New PC for £200?

[Andyk-9]

Hi all. Im looking at getting my dad a new PC for his Birthday and me and my family have put together £200. He already has the basics ie Tower, Hard drives, CD Rom, PSU and windows 7 ultimate. He is sitting with an old AMD phenom II but has been looking to upgrade for a while.

He is into his 3d modeling using Maya and photography using photoshop so the build need to be able to fly through rendering etc. I know £200 is not a lot and the I7's would be realistic but he does prefer his AMD and has been looking at the AMD Bulldozer FX-8 Eight Core but i can settle for lower as long as he can upgrade the CPU later and add additional memory in the future

Could anyone here suggest what we should get him with the margin that we have?

Kind Regards

Andy

 

[Andyk-9]

What would you say about this???

AMD Bulldozer FX-6 Six Core 6200 Black Edition 3.80Ghz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail with FREE Dirt Showdown PC Game **£15 Cashback**
£107

Asus M5A97 PRO AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard ** FREE NEXUIZ GAME ** Asus M5A97 PRO AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard ** FREE NEXUIZ GAME ** £74.99

GeIL Black Dragon 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (GD38GB1600C11DC) GeIL Black Dragon 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (GD38GB1600C11DC) £35

 

[Martini1991]

You're better off keeping the Phenom II compared to that FX4.
Try going for a second hand 1366 i7 set up.

Or getting the FX8120 straight away, they're pretty good price/performance in rendering at a shade over 100.

 

[Zuban]

what phenom II does he have and what version of maya does he use? bulldozer chips arent always a good choice for 3d modelling because 3d software is typically still a mix of single and multithreaded programming, fine if its a dedicated render box, but for modelling it will likely be no different to the phenom II and possibly worse.

just an example

http://mayafeedback.autodesk.com/fo...64110-make-the-dependency-graph-multithreaded

you'll be doing something and seemingly randomly you'll be waiting for ages whilst one core flogs itself to death whilst the others sit idling, it affects different software in different ways, and really about the only thing you can rely on to be multithreaded is the rendering process itself, everything up to that is typically a mix. This is why intel chips are better for this kind of thing right now as the balance of single to multithreaded performance is better suited to this kind of work.

 

[Leeroy123]

You won't get very much for just 200 mate