Reply To: 32GB or 64GB System ram?

[Dwayne Savage]

Personally, I would opt for the 2 systems. That way you have one for rendering and one for main system. You can use flamenco which is developed by blender studio for a render manager with both machines on the same network. 

As for the other option, Having both GPUs in the same system will only provide a 5% to 30% improvement on Blender depending on your Main/Mother board’s PCIe type, bus speed, and power supply(Gold rated is preferred, but Silver rated cover you). As already mentioned, make sure that the power supply has enough power to run everything at top speed.(AKA the Wattage) You may get 15% to 40% increase on renders though.

For the RAM you will want to check your Brand of CPU and see how much cache it has. If it has less then 36MB Or if it’s listed by cache level L3 is usually 32mb, L2 is 4MB, and L1 is 512KB. If L1 is 256 or L2 is 2mb or less, then you want to stick with 32GB in my opinion. Note: I’m over simplifying. Basically if you start having scenes that are large enough to go past 32GB the CPU will run hotter because it has less cache. When the CPU starts to overheat it will throttle down.(AKA become slower) Just because someone will probably say something, Yes, you can counter this with an advanced or high-end cooling system. 

If you’re on Linux the following Desktop Environments can make full use of 64GB RAM. GNOME, XFCE, KDE Plasma, and Cinnamon. Other will support it, but currently don’t manage it as efficiently as those in my experience. What I mean by that is that if you have the lower cache they handle it in a way that reduces or event stops the CPU from heating up compared to windows. I know Linux Techies will argue that it’s the kernel version and Memory Management subsystem that the distro uses that’s more important, but that hasn’t been my experience so far. Regardless most 64bit desktop distros can handle 2TB easily.