Need a New Computer. Your opinion on my hardware upgrade.
michaelmiranda
Posts: 0
I'm looking to get a new desktop as mine is on its last legs. I'm thinking about getting this set up:
AMD A-series A8 6600k FM2 3.9GHz Quad-core
Power Supply 520W ATX Single Fan
Motherboard Asus A55BM-E
Memory 4GB DDR3 1333 CL9
Optical Drive Samsung 24X DVD+/-RW
Storage Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB HDD
Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
I'm just starting out in 3D. Is this going to be a decent machine to get going on?
My budget it 600ish.
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Comments
Michael,
Buy a little more memory if you can stretch your budget to it, 4GB is a little low for a 64bit machine. Top marks for deciding on the Western Digital hard drives, they are very good. I also applaud your decision to go for Windows 7. As I've already noted on another thread, most of my fellow computer professionals hate Windows 8.
I have room in the budget to go to 8GB of ram.
It's been suggested for me to go to a solid state drive. Its about a $100 upgrade. I was going to allocate those funds for a graphics card. Am I better off with the solid state drive or dedicated graphics?
I agree with alex - more memory. I'm running 8GB currently and will for sure double that in a new system. I personally prefer the NVidia Gforce series for GPU .
A SSD isn't going to help speed up a render, make a bigger scene or any of that...so I'd say, spend it on RAM...bum it to 16 GB. The board will handle up to 32 gigs...
And unless you are using this for games or GPU rendering, don't bother with a different video card.
No. Won't be doing much gaming so yes, I believe I will get the 16 GB RAM.
Maybe one of you might be able to answer this. On my old Vista 32 bit machine I have a hard drive that I installed internally for storage. Can I just take that drive out of the old machine and install into the new Windows 7 machine? Will it see the files?
As long as the File system is standard you can install that drive into any PC. They even sale the Boxes to convert Internals to externals now if you would like to go that way. One of my 2 external Drives started its life as the Main drive of my old XP 32bit PC.
mjc1016 - My current system is new but I have on board graphics. you're not saying DS would not take advantage of and render higher quality renders faster with a dedicated video card are you?
3Delight is a CPU only renderer...no benefit to having a really good video card. Now if going with one of the alternate renderer's there may be some benefit...but as of yet Luxrender is not taking full advantage of GPU rendering and Octane requires a 'pro grade'/workstation card with massive amounts of RAM (multi-thousand dollar cards) for best results.
wow! you just totally saved me a lot of money i've been seriously considering spending!! it's off to the RAM store for me! will bump her to 16G's and call it a day!! thank you!
Most modern PCs and external drive enclosures use the SATA interface for hard drives. Some very old PCs may use a different one so Michael needs to check which type of interface his drive uses.
On another point, SSDs give much faster boot and load times so they are a nice to have. If you are working on a strict budget, however, more memory is definitely the better option.
SSDs are overpriced and overrated. According to the ASUS website that motherboard has only 2 memory slots so load them with the highest capacity memory sticks you can afford now.
Get a Better MB 2 memory slots that's ...a weak deal.