How to configure your workstation for Blender 3.5
Blender is a professional, free open-source 3D CAD program for creating models, movies, animations and visual effects. With the integrated video editing program you can edit your video clips optimally. The integrated render engine "Cycles" supports CPU as well as GPU for your renderings. Starting with version 3.0. Blender has a new realtime render engine called Cycles X. With Cycles X, small animations can be created and edited in real time with little work.
The right CPU for Blender 3.5
If you want to render large, more complex scenes quickly and perform many physical simulations, for example with high-resolution liquids, with a high-frequency Intel Xeon 8- or 10-core CPU, for example an Intel Xeon W2155 with 10 cores and up to 4.50GHz in Turbo Boost. Alternatively, you can choose a powerful Intel i9 model 10900x with 10 cores and a base clock speed of 3.70. More than an alternative are AMD processors, the Ryzen ThreadRipper Pro model series, for example 3955WX with 16 cores and max. 4.30GHz.
High speed memory for Blender 3.5
Memory is heavily used in Blender. Blender divides the modeling workload between the processor and the graphics card. The CPU is used for high-precision tasks, modifications and shaping, while the graphics card is responsible for geometry selection, rendering viewports and overlays. For this reason, your workstation must provide enough RAM. The main memory serves as a short-term buffer. By using the RAM with a high clock rate, you achieve a speed advantage and effectively save time. The clock rate is specified in the PC4-2666V format, for example. The number 4 stands for the RAM generation and the number after the hyphen indicates the bandwidth of the RAM module in megabytes per second. Use RAM with a high clock rate. You will have faster access to the cache (e.g. for simulations) and your data will be captured faster. We recommend at least 32 GB of RAM for Blender. If you are rendering millions of polygons and numerous textures, we advise using 64-128 GB of RAM. To ensure optimal performance, we fuel our business workstation in quad-channel mode. Look for a high number of memory banks to be able to upgrade the RAM if needed.
Optimized graficcard for Blender 3.5 - Using two GPUs reduces render time by 50%
Blender integrates the graphics card into all computing processes. Since the integrated render engine Cycle X supports the GPU, we recommend focusing on a graphics card with sufficient VRAM (graphics card memory). A high number of VRAM and Cuda cores is important. Blender is able to use multiple graphics cards and scales very well with two GPUs. If you use two identical graphics cards in SLI interconnection, render times are reduced by half. The workload is distributed evenly between two graphics cards. We recommend using graphics cards with as much VRAM as possible for your renderings. NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards are ideally suited. We can recommend NVIDIA Quadro of the RTX series. As a base a NVIDIA Quadro RTX A2000 with 12 GB GDDR6 VRAM, for performance projects a NVIDIA Quadro RTX A4000 with 16 GB GDR6 VRAM. For high-end projects, such as real-time fluid simulations, we recommend one or two NVIDIA Quadro RTX A5000 with 24 GB GDDR6 and 8,192 Cuda cores. NVIDIA graphics cards of the Geforce series achieve good results in Blender. We can recommend an NVIDIA Gefroce RTX 3070Ti or a Geforce RTX 3080Ti. Please activate for NVIDIA graficcards CUDA in the graphics card settings of Blender. As an AMD variant, an AMD Radeon Pro W6800 with 32 GB GDDR6 VRAM and Stream processors is suitable.
Rely on data security for Blender 3.5
We recommend using a 250-500 GB M.2 SSD for the operating system and the CAD programs as required. If stability is important to you, we recommend that you set up two identical SSD hard disks and two identical S-ATA HDDs as a RAID 1 mirror. This variant of the RAID array (redundant array of independent disks) mirrors all data 1:1.
