The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Buying a Computer for Blender

This video discusses the different options available for and tries to assess the best computer for blender.

Chapters
00:00
00:25 - What budget is a low/mid budget machine?
01:23 - minimum spec for Blender?
01:58 - Blender on very slow machines
02:21 - What to do if you can't afford a decent machine
03:33 - Main Components
03:50 - CPU central Processing Unit
06:55 - GPU Graphics Processing Unit
07:48 - Denoise
09:07 - Introducing the optimum PC
10:02 - low/Mid Budget PC Specs
10:20 - Chosen CPU - Ryzen 5 5600x
11:51 - GPU - RTX3060
12:18 - RAM 16GB
13:25 - Storage - SSD's vs HHD
14:27 - Power supply
14:50 - Cooling
15:20 - Testing the mid/low budget PC
16:05 - laptops?
16:37 - Macs?
18:18 - Second hand Computers?

The suggested mid/low budget creator PC for Blender is as follows:
CORSAIR CARBIDE SERIES™ 200R COMPACT GAMING CASE
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Six Core CPU (3.7GHz-4.6GHz/35MB CACHE/AM4)
ASUS® PRIME B550-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.2, 6Gb/s) - ARGB Ready!
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
12GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3060 - HDMI, DP, LHR
1TB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2200 MB/R, 1500 MB/W)
Power Supply CORSAIR 650W CV SERIES™ CV-650 POWER SUPPLY
Change to: CORSAIR 650W CX-M Series™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® BRONZE
PCS FrostFlow 100 V3 Series High Performance CPU Cooler (AMD)
2x 120mm Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof)
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD
Windows 11 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KK3-00027]

Thanks to Nvidia & PC Specialist for the advice and supplying the test computer

- Blender Benchmark is fully free and open source software
- The data provided by the community is public domain and everyone is welcome to explore it

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My PC specs
CPU - AMD RYZEN 9 5950X
GPU - RTX 3090
RAM - 128GB

[MWSculpts]

Personally the timing of this could not have been better as I am currently researching a build specifically for Blender use. Thanks Grant for this fantastic video!

[jeremythompson]

Normally I tend to frown at videos over 10 mins, bc ppl tend to ramble on or fumble a lot. This is so concise and you cover so much data that I don’t think is being talked about. Like you want fast renders? You want to push your computer during development? Start here. Not that you can’t optimize but this is how you get the bang for your Buck.

[onlyschmiddy]

Completely new to Blender and rendering in general but I tinker in AutoCAD for 3d printing so I'm trying to use Blender sculpting in particular for the more organic forms that autocad battles with.
But once you start with one thing in Blender it's a rabbit hole with all it can do. Love your videos as they are easy to follow and very informative. Thanks for all the hard work you put into your videos.

[derekmoore]

You’re a blessing for novices like me who are growing into things. As always, I appreciate everything you do!

[thebritishengineer]

I have built one or two performance machines in the past from work stations, to servers and gaming PC's. My current build was designed purposely for Blender where I regularly work with 3.8+ Gigabyte model files. My advice, you must have PCIe 4.0 and two fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives a 500Gb for the OS (Linux is best and 25% faster with Blender) and a 1Tb for your work in progress, I also use a 2Gb standard SATA for on machine archive. Video card, due to the price hike I'm still running an 8Gb RX 5700 which is a good card for Blender.

Going AMD/Intel well that's personal preference, I like AMD's Ryzen 7 5800x it has a decent Core clock and is well priced. Your going to to torture the mainboards VRM's, MSI build some nice X57 mainboards with this in mind but read the reviews... they have also made some crap my own board is the the MSI Tomahawk X570. For power a decent PSU with true 700 watt delivery. 16Gb of RAM in 2x8Gb's, it's cheaper and your going to need another 2x8Gb's... yes your going to populate all four memory slots eventually. CASE be conservative it's a metal box spend your cash on performance.

Cooling, don't skimp. Air cooling is cost effective water cooling is quieter if you know what you are doing. Clossed loop stuff off the shelf is good if you can get good deals I got a Corasir H81 for the CPU that seems to do a geat job.

Screens.. I use 2x 27" curved screens on a 3rd party central mount. Try and get something with 140+MHz refresh it's better on your eyes, anything over 2K is bollocks. Your eye can't actually see it and it's pointless for Blender.(I assume I will get comments on that).

Audio for tunes while you work.... sorry PC speakers/headsets market is so full of cheap crap with a high price tag I'm lost. If your listen to anything after 1986 or rap buy any old crap. I used to sell decent Hi Fi (no boss or bang & olufson) so I have a trusty pair of Bowers & Wilkins MM-01's for film and classical music.

You may not get what you want for £1200, but you can move towards it. Buy what you need now with a view to adding to it. One last point. empty your temp folder every week and don't fill your SSD's past 84%. Well that's it from me, this was a bit long but hope it helps.

[Gavrev]

Nice oversight man! I find it interesting that your latter day general recommendation sits around the £1200 mark, which was pretty much bang on to my total purchase cost at the end of 2017 - a self-built affair, and a very welcome upgrade, from a 10+ year old PC. At the time GPU's were a bit over RRP (not as bad as it has been of late), but I managed to offset the cost (an EVGA GTX-1070SC) with the CPU (Ryzen 1600) which was only £136 at a time when the going RRP was £229. All in all I've been happy with it but it's nice to find you making this video. A lot is often spoken of about gaming performance but not so often with productivity. The most crucial part does seem to be the complexity of the various ways in which software like Blender may choose to use your system resources, which appears to make the difference when it comes to component priority. In this respect I get the feeling the quality of PC's lifespan with respect to performance doesn't actually change as much as I imagined, or maybe that's just my perspective having last made good on a 10 year iteration! Perhaps with all the above in mind my own system will be plenty good for at least another five years before I'd notice a significant difference.

[BMH]

Don't go above 16 core CPU as the extra cores not only cost a lot more there is a huge core speed drop off above 16 cores (meaning single speed is reduced). The current cost of GPU mean that the new 40xx mid-level examples are closely priced to the low-level.

[kenkioqqo]

I always gain a lot of vital information about Blender-related subjects from all your videos, Grant. Am planning to assemble a PC for Blender next week, and this is just the kind of advice I needed.

[BlackoutGamingChannel]

you need to put 0:00 in the timestamps to get it to show as official chapters otherwise its just links to time locations. still works but may as well take advantage :)

[iandonkin]

The best video I’ve seen to help with blender specific PC’s - it’s a minefield out there, but I am pretty sure that my son is going to be happier for me having watched this and being able to guide him from a better informed viewpoint.

Of course he will want to game on the same PC so it’s still not going to be all plain sailing!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts 👍

[yorkipudd]

I bought Lenovo legion 15 Ryzen7 5800h 3060 to use on external monitors. Faster than the suggested 5600x in laptop form. Screen is crap, but it flies after swapping for 32GB 3200ram. £899 Currys UK plus 90 for memory. I'm happy with it. 2 bios updates in 2 months made it cooler and a little quieter fan wise.

[tvs]

Good to know. I've started putting a system together; i7 10th Gen 16 core CPU, 32GB RAM, Win 11. I wasn't sure what GPU to get so for now I just stuck an old GeForce 1030 2GB in it. It does okay in Eevee rendering but Cycles is out of the question. I suspect the graphics card is going to be 40% of my total budget, maybe more since I plan on using this box in a commercial endeavor. Thanks for the info.

[ShagunDamadia]

I use RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5 3600, works pretty good for me. Sometimes it crashes when using 4K textures, but with patience it does good job.

[proudindian]

Thanks Grant, I've been looking for such a video for quite some time but there was none until this came. Thanks mate!!

[kellya.]

Great video! I've been using blender for about 2 years. I've upgraded my laptop partially for gaming and partially so I had a machine that could handle several design programs open at once without lighting on fire and crashing. I invested in Alienware r7 with Nvidia 3080 and Intel i7. Hope it does the job well with blender 🤞🤞

[RoseKindred]

Thank you. I really needed this. I am looking at pre-builts now because I want to move on to sculpting and my current one weeps thermal paste.

[capawesomed]

Ill resume it: Get at least a Ryzen 5 5600X, , RTX 3070 (3060 is good enough), 32gb ram and SSD. thats it. :D

[SaltedMallows]

Using chapter categories for a video like this would be majorly helpful for referencing this guide.

[Pesto-]

I needed a laptop for travel and wanted to do some Blender on the road and learn Grease Pencil. So I bought a Surface Pro 8 (16 GB RAM) mostly for the pen support. I hope it can handle my “lighter” Blender scenes and GP stuff

[SnowaxeD]

I have GTX 1660 6Gb, and It's not the best but it does the job nicely.
And I agree with the point that, It's better to get a tower PC instead of a laptop, Hardware sounds the same but performs differently.
Before this, I used to work on a 7yr old laptop with AMD r5,
The rendering time for me had changed a lot, previously at 500 samples my laptop took about 1 hour to render 1 frame,
My New PC render the same in just a few seconds.