Hi,

I Need some info. 

My workstation is about 6 years old. It is a Core i7 6700K. (core is just 4).

But I put more memory for learning Houdini. It is now 64 GB Ram.
My Graphics card is 750ti 4GB memory.

I plan to buy "ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB GDDR6 Twin Edge OC Graphics Card" and subscribe to Redshift Render. So far I know Graphics cards are very important. But budget is an issue.


1. What do you think about my current system with GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB? Can I handle a professional freelancing job with rendering? I intend to get a redshift subscription also.

2.Are these enough to do a professional level job as well as courses provided in Rebelway water fx courses, And other VFX simulation?

3. Is Ram bus speed (MHz) important? Or should I just focus on Capacity (GB)?

4.  If I don't buy the graphics card then I can get the latest intel cpu (Core i9 12900K Processor) with 128 GB ram. I can use my old 750ti 4GB memory graphics card.

I intend to do a lot of fluid simulation as well as other effects Houdini provides.

Please give me honest professional advice. As it is a one time investment. I can't afford more until I start earning.
Thank you so much.

Hi,

don´t know if I´m the ideal specimen to go by , but i do freelance work in the field of archvis using Houdini, Blender and Redshift.
My setup is a 11 year old intel i7 3930k with 64GB of DDR3 and a GTX1080ti with 11GB of memory and it´s quite enough for most scenes with heavy instancing (from entire building blocks with 3d modelled grass and trees and cars to vacation huts in 3d modelled rainforests). So far, I don´t feel like the old hardware is a major bottleneck for my work. I can also follow along quite nicely ith pretty much any tutorial with sims, tha i do from time to time in my free time.
While simulations can be a bit more demanding than my day to day work, I´d expect the price of such a job to cover the hardware upgrade costs quite quickly. For rendering, it might make sense to use a renderfarm service, if you don´t want to invest in a high end GPU right now. For example Gridfarms works with the Houdini/Redshift combo quite nicely, they even have a plugin, that allows you to render directly from the Houdini UI. But I´m sure there are others out there... this is just the only one I have tried out so far.

I also hear many people go for an AMD processor these days.

If you want to use Redshift, chceck, if the 750ti is even compatible with the latest versions of Redshift any more. I haven´t checked this, but I feel like that card might be right on the edge of what Redshift is currently able to run on and might become incompatible soon.

Also... I think a lot simulation calculation inside Houdini can be made on the GPU nowadays, so maybe investing in a high-end processor while keeping an old GPU might not be as beneficial as saving a few bucks on the CPU and rather investing in a decent GPU. But this is also just a feeling of mine, not based on any hard data or personal experience... so wait for more opinions before you take this advice

Either way, if I were you, rather than investing in a machine that might set you back a lot, I´d try to look for jobs, that you can take on with your current equipment (you´d be surprised, how much you can get done with an old computer). Or maybe look for some used computers or components. A used GTX1080ti might give your current computer the boost it might need for a few more jobs to come and you can start saving for a new computer as you work and see, what kind of hardware might best fit your projects.

Cheers,
Ivan