and gives you a place to start your system researching.

The 3 main pieces of hardware most important to 3d graphics.

  1. Processor
  2. Video Card
  3. RAM

The processor and ram will help with faster renderings and modeling. The video card will help with real time editing, (and in the very near future processing as well).