Upgrading PC! 3D and After effects work...

jimmyjango

jimmyjango

jimmyjango

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28 Nov 2010
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41
Hi Guys,

I've decided it's time to upgrade my PC a little, budget £500. I do lots of 3D and after effects work.

Not sure how to do the nice links of my last order but here's a screenshot https://gyazo.com/c18afa9573b4ef39c0bb6c1def2c4e93

Basically I feel I need more RAM so I'm thinking 32gb and seen there's DDR4 out now, is there much benefit to DDR3? I also want another SSD drive!

I don't currently have a GPU renderer for my 3D work but it's something I'm considering so I'm thinking either another GTX770 or selling my current one and getting a single better one. I have no idea which would be better though!

What's my best bang for buck upgrade?

Thanks!
 
Hi,

Looking at what you have already I'm struggling to see anywhere to improve unless you spend massive money on X99 board/8core CPU and DDR4.

Your current board supports DDR3 only so that rules out DDR4.

SLI last time I looked was not as good as a single more powerful GFX card for CUDA/rendering support as many apps tended not to use SLI/Crossfire that well.
 
Cyanide said:
No point, it won't help any extra with rendering. The rest of the system (especially the HDD setup) would bottleneck it too much.
Click to expand...

Unless I get octane renderer which is a GPU based renderer. That's expensive so it wont be just yet. I may stick with a couple of SSD's and 32gb DDR3?

Also any viewport increased performance would be lovely, I think that's GPU
 
jimmyjango said:
Unless I get octane renderer which is a GPU based renderer. That's expensive so it wont be just yet. I may stick with a couple of SSD's and 32gb DDR3?

Also any viewport increased performance would be lovely, I think that's GPU
Click to expand...

Even then the HDDs will probably be a huge sticking point, I'd definitely be looking to upgrade them before doing anything else. You should see a decent bump in AE performance just from that :)
 
jimmyjango said:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-192-SA&groupid=1657&catid=2101&subcat=2393

A couple of these? I'm struggling to understand the disk setup link! Never understood RAID :)
Click to expand...

They'd be fine but you can get away with standard 7200rpm drives if you want to.

Easiest way to get a decent boost is to go with 4 drives -

SSD for OS and Programs,
SSD for Caches (AE uses its cache a lot so this is a good boost)
HDD for Projects and captured media
HDD for Output files
 
Cyanide said:
They'd be fine but you can get away with standard 7200rpm drives if you want to.

Easiest way to get a decent boost is to go with 4 drives -

SSD for OS and Programs,
SSD for Caches (AE uses its cache a lot so this is a good boost)
HDD for Projects and captured media
HDD for Output files
Click to expand...

Yeah my SSD is getting a little full and I keep getting cache which was my thinking of another SSD, that and I have to do some editing every now and then, potentially some 4K stuff soon, so I was thinking of all my video clips for work in progress on an SSD too.

But another SSD and a HDD might be a better/more cost effective option?

I think having 4 drives will help me be more organised too!
 
my opinion and I do 3D rendering for reference :)

CPU - not sure how you are cooling it, could you overclock it? Might need a better cooler though.

RAM - if you are struggling with 16 then yes get 32, sell the 16 if you can - just check motherboard support first before trying to upgrade :).

GPU - GPU rendering works with 2 aspects of the GPU, the processing cores and the ram. Processing cores is pretty simple, it's linear in each architecture so more cores means faster renders. However the size of the image/scene can be limited by the max memory on one gpu, ie it might not fit in gpu memory, so even if you went dual gpu you would only have in your case 2GB for scene memory. Therefore I'd suggest selling the 770 and getting a 970 with 4GB or memory. Sidenote: some aspects of gpu rendering still rely on cpu.

Using SLI won't make any difference in most 3D programs sadly, they don't usually support it and because memory isn't added together it wouldn't allow for larger scenes so 1 single card with more ram is better than getting another 770. Caveat, you can use more than 1 gpu for both the program and for gpu rendering and during rendering it would 'double performance' with matched cards but you wouldn't get any viewport benefit and it would have the limitations mentioned above with regards to memory.

Hopefully the GPU section all makes sense, ask if not :)


Storage - I'd get another 250GB SSD to use as scratch/temp/cache folder plus another hard drive if you can afford it. (I will say I'd personally go all ssd these days with a nas or similar for 'archive storage' but it would be way above budget :()

To summarise what I would do in your case:
Sell 16GB ram
Buy 32GB (4x8GB) if motherboard supports it.
Sell GTX770
Buy GTX970 4GB gpu
Buy 250GB SSD
Buy 2TB hard drive if budget allows and upgrade cpu cooler for overclocking if budget allows.

Alternative option although likely tight on budget is to sell motherboard/ram/cpu and replace with a low end 2011 rig but personally I'd say you'd see more benefit looking into gpu rendering.
 
lsg1r said:
my opinion and I do 3D rendering for reference :)

CPU - not sure how you are cooling it, could you overclock it? Might need a better cooler though.

RAM - if you are struggling with 16 then yes get 32, sell the 16 if you can - just check motherboard support first before trying to upgrade :).

GPU - GPU rendering works with 2 aspects of the GPU, the processing cores and the ram. Processing cores is pretty simple, it's linear in each architecture so more cores means faster renders. However the size of the image/scene can be limited by the max memory on one gpu, ie it might not fit in gpu memory, so even if you went dual gpu you would only have in your case 2GB for scene memory. Therefore I'd suggest selling the 770 and getting a 970 with 4GB or memory. Sidenote: some aspects of gpu rendering still rely on cpu.

Using SLI won't make any difference in most 3D programs sadly, they don't usually support it and because memory isn't added together it wouldn't allow for larger scenes so 1 single card with more ram is better than getting another 770. Caveat, you can use more than 1 gpu for both the program and for gpu rendering and during rendering it would 'double performance' with matched cards but you wouldn't get any viewport benefit and it would have the limitations mentioned above with regards to memory.

Hopefully the GPU section all makes sense, ask if not :)


Storage - I'd get another 250GB SSD to use as scratch/temp/cache folder plus another hard drive if you can afford it. (I will say I'd personally go all ssd these days with a nas or similar for 'archive storage' but it would be way above budget :()

To summarise what I would do in your case:
Sell 16GB ram
Buy 32GB (4x8GB) if motherboard supports it.
Sell GTX770
Buy GTX970 4GB gpu
Buy 250GB SSD
Buy 2TB hard drive if budget allows and upgrade cpu cooler for overclocking if budget allows.

Alternative option although likely tight on budget is to sell motherboard/ram/cpu and replace with a low end 2011 rig but personally I'd say you'd see more benefit looking into gpu rendering.
Click to expand...

Legend! Very detailed but easy to understand! I think I may just do this! I believe my mobo does support 32gb but will check.

My cooler is just the Prolimatech Panther CPU Cooler which isn't on here anymore just a fan.

I'd be tempted at overclocking but knowing me I'd destroy my computer :D

I think I'll start with the ram and hard drives then once my ram is sold look at the GPU! The duel GPU was what I was going for as a friend who works in the 3D industry has that... not that he claimed he knew it was better! So thanks for the heads up!!
 
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