Looking to upgrade my PC - need help
polycounter lvl 11
Hi,
as my PC got a little bit slow when working on high poly models etc. I'm looking forward to upgrade it.
The problem is that I'm not that hardware geek, so I don't know which upgrade I would benefit most from.
My system so far:
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor 3.2 GHz
8 GB RAM (Kingston)
NVidia GTX 570 2GB
1 TB Hard drive (500 GB extern, 500GB intern)
I think a Graphic card update is needed at most, but I'm not sure about the processor and RAM.
Do you have any recommendations what card I should look for? Should I upgrade the processor as well and buy more RAM?
P.S.: As I only have one PC, this is my work and gaming PC in one.
as my PC got a little bit slow when working on high poly models etc. I'm looking forward to upgrade it.
The problem is that I'm not that hardware geek, so I don't know which upgrade I would benefit most from.
My system so far:
AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor 3.2 GHz
8 GB RAM (Kingston)
NVidia GTX 570 2GB
1 TB Hard drive (500 GB extern, 500GB intern)
I think a Graphic card update is needed at most, but I'm not sure about the processor and RAM.
Do you have any recommendations what card I should look for? Should I upgrade the processor as well and buy more RAM?
P.S.: As I only have one PC, this is my work and gaming PC in one.
Replies
Looking at your system spec, the first thing I would suggest is an SSD, 256GB at minimum, its easy to swap in and will make everything feel snappier.
Your video card is pretty good, but its easy to swap out a video card. Going with a 770/R90 will give you about 50% better performance, and a 780 will give you about 90% better performance, 780 Ti, about 105% better. You probably will need a new power supply for a significantly faster GPU.
Your cpu is decent as well, but an I7 4770 is about twice as fast, and an I74930K is over three times as fast. You'll need to buy a new motherboard of course if switching to an I7.
You might be able to get an AMD FX-9590 (2.5x faster) or FX-9370 (2.3x faster) and use the same motherboard (not sure with AMD stuff), though these are 8-core vs the 4-core Intels, so the I7s will give better performance on apps that aren't optimized for multi-threading (each of the cores in the I7's are faster/more efficient).
These sites are useful to see where your current equipment stacks up:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
This one is solid for recommendations (for whole systems) at various price points
http://www.logicalincrements.com/
Before doing anything though, I would do a lot of research and make sure you're actually getting the most out of your current system, and try to figure out where your bottleneck really is. Again this will depend highly on what you're doing, and what software you use, and how well that software is multithreaded for instance.
My main software is 3DMax and I'm doing only hard surface stuff at the moment. Most times when I looking for better performance is, when I dealing with high poly models in Max or baking the normals/AOs with Xnormal.
I think I will go with some additional RAM and an SSD first (and also clean up my system^^), hope this will improve the performance.
My brother still uses an intel Q9550/8GB ddr2/GTX 285 and he has zero issues with his machine while working. The main difference is the render times, but he doesn't render a lot.
So my advice is: don't buy more ram, and more right now... DDR4 will ship with the new intels (not these shitty haswell refresh).
you might buy a cheap SSD for your SO and apps, and a good and cheap new 3TB HDD (components that you won't need to change in an upgrade). Actual HDDs offer a good perfomance like that seagate of 4TB at 5900rpm (it's almost silent, cool and very very good, with a perfomance as good as his very old brother of 7200rpm 3TB HHD).
Like Hermit said, a GPU should have at least 4GB. And BTW, your GTX 570 is a pretty good videocard. If you want to play games in ultra settings i recommend you to wait, because nvidia will launch newer gpus at the end of this year or in the first quarter of 2015 (maxwell). It's said they will move 4K resolutions without effort. We already have on the market several 4K monitors, and some of them for gaming!
I have a GTX 660 in a rig (similar perfomance as your gpu) and another GTX 680 with 4GB in my main computer... and let me say you that there aren't too many games taking full advantage of both videocards, nor crysis 3 that runs at 45fps with the 660 and with AA. With Battlefield 4 is more of the same, i desactivate some shitty features and the game runs very smooth.
To buy an I7 4930K is an overkill, an exaggeration, it's priced at 500€ and the mobos of the 2011 platform are very very expensive. With that money you could upgrade all your system (mobo/cpu/ram). the most expensive components are not always the good ones. In one year, that i7 will be pure garbage compared to the new ones that will be shipped.
BTW, be sure to check your task bar and your loaded apps/processes. A clean and fast windows 7 should have as min 35. Kill the services you don't need/use and make your OS faster. And of course check the fragmentation of your disks/registry. A fresh install of windows also helps when we had hundreds of apps installed/uninstalled, leaving the windows registry totally full of shit.
To sum up, i would buy a 128 GB SSD and a new HDD of 2, 3 or 4TB.
A samsung 840 EVO 120GB (68) has a similar perfomance compared to the 250GB version. And you don't need more for your SO and APPs. 250GB for a SSD are around 125-150, and i'd say you would be doing wrong buying one because it's a huge waste of money. I own a SSD i do you know how much space i'm using? just 21GBs...
The samsung 840 EVO with 750 GB was for more than 650 a year ago. Right now, i can buy it for less than 300...
If we want real speed, it's cheaper to build a raid 0 with 2 120GB ssd. And if you want the SSD for games (no offense, like almost all those rich freaks that love to "burn" the money like papers), it's better to wait and don't do the idiot wasting the double/triple of money when prices all falling down very fast.
SSDs are still not so cheap compared to HDDs, but with a good and cheap SSD of 120GB all people has enough.
I would like to hear why you disagree
I have installed all the apps i use (adobe creative suite cs6 -full-, modo, max, maya, Zbrush, mudbox, comic studio, and too many other small apps). The windows folder is the largest one, with 17GB.
I'm understanding you are using the SSD for games and all kind of data files, or i'm wrong? If you are using your computer for work only, like me, it's pretty useless to have a SSD of 250GB or more, you won't be using more than 20~25GB...
BTW, all my personal folders like "my documents" are located in my HDD for files.
UE4 Editor - ~14GB
Adobe Creative Suite CS6 - ~11GB
3DS Max - ~5GB
Other Software ~20-40GB
Favorite game that you want to boot quickly - ~20GB
That's 110GB. Add 10GB for your current project and the drive is full. Also larger SSDs are faster.
But using your ssd as a working directory for faster loading of files is a great idea so I can see how the extra space could be useful. But if you're on a very restrictive budget don't feel like it's 256gb or nothing — 128 can work just fine.
Are you on windows 8?
I literally have 10GB left at all times; constantly having to clear random temporary files that just sometimes build up from programs, 120 GB is terrible for art as it fills fast.
Definitely recommend getting a 250GB one; SSD's are amazing. I'm so sad when i get home and my comp takes 10mins to boot up compared to 10 seconds at work.
34gb free atm. But i've moved all my 3ds max working folders over to the 2Tb and archived everything that's older than a few months. I have a few games on the SSD but all steam games are on the 2TB.
Really haven't had a issue even as a power user who chews 100gb a month in files. //web dev -2D -3D chew through bandwidth!
But as prices have dropped, you'd rather have 240gb and not need it, than have 120gb and need the 240.
Adobe CS 6 (full except acrobat and flash) - ~3,5GB
Max ~ 1,5GB without backburner, the libraries, and all what i don't use
Modo 302 ~250mb
Maya ~ 1+ GB (the same as max, whithout what i don't need)
Zbrush ~ 700mb
Mudbox ~ 500mb
Other apps
Steam - 808mb
Origin - 148mb
Uplay - 192mb
All the games are on a HDD for games, like my temp folder and personal folders.
and some minor apps:
Notepad++ - 9,8mb
ccleaner - 7mb
Auslogics boostspeed - 51mb
Acdsee pro - 80mb
-etc.
My two profram files (x64 and x86) are both around 8,6GB
My user folder is always around 800mb, due to the cache of thunderbird, firefox, chorme, windows media player and acdsee.
I must say i have the folders with compression, like all my disks. I use to do that with all the fresh installs of windows when i replace the main disk. Also, when i start windows i only have 35 processes (including the wacom tablet, Sound blaster ZX, logitech gaming software, etc).
In my case, as you can see, i'm not using my SSD at all. I previously used to have a partition of 80GB for my SO and apps in a HDD, and i never surpased 35GB of usage. 8 years ago, in my workstation i had a 160GB HDD and i didn't use it at all.
If you want to have less space in your windows folder search in google: winsxs folder. You also can diable a few things as me, and delete your windows updates (with the windows cleaner). Too many useless components of windows can be uninstalled as well.