My apologies if this post is in the incorrect category. I’ve been working on a old system for years and finally have some money to get a new computer. It’s a small budget: $760. I use blender to model but render in my game engine. I sometimes render in blender, cycles specifically.
Is there any possible way I can make the best of this budget? I don’t expect the rendering time or performance of a system with a Titan, but definitely better than my 1 gig ram, duo core, integrated video computer I’m trying to work with now.
Hope there’s something I can do with this budget, and thanks in advance guys and gals.
Are you planning on building your new machine from parts or buying one? If you are building from parts you might start by asking around for people with broken machines they are replacing with new, to see whether you can take the old carcass off their hands for free: you might get a good power supply and cabinet for free, and maybe some working peripherals like disk drives or dvd drives (depending on what broke).
With that budget, you could try an FX 8370 for the CPU, it’s not so good for games as an i5, but in most cases with 3d software and other highly threaded applications, the extra cores will make it preform a bit better, the fx 8370 is a fair bit less expensive too.
Then pick up like a GTX 960 4GB or a 970, both are fairly good and will be decent for blender. You can always pick up a second later.
overclock that stuff too! The 8370 and Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture both overclock really well.
Well, I think you should wait a little longer to have at least $900, new components go on seal every single year making other useless, if you want a good quality PC, maybe you should wait. If you going to build you own PC the graphic card, the motherboard, the RAM and the CPU, if you can use the parts of another PC like others say. I think you should use and i7 core, 8 GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 750
(1) you did not list a motherboard - you’ll need an LGA1150 socket board to match that CPU (should be no problem finding one for less than $100 perhaps H81 or B85 chipsets to save some cash as long as it will fit a decent GPU)
(2) why bother with the grapgics card - the CPU has built-in graghics and you may find iGPU to be adequate - by selecting an AMD card but i7 CPU it is clear that you will not be rendering with the GPU (recall Cycles is being developed for AMD chipset and Nvidia is better for the time being but with your budget you are choosing between good CPU like the i7 or good GPU which will be GTX 750ti or preferably better)
(3) you don’t mention OS but here you can go with Linux (I’ve been very pleased with Mint)
(4) you may not feel it is within your budget but an SSD is very nice to have - perhaps affordable if you’ve already included cost of motherboard and are willing to give iGPU (Intel HD 4600 in the case of selected CPU) a try
(5) just realized you didn’t specify PSU either - would be helpful knowing what you already have
If you do forego the GPU for now, this will be an easy upgrade when you have more $ and you can save up for a while without worrying about compatibility as long as your PSU is big enough. If you still have to buy a PSU then I would suggest about 600 watts is good since this will give a fair amount of capacity for a decent GPU.
