Hello. I’m on my first year of college. I’m planning to building a PC for my blender & low end gaming need. I already have i3-12100F as my CPU.
Is there any recommended budget GPU? My current budget is $133 and the only GPU sold “officially” below that price range in my country is GT 1030, GTX 750, and RX 550. There are many second hand GPU being sold but i’m sceptical.
I could get about $500 from scholarship one year from now, but atleast I need a temporary GPU for viewport and (optional) gaming.
(I have GTX 550 Ti 1GB from my old PC but that card doesn’t support CUDA render)
Quite frankly there are no decent new cards you can get with a budget of 133.
I would look for a used NVidia card with at least CUDA support (RTX would obviously be better) and at least 6 Gigs or VRAM. So perhaps you can find a GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 for that price.
I would strongly recommend going for a 2060, maybe used for 200 or 250 USD (just make sure to test it before buying). The jump from non-RTX to RTX is quite big. I’ve used a 2060 with 6 gig vram the last 2 years professionally doing archviz. Easily held up for all my needs, and nowadays there is even the 2060 12 gig vram version (higher texture resolution possible).
If not at all possible, go for a used 1060 or 1070 as suggested before me and upgrade asap to a 2060 RTX.
Again, its quite a big jump in performance with an RTX.
I’m running as GTX1050ti with 4GB RAM and it works fine for daily use. I wouldn’t expect it to handle heavy loads, such as large simulations or tens of millions of polys. I can’t afford to buy a new system with better specs, but this system works good enough for me and some scenes are well into 5 or 6 million polys so happy enough. If my GPU chokes on render, I just switch to CPU and accept the wait.
I run an i5-4570 3.2Ghz, 16GB ram, (mobo maxed out at that) and the 1050.
This is the dire end of the market. The 1030 is best described as a display card only (have one in a system). Your CPU will render faster than it. The GTX 750 is old, as is the 550. It is also no longer supported for rendering in the latest Blender versions.
As others have suggested, if possible, look for a used card, or if going new, try to bump the budget to at least a GTX 1050ti or an RX 6400/6500 from Radeon. The RX cards in particular would be 3 to 4 times faster than your CPU and come with a useable amount of RAM.
Is there any recommended budget GPU? My current budget is $133 and the only GPU sold “officially” below that price range in my country is GT 1030, GTX 750, and RX 550. There are many second hand GPU being sold but i’m sceptical.
Low end GPU, I go for nVidia and much as possible RAM. GT 1030 with 2Gb ram is actually ok for Blender (I have one!). You can use it for modelling (Eevee viewport), it can be fitted to old computer because it doesn’t use much of electricity, also it is cheap to render where electricity costs. Also if you go low end, try to buy used videocard. There is no point to buy brand new 1030.
However, one teraflop performance and low memory doesn’t work well on complex and high quality final renders, so while you can use it to modelling, you can render animation in cloud with some 100 teraflop computer with 8-16GB VRAM. Still image final rendering can always be done CPU and overnight.
Sure you can use it to render animation in Eevee and it is very fast but you need to fit your assets to limited memory so it is like doing rendering 15 years ago, 32-bit machines.
If you can wait a little longer and increase your budget to 200 or so, you can easily get a GTX 1660 Super for that price. I just upgraded to a 3070, but I’ve been using a 1660 Super for the last 3 years in Blender (other than the last week or so.) Worked great, I was able to do some highly complex work with it
You can indeed go the Eevee route using the 1030. That being said, you can only go so far with only 2GB of ram. My point was, the 1030 is not much of an upgrade from the old GTX 550 Ti. You unlock the cuda rendering, but that is very slow and limited in application (2 gigs of ram). Other than that, and Eevee, you still end up with a card that is only good for display purposes. It is a bad value product.
Why not keep the old 550 in use until it is possible to increase the budget for something worthwhile. Even a 1650 would be a night and day improvement and make the PC actually viable for certain commercial projects (been there, done that). Or, alternatively, get something used. If buying from a stranger on Ebay is not inspiring confidence, perhaps it is worth asking friends, perhaps one of them would be willing to do the OP a favor and sell their GPU?
My point was, the 1030 is not much of an upgrade from the old GTX 550 Ti.
In viewport, that is true. In Eevee, doubling RAM does matter. 1030 can actually do CUDA rendering in simple scenes but that is not a much of upgrade. So yes, 1650 can be huge upgrade.
In this case I recommend too to seek used GPU. Not some power hungry GPU because it may not be compatible with PSU, and not too new because it is not necessary compatible with old computer operating system.
Keeping an eye on the wattage of the GPU is certainly a must. At the low end of PSU you may find yourself locked out of even a 60 class card. Also, another area that could open up the budget for a GPU is storage. Perhaps the OP could reuse existing drives or go with a lower storage options for his new build. I find it much easier to manage a small hard drive than a small GPU memory pool.