System thoughts - Adobe Creative Cloud and Blender?

[Darren S]

Hi all - I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here (usually gaming systems) and would appreciate any feedback regarding the two main packages mentioned above for a new PC system? I'm trying to help a work colleague make a decision.

Does anyone have day-to-day usage of either ACC and/or Blender and recommend specific hardware to make their job easier? Is having more memory onboard more beneficial to you than a high-end graphics card, for example? Do you get bottle-necked with the CPU regularly and would strongly advise as many cores as possible, etc?

Just after some ideas of pitfalls or other things to be on the lookout for.

@SharkyUK @boultonn @Yorkshire Pudding @N0ddie @Ph1 Tom @McGherkin @sn00p (....and any others?!)

Cheers,
D.

 

[Ben]

I used Creative Cloud day in day out for my line of work (Graphic Designer) but unfortunately I’m using an iMac. However, if you’re interested my specs are; it’s a late 2016 model with a 27” 5K display, 3.2GHz Quad Core i5 (3.6GHz with turbo boost), a 1TB Fusion Drive (I wish it was purely SSD in hindsight) 24GB RAM and AMD Radeon R9 M390 (2GB). Handles everything I throw at it pretty well including 4K video editing, I’m not sure if any of this is helpful or not but here you go 😂

 

[Darren S]

I used Creative Cloud day in day out for my line of work (Graphic Designer) but unfortunately I’m using an iMac. However, if you’re interested my specs are; it’s a late 2016 model with a 27” 5K display, 3.2GHz Quad Core i5 (3.6GHz with turbo boost), a 1TB Fusion Drive (I wish it was purely SSD in hindsight) 24GB RAM and AMD Radeon R9 M390 (2GB). Handles everything I throw at it pretty well including 4K video editing, I’m not sure if any of this is helpful or not but here you go 😂

Cheers Ben - interesting that the gfx card you mention is very low on memory (in today's standards). I wonder if the 24GB of system RAM and the Mac architecture/OS to begin with, help out significantly?

 

[boultonn]

I know it might seem like a stereotype but I think the the Mac architecture lends itself to this kind of thing.
Not to say you couldn't easily achieve the same performance on Windows, but I've been comfortably using Creative Cloud apps on my 2019 MBP 16", one of the reasons I went for the 16" rather than the 13" is the dedicated graphics and it really does fly through 4k video editing and any Adobe tasks I've thrown at it - admittedly nothing prores or the like as it's only personal use, not professional.

 

[Ph1 Tom]

On the desktops for analytical and graphical purposes we have at work it's generally more and faster cores, minimum 32gb ram and a fast SSD that help. The software packages take advantage of multimode CPUs.

If we're doing rendering a decent gpu helps, can't remember what GPU we've got but I don't think it's anything top of the range.

 

[SharkyUK]

Hey D, I use Adobe CC and Blender regularly and find that they work just peachy on my Windows 10 PC.

Given the direction that these software applications are now headed I would recommend a decent discrete GPU with as much VRAM as possible. Blender's rendering engine (as well as many of its features) now utilise the GPU for increased performance. It's the same deal with the likes of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, etc. They, too, utilise the increased performance afforded by the GPU. As of this moment, I would suggest looking towards nVidia for the GPU as I know that their NVENC hardware encoding is supported in Adobe CC and their hardware seem to favour Team Green at the moment. Turing or better is ideal, but obviously costs are higher for the newer generation of GPUs. Older GPUs will also offer benefits too of course, if not to the level of the newer items.

As for the CPU, spreading workloads across multiple cores is the way nowadays. AMD's Ryzen series are ripping up the rulebook and stuffing it to Intel to be quite honest. If your colleague cannot stretch to the new 5000 series then something like the 3900X is a stupidly strong performer (not too far off Intel's 10900k when working on Windows in Photoshop and the like). The same rings true when considering Blender workloads and, despite being largely an Intel guy, the sensible route is AMD.

Having said the above... I would first consider storage (storage in terms of available system RAM and hard drive storage). I would recommend as large and fast an size M.2 SSD as possible (or an array of said items). They can make a massive difference when, typically, a lot of time can be spent in I/O cycles as data is read/written to and from the drive, scratch directories, swap files, etc. during creative workflows. There's no issue buying even larger, cheaper and slower drives for storage - but definitely look to invest in fast SSD tech for the 'work' drives.

The same goes for RAM. Decide on a CPU, and then look at no less than 32GB. If the CPU route is AMD then have a quick search to see which RAM sticks and speeds are best suited to the CPU and mobo - they can be a bit more sensitive than Intel. Again, the more RAM the better really. I'm running 128GB RAM and it's pretty sweet! LOL! Admittedly your colleague may not require such levels of RAM (or be willing to spend that much) but I would definitely want 32GB in there.

All in my opinion of course.

 

[Krarl]

Reasonably priced

Ryzen 9 3950x
32GB+ RAM
RTX 2080 Ti

Bit more expensive

Ryzen 9 5950x
32GB+ RAM
RTX 3090

MegaMachine

Threadripper
64GB+ RAM
AMD MI100

Edit: Other bits like coolers and boards etc are a preference. I prefer air cooling but some people like having a stupid system that takes over 2 hours to take apart without draining everything all over your components 😂 But I would 100% bet getting a M.2 NVMe or a 2.5" NVMe and the biggest size your pocket can handle

 

[sn00p]

Hi all - I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here (usually gaming systems) and would appreciate any feedback regarding the two main packages mentioned above for a new PC system? I'm trying to help a work colleague make a decision.

Does anyone have day-to-day usage of either ACC and/or Blender and recommend specific hardware to make their job easier? Is having more memory onboard more beneficial to you than a high-end graphics card, for example? Do you get bottle-necked with the CPU regularly and would strongly advise as many cores as possible, etc?

Just after some ideas of pitfalls or other things to be on the lookout for.

@SharkyUK @boultonn @Yorkshire Pudding @N0ddie @Ph1 Tom @McGherkin @sn00p (....and any others?!)

Cheers,
D.

Sorry, I don't really know what's good or not in the PC world as I'm a Mac user.

I have a server which runs Unraid and hosts VM's, dockers and runs both Emby (for tv/movies) and Plex (purely music using Plexamp), that machine is a Ryzen 7 2700 with 64GB of ram, it has a Nvidia GTX 1060 which is used solely by Emby to hardware transcode video when we watch stuff outside of the house, also has 10Gbe ethernet.

The machine itself doesn't have a monitor connected, it's purely a server, I have VM's on it that I use for various purposes, the windows ones I connect to via RDP.

As an aside, I personally use the Serif Affinity tools. I have licenses for Mac+Windows+iOS for all their products, the reason for having Mac and windows versions is that if I happen to be doing windows development and I quickly need to modify an asset, it's easier to just use Affinity Designer inside the windows VM than it is to do it on the Mac and then transfer it back.

I seriously recommend the Affinity tools, they are absolutely brilliant - there will probably be a Black Friday sale as well.

 

[Steven103]

I think you asked a subtly clever question, not just what’s best (AMD & nVidia, obviously), r.e. the trade off between CPU & GPU which hasn’t really been answered yet?

Having never used Blender, Google says that not all features can be GPU accelerated and of the ones that can CUDA (nVidia only) offers a wider feature set than OpenGL (nVidia & Radeon).

So if your mate regularly uses very specific features then the answer could easily swing from a very CPU focused solution in Threadripper/EPYC+1650 to a very GPU biased solution of Ryzen+multiple 2080s.

YouTube is full of videos where 25k PCs are twice as fast as 50k Macs because the PC is built for the task.

And obviously if your mate isn’t actually doing anything particularly intensive then anything balanced & recent will be OK. A good example is CAD, people always think you need Quadro & bajillion GB of RAM. You did 20 years ago but today you can browse & interrogate assemblies with tens/hundreds of components absolutely fine on a mobile i5 with 8gb RAM & integrated graphics.