So recently my PC is giving me troubles when i use Blender since its allmost 3 years old and i use CPU for rendering.
First i thought to buy maybe a laptop but i see option to upgrade my current PC, a friend told me that might get cheaper if i want it for modeling and gaming primarily.
Here is my PC:
1x AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ [3100.2 Mhz]
2.0 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3670
298 GB HDD
Im not sure what parts exactly i have to buy to upgrade it, also not sure if the upgrade will be a better idea than buying a whole laptop.
I want to use it for modeling and rendering, some of the newest games that comes out also.
Any help and thoughts are highly gratefull for me.
Ci5 or Ci7 Sandybridge CPU (Socket 1155). The Ci5-3570K is quite sweet for gaming and rendering already, if you want the extra punch from SMT for rendering/compiling, go for the Ci7-3770K. Both good TDP, 22nm production and both OC’able. Unfortunately, AMD has nothing to offer compared to the Intel Core-i architecture - might come back though in the near future.
Mainboard with SATA3 and PCIe3.0 to be future save, where future translates most likely to the next 2-5 years.
Nvidia GTX570, GTX580 3G, GTX670 or GTX680. The 500 series is faster with CUDA for Cycles, the 600 series might catch up though. I for once wouldn’t buy the latest and greatest and go with a GTX580 3G. The next question is when the 700 series is actually going to launch, maybe Nvidia targets to do it before christmas sales, then the other cards surely will drop in price.
If you don’t need CUDA, go with a Radeon HD7970, great card, very fast, might run into problems once in a while with buggy drivers and linux support though.
16-32 GB DDR3 RAM, it’s dirtcheap anyways and you can never have enough system memory.
Get a SSD for your system, if you want to install and run your tools on it as well I’d recommend to get a 128GB SSD, if you want to dualboot Win/Linux and run both from the SSD get a 256GB SSD.
For datastorage, setup a mirror RAID, most mainboards got wonky, yet working RAID onboard already. If you have a 3 TB HDD full of data and it goes up in smoke you’ll most likely cry for weeks, invest in a second drive and RAID them up. If one disk dies, replace it and all data’ll be restored. Worth the extra money IMO.
As for keyboard, mouse, display, case… dunnow if you need that too, or re-use your old stuff.
The CPU doesn’t match you need a new mainboard.
The SSD might work if you have SATA2.
The GTX580 works if you have one PCIe x16.
But you most likely also need a new PSU for this system.
So you replace:
CPU, mainboard, graphics card, system memory, PSU and add a SSD.
All that’s left from your old system is the case and the HDD which is well, surely slow and used for ages already… replace as well.
And putting a GTX580 in your system the CPU will limit the GPU severly.
If you get a Ci5/7 and no new graphic card, the CPU will be limited by the GPU.
Buy a new matching system, but don’t try to patch up a outdated system with new hardware.
Can my PC spec give troubles when using Blender 2.63? Couse i have some problems runing here, more specificaly, the PC sometimes overlocks in the BIOS and i had to stop using Blender, thought the CPU is doing way too much job to handle smoothly, since im using AMD card and i use Cycles.
Sorry for the double post, one last question is the above.
Currently i dont use Blender couse of my PC parameters (read above post, please), maybe i can get cheap if it is not the problem?
I started to get overlocks;
I cleaned up the registry first, then i tryed to reset to default options in the BIOS, then i hard restart the CMOS battery.
Somehow the overlocks dissapeared.
After that, the PC started to go in power saving mode and i couldnt do anything to get it back to normal mode. No mouse moving or keyboard key pressings fixed it, except hard restart the PC.
Both of the problems happend randomly, might not happend exactly when render or something in Blender.
No idea from what is happening, but a friend told me that it might be the hard drive or the motherboard.
What are you willing to sacrifice to keep the cost low?
Do you want to get a high end Nvidia GPU for cycles and gaming.
Do you want a high end CPU for simulations?
You cant have both
Well i need parts that are equaly good for not only rendering, maybe in feature ill be playing some games or whatever. Or some other software like After effects.
Trying to get parts that are close to eachother at quality and productivity, also at the money i have, so i can later try to use different softwares, except Blender.
The price im looking for is around $500, i know its not much and not that good parts can be bought but this is my budget
$576 Without monitor and peripherals. The money are okay, since this build is my first that i will pay, i wonder are those parts the best possible for those money, and will they be okay for big and fast calculations when i render?
Are those parts also okay for later updating after 1-2 years?
Personally i strongly disagree with i3, you get half speed of average middle-range render box, maybe you try to get 4 core AMD 965+ like instead? CPU is matter for rendering. 1GB GPU RAM limit looks low, you just can not render scene that not fit in that with Cycles, and you fallback to 2 core i3, that will be very sad. If you have strong money limits, maybe try to bisect fault component on old computer, replacing some parts and do testing by memory/cpu/gpu burning prorgams for some hours.
Edit:
If you can replace that i3 with i7 in near future, that is acceptable ofc, maybe only MB better z77 based not old b75 to be prepared for SATA3/PCIE3 and support for new CPU power tricks. Anyway, in half if year we all get next gen haswell CPU, that require replacing everything, MB, CPU, maybe memory (DDR4, who know for real?), you can wait that ~6 months as well and jump directly to new platform.
Can you post some links of CPU and MD you think that will fit good around the money maybe with some dollars more?
The next gen will be brand new and i think it will be very expensive.
Also at the moment i cant use Blender due to the problems i writed in previous posts. So im trying to get something fast and i dont have that much money.
Yes i will choice Gygabite, please give some opinion about the build, i know its not so overpower.
But i want to know is gonna handle smoothly some big scenes in Blender or maybe some high def water simulations for example.
How fast will i render with this 550 Ti?
Please any thoughts on this one, its gonna be first build that i will actualy pay by myself.
But i want to know is gonna handle smoothly some big scenes in Blender or maybe some high def water simulations for example.
it depend only from CPU, since memory controller was implemented on CPU die. Motherboard have only relation with features as connectors or extra adapters, and reliability (all that “uber cool super extra capacitors”) etc. i5 will be much better for simulations, twice as fast as i3, and i7 give another 20-30% in multi-threaded friendly algorithms. Both MB good enough for that. Maybe you better get with 4 memory slots, to simplify increase memory later, get 2 DIMMS at start and add 2 more later if needed, with 2 slots you must RELPACE and usually it cost some extra money.
