New hardware question

[Monkeybrother]

Hi. Since I have a job with a good computer and a farm I've let my home computer gather dust, but now I need to do some rendering at home. We use V-Ray at work, but I played around with Corona alpha, like it much better and will buy a license for personal projects. My old computer has an i7 920 (2.67ghz), 12gb ram and some other stuff in a Fractal Design R5 case.

My question: Would it be better to upgrade this with a new motherboard, CPU, ram and cooling or is it worth keeping it as a render node and get a new budget PC with new components? What would be the best budget price/performance setup? Budget is $800-$1000 at most, more like "as cheap/good as possible".

Thanks!

edit: I know this has been asked before, but reading all the posts and trying to digest all the info is making my head hurt. Last time I build my own computer was 5 years or so ago, I'm completely out of the loop.

[Juraj]

If your budget is only 800-1000 dollars, there isn't a lot of choice to make it better with regular components.

But you can do this ;- )

Sell the current PC as is. it has 440 Cinebenech R15 score, overclocked it can be up to 600 or more, but, that is not a lot.

http://talcikdemovicova.com/32-thread-build-on-budget/

This will have 2000 R15 points, so it will be 4 times stronger.

You should be well under your budget. There is thread for this in forum:

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,7722.0.html

[Ryuu]

Or you can just buy a Skylake i7 instead of buying engineering samples or used CPUs :) 6700k + new motherboard should be within your budget and according to anandtech it will be about 2x faster than your current CPU:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/47?vs=1543

[Juraj]

6700k clocks nicely...and it will pair nicely with the new Pascal GPUs if you also want to do a lot of real-time (Unreal4).

But it's still quad-core, not gonna be overwhelmingly impressive for rendering. But yes, a good choice also.

(the workstation above is used CPUs, not ES, and they're pretty much like new, will work for 10+ more years, way more than is current moral cycle of hardware).

[Monkeybrother]

Thanks both! I'll look into it.

[Monkeybrother]

So... I bought a couple of those used Xeon processors and started looking around for a motherboard. Is it socket 2011-3 I'm looking for? Edit: nope.

[Monkeybrother]

So I finally got the CPU's and put them in the case I'd already built while waiting. I've built a few computers now but I'm still pleasantly surprised when it just humms on and everything works. Thanks for the tip!

[Juraj]

:- )