New PC build, need advices.

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello Unreal Community,

It’s my 1st post here and sorry if this topic has already been discussed on the forum. Also sorry for any grammar mistake as English is not my native language.

I’m going to assemble a PC to produce game assets in Maya and Mudbox (and probably 3D Coat and Zbrush) and use it in Unreal Engine 4, since my technical knowledge is limited and couldn’t find precise answers to my questions on the internet I’d be very thankful if someone of you could help me shine a light on by doubts. The parts configuration I’m going for as of now would be:

CPU: Intel i7 6700K 4.2GHz 8MB Cache
MB: Asus H170 Pro Gaming
RAM: Kingston Fury X 2133MHz 16GB
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 980ti 6GB 2816 Cuda Cores
Storage: SSD San Disk Ultra II 480GB
CPU FAN: Cooler Master Evo212
Windows 7 or 10
plus 2-3 more case fans, 650W psu and of course an adequate ATX case.

My doubts are:

1- I read a lot about Quadros being the best of the best for 3D modeling, but also read a lot about NOT beig the right ones for the kind of modeling that goes into 3D game assets so is the Quadro a must or will the GTX 980ti do fine?
I also read a lot about Quadros not going well with game engines that prefers gaming-oriented GPUs.
Is the 980ti an overkill and a 980 (non ti) will be enough?

2- Is 2133 16GB RAM enough? Better go with 32GB? Better go with an higher clock RAM (3000-3600MHz)?

3- Is the i7 6700K enough to not experience slowdowns (specially in high division levels in Mudbox or when building very mesh-populated scenes in the editor) or should I look at 6 cores CPUs?

4- I’ve read about issues with Win10 so I’d buy a Win7 license, is it a good idea or better stay on the news OS?

Thanks again for your help, I’m just willing to make sure I’ll be spending this (quite a lot of) money on the right equipment.

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Quadro will run well in the Maya and Mudbox viewport, however it is not cost effective when using a game or a game engine such as UE4, in that situation you will get much better performance with a gaming graphics card. Quadros though are very expensive, and I think it’s actually better to get a high-end Geforce card than to get a low-end Quadro.
I would wait however, the GTX 1080 is coming out next week and is better than the 980Ti, or if you want to save some money you could get the new 1070 which comes out next month which is also faster than the 980Ti but is also cheaper.

16GB of RAM is probably enough. It will depend on what you want to do, if you want a game with a large number of objects and you’re using baked lighting, then you can run out of memory pretty easily, but rarely does anyone get to that point. I wouldn’t push for faster RAM, since it’ll be more expensive and won’t offer much of a difference.

The CPU will not affect performance in Mudbox as much as the GPU will, you will want a GPU with a lot of memory, and something like the 980Ti/1080/1070 should be fine
You can always push things further than your hardware, it just depends on the complexity of what you want to do.

Windows 10 is fine, you won’t have to worry.