refurbished desktop - advice

Ruz

so i decided to get a newish pc, but thought since my current one is so old, that anything i5 or above would be fine for me. found this on ebay
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-Inspiron-Desktop-i5-6400-Windows/dp/B0185P3W9C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1478427573&sr=8-2&keywords=desktop+pc+i5

anything I should be looking out for when buying? obviously stuff like onboard crappy graphics card. this has a separate one by the looks of it

i do mainly zbrush and pshop, so I figure this would be ok for me, my current machine being an older quad core with 8GB Ram

Eric Chadwick

Needs more RAM, but if you're currently OK with 8GB then that's fine as-is.

I would do a search of your current GPU vs. this one, see what the performance difference is.

Also, check the PC Upgrade sticky in Tech Talk, lots of good tips in there.

Ruz

ok, did n't see that thread eric. cheers. Yeah ideally I would buy a brand new supercomputer, but as you mentioned apart from the RAM I think it will be fine for what I want.
zbrush seems very friendly towards older machines anyway. On my current set up I do fairly complex and detailed characters, but I think I have had this one since about 2010 or so. Certainly need to upgrade now.
my normal route is to get a custom build on pc specialist.com but I am think on saving a bit of cash this time

Eric Chadwick

IIRC Zbrush doesn't use the GPU much at all. It's all CPU? So a faster CPU would help.

Photoshop can use the GPU for rotating the view, among other things. Not sure which version they added that, but I'm using the latest version and I love having that feature (it's like rotating your sketching paper for better strokes).

Ruz

cool, cheers for the info - will do a bit more research first