Big box store PC?

[Larissa Holderness]

I am looking at purchasing a new Windows PC for modeling/rendering with 3DSM & VRay. Photoshop is also used but, I am sure that won't make much difference in what I buy.

 

Down side, I have to purchase from Best Buy. I'd love to buy everything from NewEgg or the like but, I already have financing through Best Buy.

 

Budget is $1,500. I don't need a monitor - already have two. I'd like to get the BEST PC I possibly can so I don't have to upgrade again for a few years.

 

Requirements:

Budget: $1,5000

I need 2+ HDMI outs on the video card.

Hard drive doesn't have to be larger than 1TB

 

Please help a gal that doesn't know much about computers. Thank you!

 

Larissa

[Dimitris Tolios]

There are quite a few options with this kind of budget...

 

You could either go with a "consumer/gamer" tower close to your budget or below it (like the Asus M51AD-US001S i7-4770 / 16GB RAM / 1TB 7200rpm / GTX 760 2GB) with room for you to "add" in the future (say, an SSD and/or more RAM or HDDs), or go for one ready made workstation from Dell, Lenovo or HP (like the Dell Precision T3610 Xeon E5-1620 V2 4C/8T like 3770/8GB RAM/500GB HDD/Quadro K2000) that will deplete your budget by itself, but offers more "serious" components despite being slower than the aforementioned Asus...

 

In general are no GPUs with 2x HDMI ports.

Most have 1x HDMI and then a combination of DVI and DisplayPort outputs.

It is almost certain that all the monitors with HDMI input, will have DVI too, so this should not be a big issue. There are also cheap HDMI DVI cables, below $10 from Amazon and other sources (cables and adapters are usually hideously expensive in BB).

Edited February 27, 2014 by dtolios

[Larissa Holderness]

Thank you for the reply!

 

So, you are saying that the ASUS would be a better option?

That's too bad about only one HDMI port. I have two monitors and would love for both of them to use HDMI. Oh well. I'll live.

[Dimitris Tolios]

Well...as said before, nothing is "absolute"...

But since it is dealing with consumer grade parts, it is much cheaper, so you are getting a more well-rounded machine for those $960 than you do with the T3610 and $1500.

 

The i7-4770 is slightly faster than the E5-1620V2, you get double the RAM, double the HDD. The GTX 760 might be less optimized for certain openGL apps, but certainly holds its own just fine for most Autodesk applications. You won't see a difference in Adobe or anything like that as far as viewport goes, but you will certainly get better performance with the GTX in whatever supports GPU accelerated compute (where the K2000/K4000 suck for the money).

 

On the downside, the Asus case looks cheap (and the new Precision workstation case looks pretty sleek in my opinion), but something has to give. I hope the PSU will be a decent unit in both.