topic Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade in 3ds Max Forum

12Core Hardware Upgrade

jrankin23 — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 05:55:20 GMT

I am considering a H\W upgrade to and AMD 12Core chip on a compatible MSI motherboard. Currently running an Intel 6Core on an MSi Motherboard. My concern is will this hardware upgrade force me to re-install MAX and other Apps?

Thank you for you advice.

John R

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

Diffus3d — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 08:43:29 GMT

You will absolutely have to reinstall windows and all apps.

Best Regards,

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

RobH2 — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 15:39:39 GMT

Alfred, I'm curious about your comment. I just retired a Dual Xeon machine I had that was obviously Intel and built an AMD machine. I pulled all my hard drives out of my Xeon box and put them in my AMD box, started it up, and everything was just as I left it, only faster. Of course I had to update video drivers, chipsets and all things AMD, but all of my system was intact.

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 16:24:23 GMT

3900x w/ MSI MAG x570 Tomahawk (best x570 at it's price point) you will love your upgrade.

Also note you want to find the sweet spot for that AMD chip with your RAM. 3600 CL16 or faster to pair with your CPU.

This is a great kit. Keep in mind that we are in a hardware crisis so prices are a bit higher for MSRP.

https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232907?Item=N82E16820232907

I think I had paid around 170 in July of last year. I got x4 of these.

Let me know any other build recommendations you may want.

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

RobH2 — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 17:46:01 GMT

I concur with @Anonymous . The x570 with a 3900 series processor rocks. I’ve been blown away with the performance I get in Max now. It’s almost 3x as fast as my previous dual Xeon machine that was only 3-years old. And, cost 1/2 as much. Throw an NVidia RTX video card in and you’ll be in heaven. Gotta love tecnology advances.

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

jrankin23 — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 18:06:24 GMT

RobH & Nam72,

Thank you for your input and I am glad to hear that the upgrade can be achieved without re-installs.

You're list of H/W is very close to my present choice: Ryzen 9 on a Tomahawk with 64Gb Ram.

Like you we update every two - three years and have to research the latest H/W.

Will look again at your comments.

Appreciate your help.

John R.

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

Diffus3d — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 19:59:02 GMT

I can't imagine that there aren't problems lurking under the hood @RobH2, but if it worked... it worked. That's a testament to W10 if so. I would still not recommend it. 🙂

Best Regards,

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

RobH2 — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 20:57:54 GMT

I find this interesting, considering your expertise Alfred. But my experience with Windows 10 has been excellent. I bought my first machine in 1994 (I think) and it was a Gateway P100. It had 4mb of RAM and I upgrade to 8mb RAM (yes, mb and not gb) and that upgrade cost me $900. After that, I've built every machine I've ever had and a lot for friends. I think conservatively, I've built 75 machines.

As of about 6 years ago, I've been imaging Windows 10 and saving off to a removable drive prior to retiring hardware and then dropping my hard drives and video card into a new machine. The image was in case I had massive problems and needed to get into it. I've had few problems. A driver here and there would malfunction, but all in all, I have drive data (I've migrated spinning drives to SSD) from 10-years ago that keeps hopping from motherboard to motherboard. Maybe I have a good workflow, not sure, but I've experienced fantastic migration results. Maybe that is a testimate to Windows 10 and maybe part of it is my due diligence before migrating. But I've never had to completely start over and reinstall. Wait, once I did but I did an "In-Place" upgrade and it saved all of my software installations.

I run Dism and SFC all the time to make sure things are good. And I have no issues there.

By all means users who read this, don't take it as a free pass to do what I've done because Alfred is very experienced and raises a good concern. But, my experience has been really great with migrating and not losing anything. I just did it a few months ago and it went flawlessly.

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

Diffus3d — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 21:30:31 GMT

You are too nice @RobH2 , I am but a man. I make mistakes daily and I don't know everything, plus terrible problems of the past may be more habit than anything else. I do know a lot about Max, but I've never purported to be an OS expert, and there are many things about W10 that I do not like but apparently this isn't one of them.

You sharing your experiences here are super valuable for folks in the future and I am grateful for it. Thank you!

The thing that I'd be most concerned about is programs that install with specific settings in the registry about chipsets and whether they are smart enough to update properly. I don't honestly trust a number of programs or plugins to update the registry for these type of things, but again... I'm from a time where expanded and extended memory were a thing and so were IRQ's. (sigh.)

Best Regards,

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

RobH2 — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 21:57:27 GMT

Ha, funny. IRQ's...the horror...lol... (And what about "TSRs?) I remember those well. Before Windows 10 we had to know DOS. That all went away. Fortunately Microsoft learned from Apple in that, "it just needs to work." My friends think I'm a genius when they see me working in a command prompt environment. I am 'definitely' no programmer. I tell them, it's pretty simple. Just type 'ipconfig /all' and you get a lot of useful info. It's not genius or brain surgery (unless you are writing the stuff).

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

Diffus3d — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 22:22:22 GMT

TSR's are still a thing... acrobat update service is the bane of my existence sometimes. Doesn't matter how many times I disable it, it comes back. It's a worm as far as I'm concerned. 😛

I liked DOS. My high school 3D teacher could model the teapot from memory which is pretty awesome, though not useful these days. I also get some oohs and ahhs for command prompt like I'm some sort of hacker lol. Remember .bat files? Good times.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane bud. 🙂

Best Regards,

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

spacefrog_ — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 06:19:01 GMT

I successfully updated a W10 virtual machine ( VMWare ) to real hardware W10/Intel system several times and it worked. Did some manual driver cleanup afterwards as far i remember

But indeed W10 seems to be pretty flexible in that respect ( no wonders - OS built-in WIM handling has much much improved since the W7 days, and the OS tends to leave everything - filewise - lying arround all the time ... ). For a real clean and fresh OS i still would to a fresh install - or an upgrade install at least ( the latter works pretty well too - including keeping licenses inteact - in my experience )

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

Diffus3d — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 06:38:37 GMT

I have to say W10 does impress from time to time. This is probably the best new feature they never really mentioned.

Best Regards,

Re: 12Core Hardware Upgrade

jrankin23 — Sun, 23 May 2021 03:25:59 GMT

Thank you all for your valued opinions to my question above.

Four weeks back I had my tech guys do the upgrade, Mb, AMD 12core chip and 64Gb RAM, all went well without reloading S\W and I have a screaming fast system.

Appreciate all of your help.

John R.