Computer Needed for Artists Without Talent (and my rig)
Hello friends 🙂
If you are running online apps, you don’t need a powerful computer – in fact, you don’t even need a computer. However, if you want to run AI programs locally, you will need a decent CPU, a good amount of RAM, and the MOST IMPORTANT piece of hardware – a GPU that supports CUDA, with a good amount of VRAM. The GPU card I have chosen is the Nvidia RTX 3060 – the base model (not the TI) with 12 Gb of VRAM. I am not sponsored or endorsing anything in this post, only giving you my honest feedback. Until this year, I was using my computer mainly for music and a little gaming, and I was happy with how it was performing. Before the 3060, I had an AMD RX570 with 8 gb of VRAM, and for all the programs I was running, the good ol’ 570 was ok.
The programs I was using in 2022 were Cakewalk by Bandlab as DAW, quite a lot of VST instruments, Gimp 2.10, and Darktable 4 for the photos, Davinci Resolve18 for video editing, OBS, Blender 3.00 with the Radeon drivers, Unreal Engine 4.26 e 5.0, and Daz3d for 3d. Before installing the 3060, the 3d performance of my rig was a little weak. To run Stable diffusion locally, it took way too long to generate a single image because it was using CPU processing, which is way too slow compared to GPU processing. Another big advance was the Nvidia IRAY rendering in Daz3d and Cycles rendering in Blender, not to mention the render speed now takes a fraction of what it did with an unsupported GPU. The last thing I want to mention is Nvidia Omniverse, which is so beautiful.
Well, my rig is:
- OS: Windows 10
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600x
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060 12 Gb VRAM (changed from an AMD RX 570 8Gb)
- RAM: 32 Gb pc3000
- PSU: FSP 700w
- 1 SSD 256 gb, 1 SSD 1 Tb, and 1 HDD 3 Tb, all SATA (no NVMe)
- Behringer UMC 404 hd USB Asio audio interface
- MIDI keyboard 49 keys Swissonic (cheapo Thomann MIDI keyboard, but good enough for me)
With this rig, apart from the AI stuff that I want to run locally, I was pleased. Now with the RTX, I am quite happy with it. It is much better than before and it runs AI stuff.
The AI stuff that I run locally is Automatic1111 (Stable Diffusion) for the graphic stuff and Oobabooga for the chat bots. With these two environments, I have a lot of stuff to tinker with 🙂
Regarding the RX 570, my son and I have mounted it in a z420 Xeon workstation, and we made a cheap but rather good gaming rig (we play the same games we used to play on my rig before I got the RTX). Anyway, with gaming, streaming, editing, and rendering, we never go above 1080p.
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Have a good time!
Hugs.
