Hi forum, I recently moved to a country where hardware is considerably more expensive than the UK. I run a decent i7 rig for 3D modeling , photoshop etc. My primary focus is 3D content creation. I'm getting sick of waiting ages for renders, it really cuts into my productivity. So I'm thinking of building a secondary machine for rendering. So here's my question, I can save a tonne of money if I were to get an AMD multicore CPU. It would be coupled with an Nvidia GPU as blender cycles uses CUDA to render. But there may be other times the CPU needs to perform some heavily threaded tasks as well. So just how bad or good are AMD CPUs, are they good for the kind of work I would need it to perform. I watched time to live customs review for some FX chip or other and it was like 30 minutes of depression, while owners say they're excellent. Some knowledgeable advice would be appreciated. Thank you. Also where would the sweet spot be, 4, 6 or 8 cores?
What is your current rig? Chances are it is not going to be any faster moving to the FX stuff even if the i7 isn't latest gen.
If your current rig is the one in your signature, you'd be better off taking your money to a bonfire and chucking it in there. Your i7 is much more powerful than any AMD chip out there in the desktop arena. Dependent on your cooler, you could also give the i7 a bit of an overclock. They fly if you know how to tame them. Yours should easily run at 4.5GHz which a 5.5+GHz 8-core AMD chip will still struggle to compete with, even in heavily multithreaded environments.
3770k is current CPU. Dam shame about the AMDs being rubbish. I should probably think about relegating this to second machine and building another i7 sometime in the future then. When do the regular desktop i7s go to ddr 4? PS, it wasn't to move to, it's for a second machine to render in the background.
X99 boards and i7 chips are already here as is DDR4. Most recent review on BT was back in September clicky
Check used market for retired dual cpu 1366 4 or 6 core xeon stuff. For a rendering box it would probably be best bang... maybe toss in a few older tesla cards for lulz since some of them are very cheap now if anything you use is cuda capable.