Buying a PC for the first time - do I have the right parts?

Support Technical Support
1

Hey there, so I’ve been a Mac user for a very long time and as someone who games frequently I though it would be time to invest in a machine that can run blender fairly well and is able to render animations in cycles without too many issues. Currently I’m using a MacBook Air so my experience when comes to rendering is painstakingly slow (not having the ability to render using the GPU). I also intend to use this machine for gaming as well because why not.

My budget is around $1000 but that is in Canadian so whatever the equivalent is in USD I’m sure you can figure it out ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I’ve never really learned about computer hardware but I’m a quick learner so I get the gist of things.
Now you know a bit about why I’m here, here is what I’ve picked out:

(Prices from NewEgg and the prices are in brackets are full price, outside are on sale in Canadian Dollars)

[TABLE=“width: 500”]

[TABLE=“class: grid, width: 750, align: center”]
[TR]
[TD]Case
Graphics card
Motherboard
Processor
Fan
RAM
Hardrive
PSU

$55 ($70)
$303 ($340)
$113 ($133)
$315 ($380)
$22 ($30)
$110 ($130)
$64 ($75)
$64 ($100)

DIYPC Zondda-O Black USB 3.0 ATX Mid Tower Gaming Computer Case with 3 x Orange Fans (1 x 120mm LED Fan x side, 1 x 120mm LED Fan x front, 1 x 120mm fan x rear)
MSI GeForce GTX 1060 DirectX 12 GTX 1060 GAMING X 3G 3GB 192-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready ATX Video Buying
MSI B150M Mortar LGA 1151 Intel B150 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Processor
Intel Core i5-6600K 6M Skylake Quad-Core 3.5 GHz LGA 1151 91W BX80662I56600K Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 530
Cooler Master Hyper T2 - Compact CPU Cooler with Dual Looped Direct Contact Heatpipes
RAM
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Intel Z170 Platform / Intel X99 Platform Desktop Memory Model F4-2133C15D-16GVR
Seagate Video ST1000VM002 1TB 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
EVGA 600 B1 100-B1-0600-KR 80+ BRONZE 600W Includes FREE Power On Self Tester Power Supply
Hardrive

[/TABLE]

[/TD]

[/TR]

[/TABLE]
I’ve already been told that getting a k cpu and a non z170 board is like throwing money out the window so I’ll be looking into a different part for that (any suggestions are welcome).

I already have a keyboard, mouse and monitor so I don’t have to worry about those when making this build.

Thank you for the help :slight_smile:

2

get the i7 6700, you get more cores for a similar price.

i agree, anything other then a Z series chipset is just a waste, unless you are willing to sacrifice quality and speed for budget.

3

You want much more VRAM on the GPU if you want to use it for larger scenes. 3GB will run out of memory rather quickly.

4

I’ll look into that for sure! Thanks

How big of a difference would you say the i7 actually makes? It seems to be around $75 more than the i5

5

One advice, if you’re buying a GPU, make sure it’s Nvidia

6

Fast single core performance is preferable for many of the things one might do in blender.

7

for CPU renders it will be much faster (this alone is enough for me), the single threaded performance would be a bit faster(due to clock speed). just in general, more cores are better for multitasking and day to day computing. believe it or not, the operating system requires a portion of your processor, too. nowadays games are getting into multi threading, ive heard some big games use 4 cores. i personally would spend the extra 75 now, then a whole new processor later when you find use for 8 cores.

unless theres a major breakthrough in technology, i dont think CPU single threaded will be getting much faster.

rumor has it blender 2.8 will have more use of more cores.