No Kevin 64GB of RAM is not overkill at all with iClone6. I have lots of avatars in some of my scenes. I thought the same so after switching back to Intel motherboard in about 2 decades, I only used the four slots on one side which gave me 64 GB. After I added a background avatar the motion puppet greyed out on me, and I was not able to use it. I rebooted and I got the same result. I then ordered 32 GB of RAM for the other side to fill up two of the last remaining 4 slots, and that gave me 96 GB. Now I could add puppet animation to the avatar, and added a few more avatars, but while playing back the project I could see it slowing and out of time with the music. I later bought another 32 GB, and now with a total of 128 GB, the playback timing seems to be normal now. Maybe with some older or another type motherboard and smaller projects it's overkill like I also thought. But it really does work, and that was with my virtual memories being cranked up before I added the 64 GB of RAM. So those who use a lot of things in their projects or in the future to get a motherboard with 8 memory slots. There is a difference between 64 GB where I started on this motherboard and more memory. You will not need it if you have simple projects, but keep this in mind if you upgrade your system and motherboard. AMD motherboards only allowed me a max of 4 x 8 GB, which is 32 GB total. If I had problems with 64 GB of RAM with this project, imagine how many avatars I would have been not able to add with only 32 GB of RAM? How many avatars do I have in the scene? I've never really counted. I think I could probably get away with 10 more Avatars, but I'm not really using CC characters maybe 2 or 3, because they eat up memory. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Home built; ASRock X570 Pro 4, AMD Ryzen 9-5950X CPU, AMD RADEON RX6900XT, 16GB video card, 131GB of RAM.

That is a good point. I have an older desktop and by upgrading just the graphics card it got a new lease on life. The big disadvantage of laptops is usually that you can't upgrade components.

There are a few boutique laptop makers that feature exchangeable components as well. One vendor is http://www.xoticpc.com/, which has a search facility on their site.They feature their own brand and also sell others.

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I bought recently an MSI Machine

 MSI GT73VR-6RFZ16SR451

5820HK
512 GB SSD RAID PCIE

1080 GTX
16GB MEM

 The reason why I decided for MSI over Asus is that they have slot in Graphic Cards. As far as I know Asus has soldered in Graphic cards. As the processor speeds not really are improving that much compared to how the GPU market is doing, I decided, that this is the most important to be able to buy a new card in a couple of years and no need to sell the laptop away.

I just sold an Asus with GTX 780m on ebay to get mor graphics power for Iclone 7.

Wonder when we will get it :-)

Machines :
MSI Gaming Laptop, I7, GTX 1080, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 1 TB HD
Acer Predator Helios 300 I7 10750H, 16GB, 1TB SSD, RTX 2070

Actually, it is possible to easily upgrade the storage on your own. 
OK, it's interesting to see your opinion. 
thanks for sharing! 
so, I'm better off with the very first option while getting a second ssd m2.

Edit: A second 256GB NVMe PCIe SSD would cost around 300$.

Embrace simplicity

Reduce selfishness

Have few desires

(Lao Tzu) 

It's really just a marketing thing. Big numbers, like 64 vs 32, just look good in the ad. Your very unlikeliy to see any benefit with most software. Either card will perform to it's maximum specs with "just" 32 GIG. :)

EDIT
Just saw Animagic's post pop-up. He has a very good point regarding storage. Is there a custom configuration option? It is also very likely you can upgrade the secondary internal drive yourself. That machine seems to have 2 bays inside. I had an ASUS laptop a few years ago that I put a second drive into.

The reason I selected the 1070 64GB version was because of the hard drive configuration (a 256 GB SSD is not enough). As secondary drive in the 1080 systems ASUS uses 2 times 512GB SSD in Raid 2, which would only give you 512 GB of effective space if I'm not mistaken. That's not really sufficient for the expected content and render use. If you could configure it, I would go with GTX 1070, 32 GB, 512 GB SSD, and a 1 TB secondary HDD.

A desktop would obviously be more economical, but that harder to carry around.

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A 1080 or 1070 8GB are just fine ether will work nicely but 64GB ram is a little over kill you could save the cash and upgrade something else for the cost of those extra DDR4 chips, Unless you run Houdini you will never really need 64GB of ram not even for the best games.

Your graphics card is like a paint bush to a painter, its the most important tool you have...:D



Freelance Artist Kevin.S



  

Email: animatemyart@gmail.com - Web Site:  www.animatemyart.com

The difference between 1070 to -1080 is so significant? So much so that it's preferable to double system RAM?

Embrace simplicity

Reduce selfishness

Have few desires

(Lao Tzu) 

All  good specs ...
When it comes to 3d and video the most important thing that will benefit you will be a system with the most video memory....
64GB of memory is a little over kill I would get a 32GB and put the extra cash into the best card you can get with the most memory.

The 1080 8GB with 32 GB system memory is what I would choose, 64GB memory is a little over kill ..



For $3500 you could build a really nice desktop with a Titan X Pascal 12GB in it :D


Freelance Artist Kevin.S



  

Email: animatemyart@gmail.com - Web Site:  www.animatemyart.com

Many thanks for the detailed response.
What I saw in reviews, Asus did a great job with cooling.

Embrace simplicity

Reduce selfishness

Have few desires

(Lao Tzu)