So some here might have seen my previous thread asking about using a laptop for blender, back then I mentioned mobility as one of the reasons I favoured a laptop was for mobility, however I’ve since moved to a place where I feel settled in, so I’ve decided to get a desktop (based on the advices I got from my older thread, this is better than laptops and more affordable also) so my budget is $700.
What do I look out for? what parts can you recommend? Are refurbished desktops any good?
Budget $700
Don’t buy from Best Buy, don’t buy a pre-built (you save a lot by building your own), don’t buy refurbished. Get new parts, and get them on NewEgg, not Amazon
Thanks for replying. Actually that’s why I am asking here. I am hoping the more advanced and experienced blender users can give me a break down of the parts I need and what specific types to go for.
It’s hard to recommend good information or sites because I’m not an English speaker.
If you search for a PC estimate with a search engine, you will find a related site.
※ The site I found is pcpartpicker.com .
In the Completed Buildings menu, we also recommend a system that matches the amount.
The answer I can give is to choose GPU with a lot of VRAM, Nvidia graphics card, and TRX graphics card.
If you give me the information like the post on the link, someone who knows well about this will answer.
Well, my first question is what do you do in Blender or are looking/planing to do over the next couple of years at least.
This alone can greatly impact the usefulness of the advice given, along with if you are just out of your mind, in thinking that you can do what you want to do for only $700.
A little more extra context would also help, like I assume we are talking $700USD and hence you are in the US. Do you have a micro center store near by, how do you feel about building a PC yourself, etc?
Also, what does the $700 need to cover, do you have a mouse, keyboard, monitor (if so, what basic specs, especially the monitor, along with any plans to upgrade said monitor anytime soon).
first, aim at fulfilling the software requirements and then the next is deciding what you want to do with the app.
i would recommend a website where you can check prices and compatibility then go to the market and check if those parts are found, you would also get suggestions on the case that there is not what you asked for.
Bumping this thread @joseph@thetony20@mohamed_omer@oo_1942
What’s your take on buying an already assembled refurbished desktop? I found a couple of refurbished desktops and I was wondering if these are decent for blender and some very light gaming
3070 core i5
Core i7 Gaming PC - NVIDIA RTX 3060 / 32GB RAM / 1TB SDD - Windows 10 Wi-Fi
A refurb PC can be a good and less costly option, but one needs to be careful of a couple of things.
A marketing description of a ‘Fast Gaming PC’ and then it only includes a 3050, which is not a fast gaming GPU.
The general name could also be a bit misleading, like the Dell OptiPlex 3080, which does mean it has a 3080 GPU, in fact it doesn’t seem to have any dedicated GPU and only uses the iGPU of the i5-10500 CPU. Fine for a general office PC, no good for stuff like Blender.
Things like the Dell’s which can be a nice little office PC, on a 3 year, on-site warranty and then it just gets replaced. However, in many cases the big OEM machines can also be very propriety built. As in they use a custom PSU, motherboard, case and maybe even fans.
So while its all fine as a complete unit, once you own it, if something goes wrong, you can’t just walk into a local PC shop and buy a replacement PSU or down the track think you can re-use the case by just putting a standard motherboard in it, well you can’t.
In effect, once they die, they end up as e-waste, since outside of the storage, GPU and RAM, nothing else is standard.
A bit misleading is putting it nicely - I would go so far and say this is an intentional attempt to trick people. There is absolutely no reason to have your PC build named with a number of a modern GPU, having no real GPU inside the machine is like rubbing salt in the wound.
Behavior like this puts Dell on my blacklist and if anybody is looking to buy a PC right now, think about if you want to support a company that does this kind of shit.
@Romanji That’s really low from Dell. It’s very misleading and all this time I actually thought it was a 3080 GPU, thanks @thetony20 for clearing that up. So on the list of desktops listed, which would you go for and is it better to buy a refurb or build? I’m looking at refurbs because the last time I asked for help building, well I was kind of ridiculed here
It’s always better to build. You know what you’re putting in, you’re not paying someone else to build it for you (and you pay quite a steep premium for that, it’s usually about 30% per part), you have all the original warranties and packaging for each part
Not really wanting to defend Dell in any way (it’s not as if they haven’t done a bunch of other things worthy of being blacklisted), however in this case I don’t think it’s an intentional means to trick people.
To start with, the people that mostly buy these type of PC’s, are corporate/business that buy them in bulk and they know what they are getting for the price and know darn well that it doesn’t have a RTX 3080 GPU in it.
Add to that, Dell have been selling the ‘OptiPlex’ range for years, with some sort of naming/numbering system and it most likely just turned out that 3 years ago, it happen to line up with a Nvidia GPU release.
For example, you can get from that same site, a OptiPlex 3040 SFF (so an even lower end Office PC) and I can promise you, it doesn’t have a 3040 GPU, due to the fact that no such GPU ever existed.
As Joseph said, ideally building yourself, so you know exactly what is being used and get full warranty on all new parts. But then I worked in IT for 30 years, so that’s easy for me to say.
Of the list, I don’t think any of them are any good. All the Dells are out, for a number of reasons. The first ebay listing ‘sounds’ OK, till one digs a little deeper and starts to question exactly what the CPU is. No specific model given just i7 2nd Gen (bit of a warning sign with the 2nd Gen part, which one may think is an error, but I don’t think it is).
Reason being that the RAM is then listed as being DDR3. In other words, it’s a 10 year old PC and they put a 8Gb 3060 GPU in it that just about no one wants anyway and called it a ‘Gaming PC’. There’s a reason it comes with Windows 10, it’s because Windows 11 wouldn’t install on it.
The second ebay listing is basically the same thing, but with an even worse GPU.
You still delivered a convincing defense, if their number scheme is older and consistent and includes other numbers that are not identical to modern Nvidia GPU, I think I might agree with your assessment as accidental/unintentional.
none of them…
I have build all of my PC’s myself from scratch over the last decades, except the first and the last one - you can imagine I am biased.
Building your own is not hard (not trivial either) but if you’ve got time to invest (rather than money) I would suggest you do that.
There are tons of youtube channels with tons of knowledge that can help.
I would not buy refurbished stuff and the majority of complete builds is not up to my standard not only in regards to parts and their price but the way they are build.
Hardware YouTubers regularly take apart builds in order to judge their quality and you’d be surprised of how many are seriously lacking.
Especially everything that has to do with “gaming PC’s”.
The only exception I would accept is buying a used CPU if it is not older than 2-3 years. CPU’s are pretty robust and don’t just break. Of all the PC’s I build all of the CPU survived their runtime of several years (75% of the GPU’s and 50% of the Power supplies however died before that).
That’s quite expensive, I think here in Germany I can find some shops who do it for as low as 60 with 100-150 being the norm.
With such a price picking your own parts yourself but have the PC build by someone else is still the seconds best option on the market. You spare money by getting the parts cheaper and then you spent it on the assembly, but overall it’s still the better option than buying prebuilds.
If I had 800 dollars, I’d probably wait and save up more, at this point in time. You can get a CPU and a GPU for 800 dollars, but you’ll be hard-pressed to get a MOBO, RAM, PSU, and case as well… I built a computer for 900ish five years ago that was great for the time, GTX 1660 Super, good PSU, 64 GB of RAM… but inflation and especially CPU/GPU prices have gone up so much in five years that it wouldn’t be doable today.
You can get a really good CPU for 300 on sale, if you are patient and check NewEgg’s sale page every day. In terms of sub-500 GPUs worth buying though? Good luck
For $800 (I’m assuming USD here) and based on all new parts then that’s really hard I suspect without cutting a whole bunch of corners that would then make it half useless for Blender.
The latest issue of Maximum PC has the following for their budget builds.
For the most part I think either of those are largely OK (both share a fair number of the same parts), but Ideally I’d go with the AMD build for a few reasons.
It gets you a generally better CPU and it puts on the AM5 platform which should have a good few more years of support (so later on you could just drop in a better CPU and cooler, update the RAM and be good to go for some more years).
I would however and this is VERY IMPORTANT, take the RTX 4060 GPU from the Intel build and put it in the AMD one. Yes it costs a little more then the RX 7600, but trust me, you’d be much happier with the Nvidia GPU.
Now of course there’s a whole bunch of other things one could change/update, but then we are getting well over the $1000 price, and I think it’s fair to say that just getting to that point may be a bit of an issue. So any more is out of the question.
The above price of course assumes you are building it yourself.
Again, if you are in the USA, check out: https://www.microcenter.com/ With any luck you happen to have a store near by. If so, head on down with that Budget build list and my GPU changes in mind and see what they can do in relation to overall parts if you want to build yourself or a pre-built with similar specs.
With a few minor adjustments and maybe good timing on a sale you may be able to get something fairly good, but anything under $800 is very likely not to have a main GPU and you really need some sort of Nvidia RTX based one. Push the amount to near $1000, then a lot more is very possible,
