Which CPU for a GTX 970 Blender noobie?

Hello everyone,
I just started working on Blender a week ago, and my laptop can’t even render a smoke or fiery monkey head, nothing shows up. My laptop is from 2000. So I’m looking into building my own pc and I was wondering what CPU you guys would recommend.

After days of benchmark and youtube videos, I’m thinking about using a GTX 970 for rendering. I know the CPU can be useful in running the interface prior to rendering so as to avoid lockup while rendering. I’m considering either the i5-6600k OC or the i7-7600k. Does the hyperthreading really make a difference if I’m going to be using the GPU to render. I’m also thinking of doing some indie gaming, which is why i chose these specific CPUs.

Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated from you guys. Happy rendering!

hyperthreading effectively doubles the cores, definitely worth it. my i3 3220 is just barely too slow for my new gtx970.

go with the new kaby lake cpus (7000), they arent much more expensive and are faster. the i5-7600 would be my choice of those two (assuming you meant i5-6600k or i5-7600k)

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6600K+%40+3.50GHz

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-7600K+%40+3.80GHz

So you think hyperthreading is worth it? So i should go with the i7 7600k? The i5 7600k doesn’t have hyperthreading.

Hi, I have a i5 Ivy and drive GTX 760 - GTX 670 without problems but …
Some parts of the render process are multi threaded and on big scenes my i5 need several minutes for only for BVH building.
Thats before render even start.
I would go for a i7 now, must not the biggest one.
If you get a i7 6 core you are close to the 970 or faster and have not VRAM limit of a GPU.
Or take a look here: http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Cheers, mib

i dont think there is an i7-7600. its the i7-7700 or the i7-6700. that being said, the i7-7700 would be best if the extra 100usd isnt an issue.

The fastest CPU for non rendering tasks is the Intel 7700k

How would things change if I went for an i7 7700k and a gtx 1060. Since I don’t have alot of time on Blender, I’d like to test it out and see if I’m really into it. I can build a better system later on. However, I’d like to get a rough idea of how limited i would be if I went for the mentioned parts. Oh and 16GB of 2400Hz RAM.

i7-7700k is a good CPU to get good overall performance in Blender. This does not mean that you could not have performance problems even with that CPU, because some problems are due to limitations in Blender. In addition, that CPU has intel iGPU, which you can use as primary display while render with CUDA, and that way you can still use the computer while rendering.
GTX 1060 has similar render times as GTX 970, so you should go for GTX 1060 with 6GB vRAM (not 3GB only version) to get a real edge over GTX 970. If you can, you stretch the budget to reach the GTX 1070. But if not, i7-7700K with GTX 1060 6GB vRAM is a decent machine.