OT looking for a desktop for 3d work and games
TSasha Smith
Posts: 27,404
I am hoping to spend my tax refund this year on a new desktop. Until I get my W2 I can only guess what I am going to get. My current guess would be between 10 and 12 or 13 hundred. It would need a graphic card that can handle 3 or 4 monitors. I would like to get a monitor or two with it and also new keyboard as this one needs to be replaced soon. I do have a speaker set already but I got it in 2010.
Dell keeps trying to sell me a computer one only 1 tb of hdd. That is not enough as that would barely support my daz addiction and that is not including my RDNA stash or other places either. My one drive is currently 81 gb.
I live in Nc, Usa but do not have reliable transportation so I would like a place that ships instead of going to Best Buy or Office Max which probably would not have what I need or want.
I would like a bluray drive if possible or an external one so I can watch my blueray movies
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Wait til your tax refund has come in, so you know what budget you have.
The price point you have and the amount of upgrade you expect are going to require a good amount of finagling and may not be realistic. If you're going to build a gaming and 3D workstation I would cut back on some of the fancy stuff and optimize what counts to make a system as responsive as you can at that cost while allowing you to upgrade later if you need to.
Does UPS or USPS ship out to you? Are you out in Knobby Country? Bestbuy, Officemax, Sams, BJ's, Wallmart, etc should not be where you buy a graphics or gaming workstation, their inventory is old and their systems are overpriced and underpowered, they sell computers for parents who need to buy a computer for their kids and have no idea of what they need to buy or how old the tech is or how long those computers have been sitting around in inventory and are outdated, they just know they need to buy a computer like you need to buy a toaster, but they have no idea the two are different. Tiger Direct or NewEgg are good resources for mail order. I tech systems, build and support systems for a major corporation and I will tell you stay the hell away from HP, Lenovo and ACER, they make crap. If you can build a computer you will optimize your cost. If you can't I have no issue with Dell, they make tanks, they're not the fastest horse out of the gate but they are work horses and cost wise they are not trying to rob you.
If your speakers work that tech has not changed in a long time so no need to upgrade unless you want louder speakers or better speakers, but if they do their job keep them. Bluetooth speakers are a horrendously bad idea, they are expensive and there are too many points of failute. If your speakers have a cable and plug directly into your computer keep them. A blueray player for a computer to watch movies is probably going to cost about the same as a blueray player for your house you can connect to a TV if you have a good TV and it's probable and in the event it breaks it's not part of your computer which is now bloated with blueray software. You want to keep as much crapware off your system as possible, the more stuff bloating this magical box to make it do all this magical stuff is going to come down to slowing overall performance. Honestly I think Blueray never caught on and it's a dying medium. I can buy movies from MS and stream to my Xbox and Win 10 and be anywhere without a pile of disks and a library of HD fims.
If your current job is 81GB a 1TB drive is 11 times the capacity of what you have now. A 1TB drive is fine, you can always get another internal or external drive later for rutime or backup or both.
If you are going to utilize 3 or 4 monitors depending on performance you may wish to get a 2nd video card and if your planning on getting a 2nd monitor it might be cost effective to run two monitors and one card for the time being, it's going to stretch your buying power. I use two LCD's, one for display one for pallets, I use it for Creative Cloud, DS and Blender, I have more than enough real estate to look at. If you can invest in one card and one display you're going to have more money to invest in a powerful CPU, GPU and more RAM as cost wise you are spreading yourself thin with bells and whistles and not investing in the heart of the system which games and 3D depend on. You want a system with an i5 or i7 or AMD equivalent CPU as it does make a difference (be aware Intel makes Dual Core i7's and Quad Core i7's now, they are both i7's but performance wise they are not even close in power), 3D generally requires far more RAM than gaming and depending on your render engine of choice you could bottleneck your system without enough of it, even Iray will need system RAM in the event your GPU runs out of video RAM and a 4GB Nvida card has it's limits. Iray is a great engine but it is also the most expensive one to run as your speed and your RAM are in the same package and it's not as cost effective as CPU and RAM (at the loss of speed) if you use 3Delight or Luxus or Reality (in LuxRender)
Go to one of the sites that lets you start with a standard model and customize. Actually, Dell does that, but there are other sites that are more geared toward this end of the dsktop spectrum. I've used ibuypower.com a couple of times. They target gamers, which is a good place to start for 3D, if you throw out all the LED case lighting, lol. They have frequent specials. Start with one that's on special, then add to that. My current core i7 rig came in around 1200. They are currently offering a free storage upgrade from 1TB to 2. One nice thing about ibuypower is that the site won't let you configure incompatible options. Select too big a video card, and it tells you when you need a bigger power supply.
can you upgrade your current PC ?
Probably but I am afraid I would have to buy Windows again?
win 10 is free if you currently own Windows 7 or 8 for a few more months. You can always DL it and make a disk and keep it on hand. Once the promotion is over (July 2016?) you will have to buy it but if you had it already it remains a free OS for the life of your computer.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-upgrade
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/upgrade-to-windows-10-faq
Here's what my current build cost me, I used a combination of Newegg (mostly) Amazon (video card and ram) and craigslist (for the 2 TB HD)
A lot of it is bells and whistles but it does decently with Daz and kills for gaming
3 TB HD $109.99
2TB HD $50.00
500 Gb HD $39.99
Cooler Master Storm Scout Case $79.99
Asus M4n75td MB $49.99
AMD Athlon II x3 3.2Ghz $79.99
4x 4GB DDR3 Ram $159.96
750W modular PSU $139.99
2x 140 mm fan $32.38
2x 140 mm fan $17.98
Fan controller $36.49
Front Panel Multi-Card Reader $14.99
Blu Ray with Lightscribe $69.99
Hauppauge Tv Tuner card $48.99
GTX 970 4GB $363.35
32" Acer Monitor - Free (X-mas gift)
Razer Naga Hex Mouse - Free (X-mas gift)
Razer Deathstalker Keyboard - Free (X-mas gift)
total $1294.07
that board will address a max of 16GB RAM and uses DDR3, recent Mobo's can utilize DDR4 which is significantly faster and you can address more RAM, it's also USB 2.0 so any external USB 3.0 device is theoretically slowed by a factor of 10 x. It's a very low end board by todays standards. The slowest component of your computer is the factor is the maximum speed possible of your computer and the mobo is the heart of the system.
I know it's not top of the line (I've had that board and CPU for 3 or 4 years now) but since it works well enough, upgrading is not a high priority yet. I've got to get my bills paid down first. Once I can manage that, then the first things to upgrade are my board and CPU :)
my board is 6 years old and it's pretty much neck and neck with that thing :)
There's no point in upgrading. Once you get your parts your outdated by the time you're unboxing.
Windows usually lets you upgrade almost the entire set of hardware without buying a new license. If you change more than some number of components, Windows usually requires re-activiation, but this is normally automatic. Just make sure the machine is connected to the internet the first time you turn it on. At some point, if you end up having to replace everything, you're better off buying a new machine. Buying a system with hardware and OS bundled is generally cheaper than buying the components individually.
I was mainly asking about upgrading what you have rather then purchasing a whole new, with the wanted added components , looks like (maybe it's just me reading into it wrong) you don't have the budget to get what you want.
also you can check out what desktops that sell through NewEgg you did say "do not have reliable transportation so I would like a place that ships instead of going to Best Buy or Office Max" the nice thing about place like NewEgg, you can read the customer reviews of the product you're shopping for, at least your getting sa idea what others think of the same thing.
there are many online computer stores
like one that is not too far from your location Xotic PC, look what they have in your price range
depending on the monitors you're planing to get, that can be half your budget spent right there, if not the whole budget
do you know which mother board you current have ? also (more of a curiosity) which CPU ?
seems you already have a OS, and if you can still use the same MoBo, that's a savings of $200-300 right there between the two
Not sure at the moment about what motherboard I have as my computer is doing some maintenance
how old is your computer?
without it in front of you can you recall any of the specs?
what HW do you currently own?
It was a 2010 build. Nine gb of ram. 1.5 tb hdd. I7 cpu forgot the rest at the moment.
For Daz and 3d work it's pretty simple, you want RAM CPU and nVidia card (for iRay)
For Gaming, it depends on if you are playing single player offline games or MMO/multiplayer online games.
Before I upgraded the ram and vid card on my pc, I had 8GB Ram and 2x Gtx 460-SLI. There wasn't a game I own that I couldn't play on High settings (this included games like Battlefield 3, Batman Arkham City/Origins/Assylum, etc.) But then when Star Wars Galaxies revamped their whole game (before finally shutting down) I haven't played any multiplayer online games.
The big thing with your upgrade is the monitors and a good vid card. You're looking at probably around $600 just for 1 monitor and vid card.
As bad as it sounds, I usually check craigslist for monitors. You can find people practically giving them away sometimes, so even if they don't last long, there wasn't a huge investment and you can always find more on there, then you can put the money you saved there into a more powerful machine.
Also, since tax return is only a once a year thing, Things like the keyboard and mouse that you can get cheap "for now" (like $10-$20 for a basic keyboard that sometimes even comes with a mouse) I would go for. You can always easily update them at a later time just by simply unplugging the old and plugging in the new. Every little bit you can add to your innards helps get you a better system.
Like my system, if I was able to put just a little more to the innards (all my parts were purchased at different times) then instead of the AM3-DDR3 socket motherboard, I could have picked up a more future-proof motherboard and would only have to upgrade ram and cpu. Unfortunately now if I want to upgrade I need to do the board as well.
my i7 is six years old, it's still a highly capable CPU, granted it's not a monster but it has held its own with the passage of time.
My 6 year old video card on the other hand has not. GPU technology has taken the torch from CPU gains in the early 2000's and run with it as CPU tech as slowed down to a trickle in comparison. If Iray is your desired result you could build a killer box on top of what you have. If Lux is you can keep your i7 as a render node to assit with cpu renders.
Older i7 boards can address up to 24GB RAM in some cases (check the board and check forums, many of the specs for older boards were written before RAM chips cable of offering more RAM were invented) so you could still have a usefull mobo and cpu that you could push with some RAM and all PCIe 3.0 GPU's will install into a mobo with PCIe 2.0 slots, they will be a little slower but they should work surprisingly well, just make sure you have enough power supply to work it all and you may be able to customize your old rig and add some horsepower and have some cash left over for other things ('cus we got 2 kinds of BBQ in NC!)
I notice alot of people will post their video card specs and how much ram they have, but what motherboard and cpu do you have working with it? Specific make and models that work well together (ie: no bottlenecking) ?
That info will have to wait till I get home tonight. Currently in a mall's food court waiting for top of the hour to head home.
there is a possibility that the MoBo was not 2010, it could be older. meaning it may not be abe to upgrade much more . . just throwing that out there as something to be aware of. might not be able to update the Bios to todays upgrades. Or it can be which would be great, then again you might have a whole new complete system in mind to have your current one as a Extra/Backup/2nd Machine
So knowing which Mother Board you have would be the first step
If your core i7 is first generation (i7-6xx), then it may only have 2 cores. You definitely want a 4 core processor. If your cpu is a later core i7, with 4 cores AND hyperthreading, then perhaps a mobo upgrade is a good bang for the buck. Upgrading the mobo and RAM will get you a lot of capability for games and large scenes in DS. The Intel website has all the specs. You should be able to get your specific CPU info from Computer->Properties.
http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors
Here is a quick look at the specs found here.
I'm not that up-to-date with intel as I mostly use AMD, but even though that doesn't list the number of cores, it lists the speed 2x so I would hazzard to guess it's only a dual core.
I would concentrate on a new board, cpu, ram and a decent vid card. Re-use what you can (case, monitor, HD, etc.) of your old setup until you know what you have left and update others that you can, save the rest for further upgrades since they won't impact system performance.
A decent strategy. The core i7-950 is definitely out of date. You might need a bigger power supply too, depending on the video card.
just came across this (currently reading) All about that Skylake, no Haswell, you might read in there to help on some of your decisions of choices where or what to go with
I should get my W2 today
have you decided what yyou're going to get with it ?
I disagree entirely, I have an i7 920 with 12GB DDR 3 and I have an i7 6700HQ with 16GB DDR4, the 6700 is not "dating" the 920 by a long shot. The grounds gained by four generations of i7's between were not as groundbreaking as I had been told. Yes, the 6700 is faster but it's Nascar vs Formula 1 not John Deere tractor vs. (I went very rural on this analogy but you get the point)
First I need to find my routing number and account number for my taxes to be deposited in.
true, first things first
I just ordered every thing I need for my new build,(Building a new complete system) except Monitor, Mouse, & OS, though I'm building for Gaming, but the Graphics card in mind was decided for Rendering (and gaming of course) EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti HYBRID GAMING in the end the cost is approximately $2500us, The monitor choice is the Asus VG248QE 144Hz
It's not a high end gaming machine, my original build I was going to do was $1600us, but being I' now have more $$ available, I was able to select some better items