I built a small system for my daughter some time ago using an AMD A8-3850 CPU + Gigabyte GA-A75M-UD2H MoBo. She started online gaming so I inserted an R7-260 graphics card, which worked fine. Now she needs to use Autodesk Maya (Rendering/Animation & 3D Modeling) for college and the R7 is struggling. My question, can I insert a later model card such as the RX480 as an incremental upgrade or do I need to bite the bullet here and rebuild.
Upgrade with RX480 or Rebuild?
- Thread starter Marc III
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- Oct 7, 2009
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If it's just professional work then the RX480 would be a momentary upgrade before she/you can get your bearing with building a brand new system. If she's going to game on it as well as working/doing school duties(which is more of a double duty) then you're going to have to bite the bullet and rebuild from the ground up. You could salvage the HDD and the PSU(provided it's of a good brand and is reliable with ample wattage) since any platform you move to, be it either Intel or AMD, you'll be seeing the motherboard, CPU and ram being necessary.
You could get the highest end APU for that platform but it'd yet be a moot point since render times would be dismal. You're also going to need lots of ram for them rendering/animation duties.
How about you go through this thread and post back with the necessary details and we can move on from there.
You could get the highest end APU for that platform but it'd yet be a moot point since render times would be dismal. You're also going to need lots of ram for them rendering/animation duties.
How about you go through this thread and post back with the necessary details and we can move on from there.
As I suspected the CPU is always going to be the bottleneck here but I was hoping for a stop gap measure until the dust settles on the new AMD Zen series of CPU. Guess I better start putting the pieces together for Daughters PC #2. Thanks for the advice 
dontlistentome
Glorious
- Sep 5, 2016
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In college her time will be of great value to her, so I'd go with building her a more modern system. It might be that 260 could still be of use depending on whether the new CPU can carry most of the load or not. Also, if she's going to be doing serious work on this, and you want to buy a new card, it might be wise to go with a Firepro or Quadro instead of a gaming card. Even if you need to buy a used one instead of a new card, I'd look into what is recommend on the Maya website for GPU acceleration.
I can reuse the case, PSU, HDD and peripherals so that saves the $1.5K build budget for the RAM, MoBo, Graphics Card and CPU. I will install 16Gb of Memory which I think is more than enough for what she needs with Maya. I may wait for the first of the reviews on the Zen CPU to come out along with any motherboards before I make up my mind.
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