need a base unit for a teenager (stroppy one), who would be using it for Roblox, Fornite, and Blender (hence me asking here), and other stuff similar to that.
would this spec cope OK for Blender?
we can’t tolerate lagging of course!
what do you think? i’m not up to speed on what is used for PCs like this these days.
currently using a 2008 iMac 2.4Ghz C2D with 2GB RAM and ATI radeon HD 2400 XT
Gigabyte H110M-S2H Motherboard
Intel i3-7100 (5893 points passmark score)
3.9Ghz Dual Core with Hyperthreading (2 Cores, 4 Threads)
8GB HyperX 2400Mhz RAM
EVGA GTX 750 Ti 1GB Graphics Card (3726 3D Score in Passmark)
SSD for boot storage
when checking the scores for fortnite it recommends 3899 for CPU and 4123 for GFX.
i know this spec is well above the minimum required for Blender, but not as good as the recommended, however i don’t think there will be anything complex being done in Blender. it’s more of a teenager play thing.
Any modern i5 or i7 notebook or desktop with min 16gb RAM and a dedicated gaming GPU would be more than good enough for your needs. The only further gains beyond the slightly-above-average spec computer would be for rendering power.
Hi.
The budget that you have can not go much further than that?
If so, CPU seems right to me. The graphics card has little vRAM (even if it is 2GB model). You see if you can go for GTX 1050 Ti 4GB (be sure it’s model “Ti”). And if you have some money left over, more RAM would also be good.
Blender 2.79b is the latest release. It has two render engines. Blender internal render that is being abandoned in future versions of Blender. And Cycles engine, which can use CPU or GPU to render. If you can buy 1050 Ti, it is possible that it will render twice as fast or even more than the i3-7100.
Future versions of Blender will incorporate Eevee real time engine, which uses GPU (OpenGL), so you would also benefit with the 1050 Ti.
Edit:
Another option for nvidia GPU could be GTX 960 4GB (you can be sure that it has 4GB vRAM, because there is also GTX 960 with 2GB vRAM).
OK well on checking, the system can support up to an i7 CPU so that does leave upgrade options down the line, and it has a 1 x 8GB RAM so leaves the option to upgrade that to 16GB.
so the only focus is really going to be with GPU it comes with.
I’m checking with the seller to see what options are available on that.
The VRM of the motherboard is basically non-existent, I understand that money can be tight but going for a better motherboard would be ideally preferable and would leave your kid a CPU upgrade path.
Also I notice you did not list the Power Supply. If there is one piece of advice I would give out over all other advice its this: Never cheap out on the PSU or the motherboard.
Especially on the PSU front - it’s an investment. A good PSU will live through multiple generations of computers. A decade easily. A terrible PSU will die and take the system(at least the motherboard if not more) with it.
About YAFU’s comment on GPU/video ram - he is assuming rendering is going to be done on the GPU. Considering your CPU choice I can see why @YAFU is thinking in those terms however lets not overlook that the CPU can be used for rendering too considering the budget.
Its the voltage regulator that bridges the PSU and the CPU. Just because the CPU socket pin-out supports up to an i7 doesn’t mean an i7 should ever be installed in that motherboard. Could end in tears and/or extreeeeeme teenager rage.
By the way, if for now you can not get any of the cards that I have recommended you, you use intel integrated GPU for the moment until you can buy a good GPU.
vRAM amount is decisive for Cycles. If the scene does not fit in vRAM, Cycles can not render at all, you get an error message. So you avoid that your seller will sell you something unusable for the moment if he does not have a good card to offer.
Felix_KuttFelix, That’s right, I assume the render with GPU in Cycles, and with Eevee in future Blender 2.8.
i3 is not bad at all to work with Blender if you are going to render with GPU, they have good single thread performance. You see performance (at the end of the next page in comments) with particle simulation (I tested with intel i3-4170):
Note that I have done the tests on Linux, for Windows you add approximately 30 seconds to my times.
To render with CPU in Cycles, intel i3-4170 is approximately 40% slower than my i7-3770. So nothing bad for that either.
yes, from purely the blender use perspective rendering on the cpu, the integrated intel graphics might be a bearable temporary experience however it will not push many frames in games not even on low settings. In this respect going with a AMD Raven Ridge APU would be much better as an entry level.
A red flag to me. A no-name supplier(likely re-branding god knows what, could be decent could be real bad). I’m guessing its(from wikipedia): Tagan may refer to: Tagan Technology, a German computer supplies company.
As on OK-ish PSU I’d recommend Corsair VS(Value Series) PSU’s as the type of PSU that you might use for a single gen. But upon upgrading the system you will most certainly want to move on to something better.
Note that Corsair too in fact re-brands PSU’s from actual manufacturers however at least they do some serious quality control on top of them. Again Tagan might do the same however I’m entirely unfamiliar with that brand - it’s not even carried by the local parts suppliers here in Estonia.
Personally I use SeaSonic(nicknamed the SafeSonic by the builders community - for a reason) PSU’s. Corsairs high end PSU’s tend to be re-brands of SeaSonic PSU’s.
I haven’t yet run your listed parts through a PSU calculator but this is the calculator I typically use for ballpark figures:
I referred to intel integrated GPU as a very temporary solution until he can get a good graphics card. I do not know about new AMD APUs, but they usually have a very bad single-thread performance on CPU, which can be a headache when working with Blender for the slowness in some tasks.
The new Raven Ridge is Ryzen based and fairly competitive, and the integrated GPU is actually capable of playing modern games at 1080p on low settings.
Note that there is also a better version with SMT and slightly better gpu: The R5 2400G.
ive literally had cheap power supplies blow up. some even report fires. i had a logisys 600 smoke out.
seasonic or superflower. gold rated MINIMUM. 600 watt minimum. the rule is 2x to 1.5x the component draw due to efficiency issues and reduced wear. even the best require some head room.
i agree on the better mobo. flaky board means flaky computer. dead board means dead computer. half working board means half working computer. bad, bad, bad.
That is definitely blowing things out of proportion. Bronze is fine. Gold is just more efficient. Assuming it’s a trust worthy brand. 600+ watts is a good investment if investing in something that will last multiple generations though.
@chenks One thing I forgot to mention about the Ryzen APUs, they are both quad cores vs the i3 which is a dual core.
