PC Upgrades
MKDAWUSS
Posts: 96
I'm starting to realize that my PC is starting to show its age. A lot of my computer's components are now over 10 years old. What are some recommendations and where should I begin in terms of upgrading the rig? I want to get things that last technologically but at the same time avoid the "luxury fee" (and following depreciation) of the cutting edge. I have squeezed plenty out of my current gear.
MB: ASUS P7P55D Deluxe
CPU: Intel Core i7 860 2.8GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 760
RAM: 16 GB
Hard drives, well one's got about 60 GB free (930 GB) and another's got about 1 TB free (1.8 TB)
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Comments
Getting a recent generation Nvidia card will get you the biggest boost for iRay rendering. A 2060 Super or 2070 Super would be a huge boost and both are pretty good price to performance wise. You would likely also need a more recent PSU, the one in that rig likely doesn't have PCIE power connectors.
Upgrading the CPU/motherboard/RAM would all go to together. Upgrading any of these would require uopgrading all. If you do I'd recommend looking at the AMD R5 3600 it is much more powerful than the 860 at around $150. The B550 motherboards will release very soon and will be reasonably priced for PCIE gen 4 which will be helpful if you keep it as long as did the current system. You'll also need DDR4 RAM but prices right now are low for RAM.
You also might want to look at a recent case to get things like USB 3 and USB C on the front panel.
WORD!
For storage it's highly desirable to have an SSD for the OS and rapid access to frequently used data. Preferably at least one "M.2 NVMe SSD" they're so much faster than even a "SATA SSD". But also good to have a large spinning hard drive for backups and archival storage.
That's a pretty old set-up MKD. The only thing that matters with upgrades is how much money you've got to throw at a new rig. Which you didn't mention. Complicated of course by "...do I wait for the next gen. of GPU or buy one now."
In order of importance to DS I'd say this-
1. V Ram (NVIDIA GPU)
2. Sys. ram
3. CPU
4.... the other stuff
....hmm my main render system is even more ancient:
MB: AUS P6T X58, Socket LGA 1366, x2 PCIe 2.0 x 16 expansion slots 6 DIMM slots, memory supported: 24 GB.
CPU Intel Xeon X5660 (formerly i7 930)
GPU: Nvida Titan X [Maxwell] (formerly Nvida GTX 460 [Fermi])
Memory 24 GB DDR3 1333 (formerly 12 GB DDR3 1333)
Drives: 240 GB SATAII SSD (boot and application, formerly a 250 GB HDD) 2 TB Content Library HDD, 1 TB Storage HDD.
Been reading some interesting reports of users who were able to get 48 GB working on a P6T X58 MB as long as they are not overclocked So DDR3 1066 and 1333 could work. Seems the key is having a Xeon Westmere 56xx CPU. as that is what everyone who got is working has .
Now once Ampere comes out I might be interested in getting a Turing Titan when the price comes down as I can upgrade the memory to back it up.
Yeh kyoto, I have quite an old set-up but it renders very well after I dropped a RTX 2080 into it. Never misses a beat even though I give it a hammering every day.
The rest of the system seems immaterial (within reason) so long as your GPU and RAM is up to scratch.
...yeah about the only weak part are PCIe 2.0 slots which do make loading the scene into VRAM take a little longer but once it's there, render performance is fine. When I can get a sizeable scene rendered in say 20 - 30 min instead of 4 - 6 hours that is a bonus. Should it drop to the CPU I have at least 50% more CPU threads and twice the memory I used to have so no more going into swap mode.