Blender Underground

so, My wife has informed me. I'm getting a wholly new rig come February... that means new case, CPU & board, Vid card and a trio of HD flat panels. because 2 is just not enough.

My rig seems to have taken a lot of abuse the past few years and well it's about time I rework the rig.

Any one have any suggestions of how to spend 3k effectively on computer parts? Bare in mind I am keeping my DVD/BR drives pair and most of my Hard drives while adding a couple more. I will also likely need new memory as my current sticks may not work on the new board.

Oh and I am getting windows 7 Ultimate and installing the 64bit version/

3K ?

With that much money you could just head up to the costliest computer store and still end up with a darn powerful rig. But since I bet you prefer building your rig yourself, here are 2 resources offering great prices on parts.

http://www.newegg.com/
http://www.tigerdirect.com/
http://www.ncix.com

...as for nvidia's cards check out their website, they host themselves several retailers for price comparison.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/graphics_c ... y_now.html


Have fun lucky bastard

I've priced out a lot of my hopeful parts via newegg.com and the like. however there is a Brick an Mortar here in salt lake that is claiming price match and/or beating the online outlets. so I think I'll pick the local shop over the online deal. however the info you have given me short newegg (which is the place i start my component shopping at anyways) will be very helpful if they do indeed price match and beat the online sources.

I was talking more along the lines of what parts would you put into a PC to make it awesome. Like what kind of video card would you choose and why?

I'm an nVidia fan, they have never really let e down as apposed to others that have been all talk and no performance.

I like kingston ram for some reason and Seagate HDDs. The board and proc is whereit gets iffy. I've been know to be AMD loyal but have used intel chips. as for board Gigabyte and the ASUS tend to get my love.

well anyways... that it for now, i have a few months to really get my ducks in a row before the big upgrade...

and yes, I like putting my rigs together my self cause that way I know exactly what it is in my machine and who is to blame if it's not installed properly... that and I am a firm believer in the saying "It will never work correctly unless there is a drop or two of your own blood in the case..."

what did you end up going with?

For what it's worth I would have suggested something with at least 16GB of RAM, a dual Xeon or at the very least newer i7 chip, the newer 580(?)gtx nvidia card (can never beat CUDA for software support) and a board that supports the new sandy bridge architecture. For crying out loud don't waste your money on a quadro, you're throwing your cash away on drivers if you do.

Thats very pricey.

What i would get with 3k, and also scavenge things from older, such as HDD, DVD drive and stuff.

EVGA Classified SR-X $648.99
(2 maybe?) EVGA GTX 580 $500 (Price for single)(Roughly)
16 gb Corsair DDR3 Vengeance 1800 Mhz $168.13 (Roughly)
(2) Intel Xeon Six Core 2ghz $482.44 (Roughly)

A decently sized case with lots of fans and you should be able to get nice temps with those. Although not sure about PSU.
And maybe some over clockage.