Birthday gift advice

I’m looking for some advice on a birthday gift for my son. He’s into Blender, mainly doing special effects (e.g. explosions, lightsaber effects), green screen work, and some 3D modeling. I’m looking for advice on a good birthday/Christmas gift in the $200-300 price range to improve his Blender running times. Presently, he does all CPU rendering on AMD FX-6350 (6 cores at 4Ghz). The machine also has 16GB RAM and Diamond HD6770 1GB graphics card.

Thanks for your help!

simply change the diamond to more powerfull GPU like R9 390x or Nano gpu

I hav eto agree that the 1GB graphics seems a little out of place with 6 4GHz cores as its counterpart. Out of curiosity I’d appreciate feedback on how much better the program runs with the upgrade. Personally I prefer NVidia for CUDA, but I believe it could cause problems if the rest of the system is AMD based.

Maybe not that much out of place. Very often when I part together a new machine I’ll reuse my old machines vid card till I can upgrade to a new one.

<edit> And AMD normally smacks of a gaming rig put together on a budget. Nothing wrong with that but it does make sense.

I would look at ether a vidcard upgrade for him. Or some course ware for him.

Thanks for the advice, I’ll check into the graphics card upgrade. A bit of a naive question, but should it do renders significantly faster than CPU rendering, work together with the CPU, enable different kinds of renders, or something else?