I bought my computer in mid 2016 for 3D modeling and texturing and now I’ve been thinking that my PC is due for an upgrade but I’m not quite sure what equipment I should get.
Display adapter: One NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Processors: Eight Intel® Core™ i7-6700k CPU @ 4.00GHz
I don’t what other information I should include. Any help would be great.
Basically, you must mention all the parts you have now, i.e. motherboard, RAM, psu, ssd’s etc, describe your workflow and which software you use frequently, and then give a budget.
Why do you feel that there is a need to upgrade right now? Is your pc sluggish with what you do with it?
Oh, all the parts. Ok, here it is:
Display Adapters: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Processors: Intel® Core™ i7-6700k CPU @ 4.00GHz
RAM: 16 GB
Motherboard: Maximus VIII Hero
SSD: 371 GB
HDD: 1.81 TB
The software I mostly use is Maya , Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag, Photoshop/Adobe products, and various games. Lately I’ve noticed that Substance Painter has gotten really slow and frequently crashes. Every time I boot it up I get a message saying my driver of my GPU is outdated and that the TDR is too low. Also, a majority of the games I play cause the fan to activate and I can feel the top of my PC getting pretty hot. I also just want to keep my system updated so it can handle the games I play.
Have you installed the latest GPU drivers then? Your system should handle most of the apps just fine. I don’t think that the 980ti should cause you any problems. It might be a driver issue, not the hardware itself. Or you may just need more vram if the 6gb you have now don’t suffice.
As for the high temps you see lately you should check your cooling parts, the CPU cooler and the chassis. What kind of cooler are you using? Have you cleaned your chassis lately from dust etc?
Your cpu cooler might need a thermal paste replacement.
Personally, I would add more ram in this system for now. In the future, if there was a need for more cpu cores I would make a generous upgrade to a 8-16 core cpu, but only if it was necessary.
your system is not outdated for fullHD games.
For Substance Painter crash try to search and increase “TDR delay” and maybe “sparse texture off”.
Look for your processors temperatures in idle and by rendering; depending of your cooler and Thermal Paste conditions it may be from 40-75 (ok) to 60-95 (warning).
The last time I tried to update my drivers it said there were no updates available.
The TDR delay is where the OS thinks the gpu has crashed because it is taking too long to respond, this can be an issue with gpu intensive tasks and affects all graphics cards equally, upgrading won’t help, google for how to increase the TDR.
The only upgrade I would bother with on your machine is more RAM. The cpu and GPU are still perfectly fine for most tasks, you wont feel much of a difference if you upgrade. 16gb is at the low end these days, bump it up to 32/64
When is a good time to upgrade the GPU, CPU and other hardware? Every few years or when my PC slows down?
It depends. If you’re the guy that always buys new stuff out of the box, then the best time is when your hardware starts to perform poorly. This time usually comes at around 7-8 years (roughly).
On the other hand, if you like to swap older hardware for new, i.e. sell your old hardware in the used parts market while it still is on demand and can be sold for a good price and add a few bucks and buy new hardware, then the best time is usually every 2-3 years or so.
Especially for cpus though, due to AMD’s dynamic return to the cpu market and the new Ryzen cpus coming up soon, older cpus will be rapidly devalued, at least more rapidly than we were used to in the previous years. Nevertheless It would be relatively easy and cheap to upgrade your cpu if you aimed at a previous generation from Intel and AMD, ex. a 8700K or a 2700X etc. If more cores aren’t paramount for your work, I don’t see the reason why. A gpu is much easier to upgrade.
As @imashination said in the previous post, the rational thing to do now is to add more RAM to your system, ensuring you’ll have enough for any task you might add to your workflow.
Ok, I think I’ll go for some more RAM, a new hard drive and get my coolant system checked up on. Thanks for all the replies and help!
My personal rule of thumb is that an upgrade needs to double the speed of something as a minimum, preferably triple.
eg for you, the minimum gpu I would upgrade to from a 980ti would be a 2080ti, but that is the fastest thing out there so I would wait a generation or two until its either cheaper or there is a bigger upgrade to be had.
Storage, a worthwhile upgrade might be a 2tb nvme pcie 3500 mb/s m.2 stick
If you cpu render then a 16 core thread ripper would be nice, but that needs a new motherboard and maybe ram. But keep in mind it wont make any day to day tasks faster, just final renders.