Build 77 – Hephaestus: Animation Workstation

Hephaestus is an animation workstation, designed around a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X processor and a Quadro RTX 4000 8GB video card.

Description

Hephaestus is an animation workstation, designed around a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X processor and a Quadro RTX 4000 8GB video card.

General System Design

This build is designed around a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X processor and a Quadro RTX 4000 8GB video card.

Software Workload/Customer Need

This customer needed to move from a laptop to a powerful new workstation to handle their growing professional workload that would last a long time. This build was designed for animation, visual effects, and graphic design.

This system is designed in particular for Maya, Houdini, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Photoshop and Zbrush (in order of importance to the client).

This order was managed by one of our former tech consultants, now memorialized in The Johnson Process. Builds managed by Chris include HephaestusThe Beast, JangoNautilusData DozerHoudinierThe BebopSilver SurferEl Rey Del Muerto, and The ArkenScripter.

System Spec

Processor (CPU): AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4

Motherboard: MSI MPG X570 GAMING EDGE WIFI

Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 2x32GB DDR4-3600

Storage (SSD): HP EX950 512GB NVME

Storage (SSD): HP EX950 1TB NVME

Storage (HDD): Western Digital Black 2TB

Video Card (GPU): PNY Quadro RTX 4000 8GB

Power Supply (PSU): Corsair RMx 850W

Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro M TG

Fans: 6x Phanteks PH-F120MP

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Design Rationale

  • The Ryzen 9 3900X gave the customer a great amount of single-core performance for modeling, and multicore performance for heavily-threaded tasks.
  • To ensure the CPU runs at full speed, air cooling with a dual-tower cooler was recommended. Liquid cooling is more powerful, but not necessary.
  • The customer wanted a stable motherboard with a good amount of desktop functionality.
  • The customer wanted at least 64GB of RAM. 128GB is an easy upgrade.
  • The customer was fine with our default storage setup.
  • For best stability in the customers workflow, a professional-grade video card was recommended. For the level of production, we recommended the Quadro RTX 4000 8GB.
  • The overall design of the build meant that a 850W power supply was recommended.
  • We used one of our default mid-tower cases to fit the build.
  • We used our default fans to ensure proper airflow and static pressure.

Customer Review

“I ordered a computer from Top Flight Computers and I’m states away so it unfortunately something must have happened during shipping and it didn’t start up when I got it. It was packaged really well for shipping so I don’t think it was the company’s fault, but they were really helpful through the whole process and paid for someone local to me to take a look at it and get it working.

I have really loved my PC, my biggest complaint is likely that for my new job I don’t get to use it, because they want us to work on the equipment provided for us. I enjoy doing various types of CG work but I really don’t know anything about hardware or building a computer, so this company was a really good option for me.

The people are really kind and knowledgeable and I’m glad that when my computer showed up they didn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing how to diagnose the issue.

At the end of the day I was paying someone else to build my PC instead of learning to myself because I just don’t know anything about it, but a lot of times people who are knowledgeable about tech can be really pretentious and frustrating to communicate with for people who just aren’t.

Top Flight’s employees weren’t like this at all – they were kind and helpful through my fumbling. I didn’t feel taken advantage of either with my lack of knowledge, and I asked for a really weird range of uses because there’s a lot I enjoy doing at a hobby level but only some work I do at a professional level (I’m a modeler professionally but dabble in a lot of 3d skillsets) and no one was rude about that with me.

Since specialization is common professionally with CG, if you get a know-it-all type person they can be rude about a CG artist who does a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but the Top Flight employees were all fantastic.”

Rachel, Royal Oak MI

Build Gallery

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Carbon Thunder is an animation workstation, designed around an 8-core i7-10700K processor and an RTX 2070 Super 8GB video card.
Hephaestus is an animation workstation, designed around a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X processor and a Quadro RTX 4000 8GB video card.
Blenderizer is an animation workstation, designed around a 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X processor and twin RTX 2080Ti 11GB video cards.
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