Any suggestions on where to get a budget PC (online or retail) ?
5200north
Posts: 249
My ancient (10 years old) desktop finally died and I want to spend a little of my tax refund on new one, but I can only justify spending $200 to $350.
I've been using Daz3d, Hexagon and modo on a PC that was barely more powerful than a $3 calculator, so I'm a cheap date for this - a couple figure and a few props wold take hours.
I have read alot of posts and taken alot of notes, but when I search online I get lost. I have been looking at refurbished PC but I need some direction.
I can use the monitor I have so just the PC.
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$350 is a tight budget for a decent desktop computer, which will gratify Daz's needs.
The two most important things are RAM and CPU-Power. Ignore video-cards, as you won't find a card, for that price, which will do Daz any justice. (Even used).
You should be able to use your keyboard, mouse and monitor, and whatever guts you can scavange. (Hard drives, power-supply possibly, wifi-card, soundcard, video card... If you have any of that in there. Depends what actually broke, and if you have compatable connections in the new computer.)
Look for something with at-least an "i5 Pentium", not Centrino, or centron, or any other type of "i5" (They use trick ID's with i5 in them, to hide the fact that the chip is NOT an i5 in it.)
Look for something with at-least 8GB of RAM, but 16GB is a lot better, 32GB-64GB would be out of your budget.
Beyond that... anything is fine. (Even for tablets/laptops... You need 8GB versions, and i5-mobile CPU's)
US Micro has some good refurbs for about $200-300, including keyboard and monitor. They are mostly Windows 7. We buy these for work a lot and rarely have problems with them (I work in the finance sector, in IT). I've considered buying them for home as well. Haven't used 3D software on them, but I think they'd work fine: http://usmicrocorpretail.com/default.aspx
A "good enough" video card, like a 750ti, is a little over $100. It's not a bad place to start.
Good luck!
you can try tiger direct but I would avoid newegg at all costs. I will never recomend them to anyone ever again.
Surprised to hear this. I used to use them a lot. Haven't in a while, because I rarely rebuild computers at home any more.
Yeah, it used to be Tiger Direct to avoid, and NewEgg was good.
Anyway, for the OP I bought a 5 HP laptop for $150 but I had still my both my SSDs and extra RAM from my old fried tablet PC to use with it but it works fine with DAZ 3D and Unity 5. It is a 2nd Gen i5 with Intel HD Graphics 3000. I got it buy it now at eBay including shipping.
I'd recommend though you get at least an Intel HD Graphics 4000 or equivalent ATI or nVidia card when you shop. And if you've never tried I'd save money on the video card and instead replace HDD with SSD, especially if there is a free expansion slot you can go back in and add a new video card too.
I like Tiger Direct. But you know... Best Buy sometimes has some open box sales that are pretty darned good. It's woth talking at least a quick walkthrough to see if they have anything. But if it was ever a floor model, I would then format that sucker and reinstall the OS. :-)
I've been using your comments and reading a lot of web pages. I think I want to try to salvage some parts for my old one like the sound card, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, keyboard, mouse, and I think my hard drive is decent and concentrate on 8 megabytes of memory ( couldn't I upgrade down the road to 16 megabytes down the road?) and a decent processor. I can't get an Intel i5 would a i3 be doable?
Building the computer myself is real appealing and I've been playing around with pcpartpicker. They seem to emphasize gaming PCs but some of the ones they have in the $300 range seem promising I just need to figure out how to tweak it for daz3d. They have a million different builds but never mentioned daz3d or any other 3d program.
Figuring out what video card to get is is really confusing but I I have some time since I can't do any 3d stuff. I just saw that Gastro Pub in the store and I'm dying to get my hands on that and make those renders.
I try to replace parts that are external to the computer when I build or by the computer. If I have an external drive that needs to be replaced I'd rather add an internal to a PC box and hold off on the external, If I can hold off on a monitor and put the money towards the GPU or more RAM instead I hold off and use my aging monitor (DS doesn't support 4K LCD's yet either so they will only come down in price while they work on that fix we keep hearing about) but your $300 ceiling is going to be very limiting. An i3 is going to suffer in any CPU intensive render, but keep in mind i5 does not always mean quad core, I mistakenly ordered a 6gen i7 that was dual core and had no idea I was getting a energy efficient CPU that was devoid of performance but branded as an i7 until I did a bit more research. The CPU was new at the time and intel's site buried the fact it was a 2/4 core/multi and not a 4/8 deep in the article, it was returned before it shipped. You need to build a box that is going to spend a great deal of time being pinned and drawing current more than someone who games or surfs and reads email, you will be asking a lot from the system and you find you are asking too much too soon. GPU's need power, so don't read peak power as what should be in your computer to power it. A Titan GTX peeks at 251W, it requires a PSU with at least 400 watts MORE than that value and it barely takes into account the rest of your systems power requirements and the fact you will be pinning that CPU for a lot of use.
I'm currently using a computer that was built for me (thanks, Dad!) with an Intel Celeron and onboard video. It renders decently and performs surprisingly well. It's "good enough" for now until I can build something better. Can't remember the model #, but can post when I get home. It was highly rated, very affordable and comparable to the i5's. Celerons have a bad rap, but that one apparently was very good. I wouldn't normally recommend them, but if you're really stretching dollars, it might be an option.
Yeah, yeah I realize that $300 budget was unrealistic now I'm hoping to keep it around 500 that's why I wanted to maybe you some older parts so at least I can start playing with daz3d and then boosted up later.
I'm going to look for and i5.
Om the most complicated thing I think is going to be trying to pick out a case just seems like there's a million of them and I can't really tell the difference except that some are larger I guess that's good for cooling
Geek time.
The first thing i'm going to suggest is not to buy the "newest" toy, it just costs more than buying used and the cost to performance is not there. Also don't buy off the rack systems, short of gaming systems they will be underpowered for 3d graphics work, and even gaming specs will stink.
Unless daz studio is making you money don't spend more than you have to.
If your heart is set on new, skip intel core series(i5 i7 etc) and go AMD.
The cost to performance savings is imense.
For instance
comparing cheapest cpu to cheapest cpu.
the intel i5 3450s(quad core, 2.8ghz) costs 180.00usd on newegg.
the AMD a8-7600(quad core, 3.2ghz) costs 80.00usd on newegg.
Benchmarking the 7600(amd) has an overall higher performance.
For more detailed analysis and comparison i'd suggest a site like cpuboss.com for headtohead benchmarking.
If you are planning on only using one computer for both work and rendering, you'll want to consider a multiprocesor system, and a server class board.
There are several consumer class Intel boards that also support dual processors, but the cpu options are limited to the core series.
Dell precision is one in particular, the 690 is my current workstation.
with two dual core xeon processors(5130 2.0ghz), upgradeable to two quad core, upto 64GB of ram(ddr2 fb ram)(32 currently came with 8), and a crappy fx1800 graphics card(768mb ram, 96 cuda) it's a little work horse. Even when i get over 24gb of physical ram used it's rare to have any kind of slugishness with the viewport.Rendering on this box only drags when dealing with high levels of transparency maps, such as ivy on a wall that is flat polys using transparency to create the leaves.
The off the rack price was 125(ebay), with the additions i made, recycling parts from my old computer, i've got another 30 bucks in it for memory and will be upgrading the cpus to dual quads for 15 in the not to distant future.
If you can swing it, i'd suggest the 7400 series as opposed to the 690, same frame, but the 7400 can take a few better processors. if you are adventurous, you can actually drop a 7400 mobo in a 690. The average price is right at 200 with between 8 and 16gb ram.
Be aware that these are beasts at 60lbs.
Memory: the more the better. i don't recommend trying to use daz studio, or any graphics program with less than 16GB of ram.
As far as type, ddr2, ddr3, ddr4, FB(full buffered), un-buffered, registered, it's not really going to make much difference, nor is ram speed.
Graphics card:anything with 1gb or better of memory. nvidia or radeon doesn't matter.
If you want to use iray GPU based rendering you'll be limited to Nvidia cards only, and anything that will be usable will blow your budget, sort of.
Something most people are not aware of when it comes to GPU rendering are Headerless graphics cards.
The Tesla series from nvidia is one.
These cards plug into the same X16 slots of a graphics card, but do not have video out ports.
You can pick up a cheap one on ebay for about 70-80 bucks with 6gb of ram and 512 cuda cores.
The closest thing on newegg is 4gb with 96 cuda in the same price range, the 6gb are not even in the ball park(699)
But you need to have either onboard graphics, to drive your monitor, or at least two x16 slots, one for the tesla and one for your monitors.
Quick check list
1. CPU: more cores(current max is 16 for commercial), more speed= faster rendering.
2. Memory:16gb at the least.
3. GPU: non-gpu rendering, anything over 1Gb in memory. make model etc are irrelevant.
For Gpu rendering, at least 4gb, and preferably a heck of a lot more(current max is 12GB), and as many cuda cores as you can afford.
4. Motherboard: at least 2xpcie x16 slots. While there will be a performance drop between using a newer card and an older mother board, for gpu rendering the difference will be lower than when playing video games.
Just my two cents, take it or leave it.
Wow, thank you I'm going to look up some stuff and educate myself righ Wow this is worth a lot more than $0.02. I'm going to spend that tax refund real soon cuz I miss playing around on daz3d
Try to convince a friend to upgrade to a shiny new computer and sell you their older one for cheap. :-)
Glad to be of service, that 30+years in computers comes in handy sometimes.
The OP will be very lucky to find such a computer like that on eBay or Craig's List.
If you do try to find and buy such a computer prepare to write down a list of acceptable variants in the used listings for component parts and to spend about a week searching and comparing and favoriting possibilities. That's how I finally found my $150 laptop but I only spent about 3 days since I eliminated desktops.
Actually finding the computer specs i listed is very easy on ebay.
Took me less than a day of comparison to settle on the precision 690 and/or 7400. The 690 was just more in my budget.
The key focus points are
1. Dual cpus, make sure the unit lists two cpus included, or look for matched pairs of compatible cpus.
2. Maximum supported ram of at least 16Gb and preferably much higher. You'll need to check the builder, i.e. dell or Hp, site for specifics and just need the quick ref or users guide to confirm.
3. at least one pci-e x16 slot, preferably 2 or more. again check the builder's sites.
If you focus on those three aspects, the decision making process is very quick.
checking the quick spec sheets(read the fine print on them for some nasty suprises) from the system builder(i.e. dell or hp) and checking cpu compatiblity is fairly easy.
Intel and amd have lists of each of their cpu series and you can quickly scan through number of cores, and processor speeds.
I would consider what rendering you're going to be doing, is it either by IRAY, or other; also check if the rendering can be acellerated by graphics cards; that might make it manufacturer specific.
IRAY, as an example, can only GPU render with Nvidia cards.
Also determine what you scene sizes usually are; if they are invariably above 12GB, there are no graphics cards from Nvidia currently able to render anything larger, and you would need to resort to other methods to use cards than just loading up the full scene. The new cards from NVidia due within a few months will be able to; the info seems to suggest up to 24GB on Pascal cards - expect those to cost more.
Avoid overclocking - you get relatively little performance gain for rendering (but it can vary), but it does increase the cost via more electricity, and can significantly shorten the life span of products.
Make sure you get a good PSU; will save you money in the long run due to slightly better efficiency and less liklihood of damaging other components, both in use and when it goes bang due to overstressing it.
Wow, thank you I'm going to look up some stuff and educate myself righ Wow this is worth a lot more than $0.02. I'm going to spend that tax refund real soon cuz I miss playing around on daz3d
As I'm looking to upgrade and it's been a long, long time since I comparison shopped and compared CPU power per dollar and expandability and here is the hands down winner I've found:
http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BGT69OE/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
At about $450, it has Intel Gen 6 i5 Quad Core and 8GB DDR4 memory. Add in the best nVidia card you can buy with the $200 difference between it and your budget and you wind up with a better and technically more modern computer, if large tower (I like mini PCs like the Mac Mini or laptops) than the competition. It can be expanded to 32GB and when the time comes the chassis can be reused easily to upgrade components.
You'll eventually though want to replace HD with SSD and add more RAM. Also adding more than one nVidia card will likely require a power supply upgrade. You'll need to buy a low power video card for the 1st add-on with a 200 W Power Supply. However by next year, nVidia cards that are very expensive now will likely be affordable so I wouldn't rush to fill all 2 expansion slots right away. It has 4 expansion slots but only 2 can be for video cards. Also, nVidia is supposed to be working on low-power vidia cards with the same GPU processing i/o throughput.
My question is for those of you that have GPUs that aren't integrated can I drive my monitor with the integrated GPU and do the rendering in DAZ Studio usings the nVidia or other add-on video card?