I'm considering upgrading my 2012 PC and could really use some advice on which parts to choose. Here's what I currently use my PC for: Blender, running multiple virtual machines on VMware, Photoshop, managing 4 monitors, using ffmpeg for media encoding and decoding, programming with MSVC and g++, and doing some light machine learning.
My current setup includes a Gigabyte H77-D3H motherboard, an Intel i7 3770k CPU at 3.5 GHz, two 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM sticks, and an ASUS GeForce RTX 3060 Dual OC V2 GPU with 12 GB. I also have a spare GTX 770 Ti Hawk.
While everything works fine, I feel it's not very energy-efficient and the CPU bottlenecks the GPU. I particularly notice slowdowns during media encoding. I'd like to keep my RAM if possible due to current prices, but if needed, I can consider replacements. It would be great to have lots of SATA ports and Linux compatibility, though those aren't must-haves. I'm aiming to stay within a budget of $300 to $500, and I'm located in Sweden but can also source parts from Norway, Denmark, or Germany.
2 Answers
Here’s another suggestion: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/FdGd4M. I went for an AMD CPU this time. They’re known for solid performance, especially with virtualization, which is great for VMware. Just a heads up, micro ATX boards can sometimes cost a bit more, so keep an eye on that!
You really need a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM since DDR3 isn't compatible with modern platforms. Check this build out: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/nHNtvj. You can expect about 4.5 times the performance in Blender and video encoding. Going for a newer setup with more efficient architecture and a split between performance and efficiency should help a ton!
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