I'm Lost.

Opkin

Opkin

Opkin

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24 Nov 2016
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14
To whom that may listen,

I'm completely lost trying to research upgrade advice, mainly Intel 12th Gen vs Ryzen, but will explain...

I'm a graphic designer and have had a PC that I built around 10 years ago, see spec below.

650D Case TX 650W V2 PSU + H80 CPU Cooler
Corsair Obsidian 650D Gaming Midi Tower - Black
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor
GTX 1060 6GB
Asus P8P67 Intel P67
Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz DualQuad Channel Kit
Win 10
Corsair F3 Solid State Hard Drive 240
Samsung SH-B123LBSBP 12x BluRay ROM 16x DVD±RW Lightscribe SATA-II Optical Drive - Black (OEM)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB SATA 6Gbs 32MB Cache - OEM (ST31000524AS)
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 Sound Card - OEM (30SB057000000)
Edimax EW-7612UAN 300Mbps High-Gain Wireless-N USB Adapter

I use Adobe CC daily and increasingly more Fusion 360 or Blender, Keyshot and Marvellous Designer etc.
I also have a Wacom Companion 2 which is also now dated and having application support issues.
I have use of a Macbook Pro (2019 Intel atm) supplied by my work, but it isn't the best spec and applications are limited.

Although my PC build isn't the most powerful it has done well.

I have been offered a huge spec PC Build for £2k, it's a 5-6 year old system but was and still is a monster.
i7 6950X O.C - M.2 + SSD - Rampage ED10 Mobo - Titan X Pascal 12GB X2 SLI - 32GB Dominator Platinum - Watercooled - RM 1000 PSU
But I feel I could get a similar 2022 system possibly a bundle upgrade) with 1 GPU and higher Core/Thread CPU for almost the same price using some of my old system parts, IDK.

OR

Workstation Laptop (I like the portability factor)

OR

Wacom Mobile Studio Pro (I like the portability factor and that it's a Drawing tablet/Cintiq. Worried about upgrade options and future app support)

Again, I'm lost. What to do?
Thank you.
 
I have been offered a huge spec PC Build for £2k, it's a 5-6 year old system but was and still is a monster.
i7 6950X O.C - M.2 + SSD - Rampage ED10 Mobo - Titan X Pascal 12GB X2 SLI - 32GB Dominator Platinum - Watercooled - RM 1000 PSU
Click to expand...

It’s no longer a monster and at £2k it’s waaaay over priced.

Can your apps make use of the 2 titans?

Second hand, that i7 6950X is maybe worth +-£180 and it only boosts to 4ghz. Something like an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X boosts to 4.80GHz, has 12 Core with 24 Threads, has far better architecture and is £359.99 (more in line with a rig priced at £2k).

I'd build you this and it would be much faster and is much cheaper and has 64gigs of RAM. I added the 3060 as it has plenty of VRAM for editing use.

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £1,667.08 (includes delivery: £13.20)​











​
 
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DDR5 Intel option with 64gigs of RAM is still less than £2k (all be it just)

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £1,957.13 (includes delivery: £13.20)​










​
 
Opkin said:
Again, I'm lost. What to do?
Thank you.
Click to expand...

Bit short on time now, so can't find a good example for you, but I'd be inclined to go with a poweful Apple laptop or a workstation laptop.

I might err towards Apple for your usecase, especially as you're already used to using Apple. Have a look at some reviews, maybe Hardware Chenooks on YouTube I think did something relevant to this.
 
If you desperately need a new PC now then JollyJamma's builds above are both very good and offer better value than the old system you are being offered IMHO. With the AMD system you should be getting a 5950x and go for full 16 cores and not the 12 core 5900x. Larger case and then 360 aio is another thing I would go with for that AMD system. The Intel system above also needs a cooler.

Another option is to wait and this is what I highly advise you to do. AMD Zen4 is due out late this year and whilst it may not deliver on its increased IPC and performance/Watt claims it will come with a lot lot lot more cores and this is what will benefit you the most.

The system you have been offered has the term "watercooled" in it. This is very vague and could be totally worthless or have 2k parts in the watercooling alone, no way to tell.
 
Chris Beard said:
Bit short on time now, so can't find a good example for you, but I'd be inclined to go with a poweful Apple laptop or a workstation laptop.

I might err towards Apple for your usecase, especially as you're already used to using Apple. Have a look at some reviews, maybe Hardware Chenooks on YouTube I think did something relevant to this.
Click to expand...
I saw this from OP and thought that Apple would be best but obviously it depends on what work wants to fork out for.

I have use of a Macbook Pro (2019 Intel atm) supplied by my work, but it isn't the best spec and applications are limited.
Click to expand...
I'd be inclined to get a Mac Studio for OP if he went Apple. £2399 with 64gigs of RAM.
 
Thank you all for your helpful opinions and suggestions!
AMD Zen4 sounds interesting I'll look into that now, this is one of the reasons I have asked as I'm obviously not a consistent follower of new tech and releases, only what I happen to see now and then.
Thank you for the opinions on the old 2k system, this won't be one of my options now. But the new build suggestions look great!
I literally just watched this Mac studio vs PC comparison video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-mbtSRz2nk, Love the small form factor and very low noise levels of the Mac Studio!
 
JollyJamma said:
It’s no longer a monster and at £2k it’s waaaay over priced.
Click to expand...

OP: for comparison purposes, the once mighty Titan is now around a 3060/3060Ti, at least it is in gaming performance and as Jolly asked, can your apps even support two gpus anyway? The 3060 has 12GB of memory too, though the 3060 Ti only 8GB.

Since you might be pegging this rig at full load for long periods (e.g. blender), I think it would pay to make sure you have a decent cooler and the motherboard VRM is solid. For productivity purposes the 5900X is very keenly priced right now and they're generally more energy efficient under full multi-threaded load, compared to Intel systems.
 
Opkin said:
I literally just watched this Mac studio vs PC comparison video...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-mbtSRz2nk, Love the small form factor and very low noise levels of the Mac Studio!
Click to expand...

That was quite a good video, and the M1 and new M2 are both very impressive.

You can, if you're willing to put in quite a bit of effort, get something comparible to the look and size of the Mac Studio on the PC that's more powerful at a cheaper price point (or more powerful at a similar price point). I think the first couple of comments on the video highlight this.

You should know I'm bias in favour of the PC, as I suspect most of this forum probably is.

If you are going PC then AM4 is def. the right way to go. If you're building a desktop from parts (which, I believe is the best and funnest way) be aware that some of the older designs (e.g. B450) support the latest CPUs at quite a saving vs newer B550 motherboards.

The main sacrifice is the PCI 3.0 vs PCI 4.0 which has no desirable impact in games or day-to-day use, but might impact high resolution video scrubbing with a very fast nvme drive.

We all love suggesting systems, so if you're interested in building a machine I'd recommend starting a new thread with your budget in the title. You'll get some good suggestions :-)
 
Chris Beard said:
That was quite a good video, and the M1 and new M2 are both very impressive.
Click to expand...

Shame that the prices are completely out of whack, and slight adjustments in the parts for the PC would result in large savings with almost no loss in performance .

CPU: Intel Core i9-12900KF 3.2 GHz 16-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 360 56.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Motherboard: Asus ProArt Z690-CREATOR WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-5600 CL38 Memory x2
Storage: Crucial P5 Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB Founders Edition Video Card
Case: NZXT H7 Flow ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2021) 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Case Fan: ARCTIC P14 PST 140 mm Fans 5-Pack

Total: ~£3000.00

Save another £400 by picking up a used RTX 3090, or if you don't need the 24GB VRAM buffer, a 3080 Ti. I've left the over priced board in there, would be cheaper to get a lower end board and a decent 10GbE card though, and what ever other expansion you needed.

Price for the Apple Studio in the UK as configured in that video is £4999. An extra £2K! And if it goes wrong out of warranty, you just need to bend over and lube up.
 
Tetras said:
OP: for comparison purposes, the once mighty Titan is now around a 3060/3060Ti, at least it is in gaming performance and as Jolly asked, can your apps even support two gpus anyway? The 3060 has 12GB of memory too, though the 3060 Ti only 8GB.

Since you might be pegging this rig at full load for long periods (e.g. blender), I think it would pay to make sure you have a decent cooler and the motherboard VRM is solid. For productivity purposes the 5900X is very keenly priced right now and they're generally more energy efficient under full multi-threaded load, compared to Intel systems.
Click to expand...

Have to agree with this. Also, a single Titan xp draws about 263 watts at full load (205 watts in gaming), thus, you have over 500 watts in power draw from the two cards (if you can make us of both of them).

That's madness when an RTX 3060 would work just as well (if not a little better) for a lot less power draw (170 watts single card, 340 for two)

I also agree that a 5900X would be a good option. Very good performance per watt and very good multithreaded performance.
 
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I would suggest being careful with DDR5 when configuring systems. I have had some really big problems getting 4 sticks of DDR5 running at anything over 4800Mhz. From what i can tell from several motherboard manufactures it seems to be an issue across the board. I do not believe Asus even has any motherboards that have been certified with more than 2 sticks of memory on their QVL at the moment. 2 x Sticks do not seem to have an issue, i have tried several configurations of 2 x 32Gb DDR5 5200Mhz+ and they seem to work fine but 4 x 16gb DDR5 5200Mhz+ has some serious issues but if they are set to XMP but the frequency dropped to 4800Mhz it seems to be stable.
 
Hahaha.. Yeah old enough to remember playing on these old systems such as ZX81, ZXSpectrum and Atari VCS 2600 Woody console wise.

On most days i dev Threadripper Pro, AMD Epyc and other top end Intel/AMD solutions.. :D
 
Journey said:
Shame that the prices are completely out of whack, and slight adjustments in the parts for the PC would result in large savings with almost no loss in performance .

CPU: Intel Core i9-12900KF 3.2 GHz 16-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 360 56.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Motherboard: Asus ProArt Z690-CREATOR WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-5600 CL38 Memory x2
Storage: Crucial P5 Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB Founders Edition Video Card
Case: NZXT H7 Flow ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2021) 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Case Fan: ARCTIC P14 PST 140 mm Fans 5-Pack

Total: ~£3000.00

Save another £400 by picking up a used RTX 3090, or if you don't need the 24GB VRAM buffer, a 3080 Ti. I've left the over priced board in there, would be cheaper to get a lower end board and a decent 10GbE card though, and what ever other expansion you needed.

Price for the Apple Studio in the UK as configured in that video is £4999. An extra £2K! And if it goes wrong out of warranty, you just need to bend over and lube up.
Click to expand...
I did go and spec up a Studio and quickly changed my mind! :cry:

I like this build but am leaning towards the earlier 5950x 16 core suggestion mainly due to price.
 
Opkin said:
I did go and spec up a Studio and quickly changed my mind! :cry:

I like this build but am leaning towards the earlier 5950x 16 core suggestion mainly due to price.
Click to expand...

Oh that wasn't a suggestion, I was just showing how crappy the config and price was in that video.

If you do get that 5950x build don't be buying a 6TB HDD for £170, when you can get a 16TB data centre grade drive for around £250, or a 10/12TB at the £170 mark.

I build quite a lot of workstation-type machines, and it's a hard choice between Intel and AMD right now, especially with only a few months until AM5 and Zen4, and Raptor Lake on LGA1700 are due. Is say if you've managed this long, hold out! :D
 
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