Graphics station, ~450-600$ (+ HDD Problem)

[Wobblz]

Hello guys,

I'm a graphic designer and I live in Sofia, Bulgaria. I'm in great need of help currently so thanks in advance for any input on my problems.

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Yesterday my HDD refused to boot properly as it does quite a lot. I've had tons of problems with HDDs the last six months. First it was with a Barracuda, I guess most of you know the BSY signal problem with some of those. I don't remember whether it bricked but I couldn't run it properly even on another machine - it was as good as dead. Then I used an old HDD which failed too for some reason. I bought a brand new HDD and now it too failed to boot:

HDD SMART Command Failed

till now it the error on POST was

Insert proper boot device

In most cases I change the SATA port and reboot which fixes the problem till next time, this time tho this didn't help.

Previous times I tried almost everything that came to mind - low level formats, bios reflashes and so on. I haven't still diagnosed the current issue with Hirens Boot CD cause I'm tired of all the HDD problems recently. I guess it's either the Power Supply or the MB itself and I'm having some freelance work next weekend so an upgrade won't hurt and would put all this to an end.

If you have any ideas for a workaround or something specific to try so I can have more time to upgrade and complete my projects - great.

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Still, this doesn't change the fact that my machine is years old so it's about time to upgrade. My current configuration is:

Asus P5QL
Pentium Dual-Core 2,5GHz
6GB RAM, guess they're DDR2 so I won't be able to slot them
Radeon HD4850

I work with two monitors on DVI.

The things I'd like to keep are my external sound and LAN cards (both PCI), the HDD if it's still working and the GPU cause as far as I know most 3D renderers and 99% of Adobe's products' functionality have no benefit from GPU processing power so most importantly I need CPU and RAM.

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Approximate Purchase Date: This week.

Budget Range: 450$-600$, keep in mind I make about 900$ a month so those 600$ are really a maximum

System Usage from Most to Least Important: Graphic Design (this includes a bit of 3D modelling/video editing and Photo Editing), Browsing, a bit of Gaming

Are you buying a monitor: No. I'm working with two DVI compatible monitors, a Dell U2713 and an old 19" LG [both on DVI].

Parts to Upgrade: mobo, CPU, RAM, [GPU if you think there's a good option in my budget range, although gaming is not SO important], Power Supply, I'm thinking about a new case cause my old one is horrible but it's not a priority [still if you have some ideas - something simple and black, no bling]

Do you need to buy OS: No

Preferred Website(s) for Parts: I live in Bulgaria so I'll be looking at local prices and preferably this store.

Location: Sofia, Bulgaria

Parts Preferences: -

Overclocking: Maybe

SLI or Crossfire: Maybe

Your Monitor Resolution: 2,560x1,440

Additional Comments: Adobe Creative Suite, Cinema 4D

And Most Importantly, Why Are You Upgrading: HDD problem and an old PC overall


Really appreciated.



Don't...

Bump posts


http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283384-33-read-first

 

[bambiboom]

Wobblz,

Your problems with the HD I think is a motherboard- HD controller problem, or possibly BIOS. If your work is graphic design and includes 3D modeling, you will benefit greatly from the CPU / motherboard, and RAM upgrades.

My suggestions >

1. CPU > i5-4570K , 3.4 / 3.6 GHZ four core > 400.00 lv

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=550313

2. Motherboard > Asus H87M-PLUS, H87, LGA1150, DDR3, PCI-E 3.0 (CF) (HDMI & DVI), SB7.1, Lan1000, 6xSATA 6Gb/s RAID 0,1,5,10, 4xUSB3.0, mATX > 192 lv

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=550320

3. RAM > 2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz, Kingston HyperX Blu > 123. lv [< Important > This memory should be checked for compatibility with the motherboard on the Asus site, but is the speed and module size I suggest] Later, if you use a lot of applications at one time, this can be upgraded to 16GB or 24GB or within your maximum budget you could change to 2 X 8GB and leave room to add later up to 32 GB. I use the rule- probably too generous- > 2GB for the Operating System, 2GB for each program, 2GB for the files, and 2GB for swap files.

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=545786

4. Power Supply > Захранване 550W, Corsair VS Series™ VS550, ActivePFC, тих 120mm вентилатор, 3г. гаранция > 106. lv

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=547534

TOTAL > 629 lv (= about $ 418 )

_____________________________________

The i5 uses probably at least double the power as the dual core, so a new power supply seems a good idea and that will also allow a future with a better graphics card.

An i7 CPU would be much better as these have hyperthreading. Unfortunately, the i4-4770K is 684 lv. If you can find a used i7-2600K or i7-3770K within your budget, that would be better than i5. The i7 of course uses the LGA 1155 socket.

Best of all would be a six-core Intel as rendering is one of the few applications that use all the CPU cores. I specifically added a second Xeon CPU to my system to have 8 cores for rendering.

Also, Adobe and Autodesk products are optimized for CUDA coprocessing, so a GeForce and especially Quadro will benefit your work. See >

http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html

Remember that Quadros have error correcting VRAM- better shadows and color gradients, also up to 128X anti-aliasing, multiple lighting sources, 10-bit color and so on. Adobe makes special drivers for their applications for Quadro.

Greetings to Sofia!

Cheers,

BambiBoom

[ Dell Precision T5400 > 2X Xeon X5460 quad core @3.16GHz > 16 GB ECC > Quadro FX 4800 (1.5GB) > WD RE4 / Segt Brcda 500GB > windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit > AutoCad, Revit, Solidworks, Sketchup Pro, Corel Technical Designer, Adobe CS4 MC, WordP Office, MS Office ]

 

[Wobblz]

1. CPU > i5-4570K , 3.4 / 3.6 GHZ four core > 400.00 lv

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=550313

2. Motherboard > Asus H87M-PLUS, H87, LGA1150, DDR3, PCI-E 3.0 (CF) (HDMI & DVI), SB7.1, Lan1000, 6xSATA 6Gb/s RAID 0,1,5,10, 4xUSB3.0, mATX > 192 lv

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=550320

3. RAM > 2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz, Kingston HyperX Blu > 123. lv [< Important > This memory should be checked for compatibility with the motherboard on the Asus site, but is the speed and module size I suggest] Later, if you use a lot of applications at one time, this can be upgraded to 16GB or 24GB or within your maximum budget you could change to 2 X 8GB and leave room to add later up to 32 GB. I use the rule- probably too generous- > 2GB for the Operating System, 2GB for each program, 2GB for the files, and 2GB for swap files.

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=545786

4. Power Supply > Захранване 550W, Corsair VS Series™ VS550, ActivePFC, тих 120mm вентилатор, 3г. гаранция > 106. lv

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=547534

TOTAL > 629 lv (= about $ 418 )

Hi BambiBoom,

Thanks a lot for you effort. It's a pretty good rig and I'm really grateful that you got the parts/prices from the store I mentioned

Could you suggest a rig that's more on the expensive [600$] side?

 

[bambiboom]

Wobblz,

Never ask an architect to spend more money. We are especially trained to spend all you have!

I think that the best way to complete the upgrade is to consider the graphics card. It depends on the full nature of your use. Adobe products do use CUDA acceleration and you will benefit greatly from an NVIDIA card. I use Adobe CS4 Master Collection (2010) on Windows 7 Ultimate with a Quadro FX 4800 (1,5GB) graphics card and Adobe provides a special NVIDIA driver only for CS4 in Windows 7 64-bit.

If you use a Quadro, results are even better as Quadros have error correcting VRAM, and up to 128X anti-aliasing instead of 16X. I tried a GTX 285 (1GB) and had aliasing, bizarre shadows, crude color gradients- like rainbows- and in 3D models severe artifacting- it would rain little black lines off of tree leaves in the renderings! A used Quadro FX 4800 cured everything. The FX 4800 was designed to be optimized for CS4 and there was a model called the "CX" that specifically for Adobe CS4 >

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NVIDIA-Quadro-CX-Graphics-card-1-5-GB-GDDR3-SDRAM-/310695968699?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item4856ec3fbb

> and which was about $1,200 new.

The older series Quadros are superb in 2D- not quite as brilliant in 3D. An $80 Quadro FX1800 makes a 2D score as good as an $800 Quadro 4000. For $500 you can buy a used Quadro FX 5800 (4GB) that was $3,400 new and was designed to be fantastic at video editing.

However, if you are interested in a new card and form JAR, I would suggest >

GF GTX 650, 2GB Asus GTX650-E-2GD5, PCI-E 3.0, DDR5, 128bit, HDMI & DVI

Безплатна доставка
Product group: Video Card
Category: Видеокарти GeForce
Product Code: VCA2GASGTX650E2GD5
Producer: Asus
История на цената: трактор
Producer code: GTX650-E-2GD5

http://jarcomputers.com/l_en/?m=7&i=547609

> which is a GeForce GTX 650 with 2GB memory for 286 lv , bringing the total upgrade to about 909 lv ($418 + $190 = $608). I think that system would produce excellent results and the GTX 650 is very good at 3D.

As I sometimes do, when having a conversation with someone from a place I have not visited (I've never been east of Budapest, nor west of Hawaii), I had a walk around Sofia on Google Earth. Very interesting, I've only seen that kind of streets in an arrangement of rings in very, very old cities. The street scenes- I went down "bul Vitosha" and "pl Sveta Nedelya" remind me of a warmer Helsinki,.. Wonderful old church at "Aleksandar Stambolisyski". A nice proportion of parks and green space- even the football stadium appears to be in a park.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

 

[Wobblz]

Never ask an architect to spend more money. We are especially trained to spend all you have!

That seriously cracked me up. Hasn't the recession hit you guys? Anyway, you'd make a great politician.

I think that the best way to complete the upgrade is to consider the graphics card. It depends on the full nature of your use.

I might have fooled you a bit here. I'm into 3D but I'm currently a newbie so I'm getting into basics as modelling/lightning/texturing pretty basic stuff, I haven't even started to animate more complex scenes yet. So, a decent GPU is great to have in my case but not a necessity.

I'm more of a RAM hog I guess. Tons of different apps and files open flying around multitasking like mad. Here's my portfolio and the type of stuff I make. I'm not that demanding as a professional, although I totally understand your suggestions from the architectural CAD point of view.

I've also made a quick search out of curiosity about those Quadro cards and this particular topic I ended up browsing was full of people displaying poor results comparing the latest of each Quadro and GTX GPUs. Probably they weren't searching for the particular features it offers professionals and were showing tests that can't highlight those but that altogether is a completely different topic I guess.

That said I'm I guess I'll add a 2x8GB RAM [what do you think about Corsair, if you have any observations or heard anything] and I'll end up buying the best that i5 series have to offer. The Power Supply looks good. Now that I looked in detail, the MB doesn't support clocking because of the H87 so no need of a K CPU so I'll either forget about the clocking that I'll probably even never use or search for a similar MB.

Adobe products do use CUDA acceleration and you will benefit greatly from an NVIDIA card. I use Adobe CS4 Master Collection (2010) on Windows 7 Ultimate with a Quadro FX 4800 (1,5GB) graphics card and Adobe provides a special NVIDIA driver only for CS4 in Windows 7 64-bit.

FYI I'm with CS6 on a 64bit Win7. Don't know whether this changes things.

If you use a Quadro, results are even better as Quadros have error correcting VRAM, and up to 128X anti-aliasing instead of 16X. I tried a GTX 285 (1GB) and had aliasing, bizarre shadows, crude color gradients- like rainbows- and in 3D models severe artifacting- it would rain little black lines off of tree leaves in the renderings! A used Quadro FX 4800 cured everything. The FX 4800 was designed to be optimized for CS4 and there was a model called the "CX" that specifically for Adobe CS4 >

I can't even start to imagine what's the visual difference, to be honest. Are all those problems in CS or we're talking about 3D here, or both? Maybe this reply would talk you out of discussing those GPUs for my case cause I'm not sure I'd use all the features that they would offer in my day-to-day work.

As I sometimes do, when having a conversation with someone from a place I have not visited (I've never been east of Budapest, nor west of Hawaii), I had a walk around Sofia on Google Earth. Very interesting, I've only seen that kind of streets in an arrangement of rings in very, very old cities. The street scenes- I went down "bul Vitosha" and "pl Sveta Nedelya" remind me of a warmer Helsinki,.. Wonderful old church at "Aleksandar Stambolisyski". A nice proportion of parks and green space- even the football stadium appears to be in a park.

That's a pretty curious habit. This central part is indeed old as urban planning, the core of city, when it was making it's first steps as a Capital. It was made such in 1879. Here's a website with archive photos of the times when it pretty much ended in the central parts which you were exploring. The link will lead to you to the pics of St. Nedelya Square but you can browse lots of archive architectural photos if you like, sadly and to my amazement there's no English version and you can't use Google Translate because the 'designer' ingeniously made buttons out of images (I'll try to translate the buttons if you decide to browse the site, on the homepage, from top to bottom, left to right: The Palace - Boulevards - Streets - Squares - Gardens - Markets - Other Places - General Views - Surrounding Areas). Guess this won't be that helpful but still. There are 4 major parks in the city, one named after each direction (South Park, West Park, etc.) and that's pretty great; the biggest one is the Borisova Garden which is in the center. Overall the green spaces are one of the few things that are currently okay with the city and the best part is you can go skiing or hiking on the Vitosha mountain which is 30 minutes away at most from any part of the city.

If you ever decide to come to Sofia I'd gladly walk you around.

Talking bout architecture and churches, as an architect, I think you'd like Armenian church architecture. I'm an ethnic Armenian, although I've never been there myself, so I couldn't resist to advertise the architecture that I find, hopefully without bias, to be amazing - both visually and technically. I'd also advise you to browse the Balyan dynasty that were for many generations the ottoman imperial architects and built quite a lot of prominent structures in Istanbul. I hope you find those links interesting.

BTW Where are you from yourself?

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Finally I'd like to thank you wholeheartedly, I was starting to lose faith anyone would spend a minute or two to help me out in this.

PS I managed to boot my PC for now so my needs are less urgent ATM but still I'd like to proceed into upgrading now that I'm on it.

 

[bambiboom]

Wobblz,

I'm glad to read that your system is giving you some last runs. In Los Angeles, everyone has to have two cars in case one goes in for repair and I have two of my previous systems with all the applications and file folders ready to plug in at a moment's notice. Even the computer dedicated for sound only has my 1998 AutoCad R14 and Photoshop Illustrator CS3 on it.

Yes, the recession has been worst for architects and construction. Officially, the unemployment rate for architects in the US is 14%, but I think a lot of people are sitting quietly in their offices with one employee, only just keeping the lights on. All my architects friend are very worried. The overhead costs in a medium-sized office are such that one or two bad months can ruin an office. This has gone on for so long that three years ago, I began a diversion towards industrial design so that I can generate my own projects.

I had a look at your online portfolio- really impressive! The symbols / logos are wonderfully clean and well-balanced- very strong and the calligraphy really striking- artistic. That they have a simultaneous dynamic and yet ancient, exotic quality are on the fine edge of readability makes them very intriguing. I was thinking that if those were enlarged and certain words placed in vertical series on fabric hangings they would resemble some far off Zen-like poetry- Rumi from his "lost" Japanese period, and these could hang in art galleries >

Corrupt
Friend
Become
Oceanic

Back to computers, I apologize for mentioning the graphics cards again, but I will say that the image quality provided by workstation cards is considerable and I think for your very accurate symbols design, the anti-aliasing alone would be worth investigating. In rendering and where there are shadows and color gradients, too, Quadros can produce more subtle, refined results. I've been working with 3D CAD only for about three years, but I reached a level of image quality expectation that very quickly exceeded the potential of a GeForce GTX 285 made all kinds of problems, would not display viewports and the artifacts and completely random shadows. It happens too that Adobe CS is particularly optimized to take advantage of Quadros and once you see the benefits, they are very convincing. It's true that the qualities are more noteable in renderings or 2D derived from 3D models, especially where there are particles- smoke /fog, transparency, shadows, and illumination.

However, lots of RAM is a god idea as well. I often have five or six applications running at once, and sometimes the 3D models can be large- I have a 3D model in Sketchup that is about 110MB. I allow 2GB for Windows, 2GB fro each application, and 2GB for the files and swapping and that results in my having 16GB. By the way, you may know that DDR2 is worth almost twice the amount as DDR3 (at least in the US), so your old RAM might be sold to fund the new.

I enjoyed the archive photos of Sofia, a quite European flavor with a comfortable scale- the buildings are not overly tall and the streets are not wider than they need to be. It looks like a good place to have coffee in a cafe, which is one of my main criteria for cities. Also, the proportion of parks creates a good texture of close and open spaces. Another feature that is very attractive is that Sofia appears to have relatively clean edges, it doesn't just bleed endlessly into dull suburbs. I live in Los Angeles, and there is just no sense of boundaries- it is 160 X 190 km and feels as though there is no end. Also, 40 C today,.. I lived in London for years and that has at least the "green belt", but it also seems to go on forever. The only place I've lived that was nicely proportioned in that way was Cambridge, England- you could walk from the main street and in ten minutes be standing in a field with horses. That is very generous to offer to show me points of interest in Sofia. That is a part of the World I should have visited long ago. I had a client in Izmir, Turkey and almost visited there three years ago. Likewise, if you ever visit Los Angeles, I can show you all the best, historical, secret parking garages !

I like Armenian / Byzantine / Romanesque churches very much- some are like fantasy castles rambling and open and others very compact and symmetrical / classical and almost look like they were built as solid blocks and then hollowed out.

Yes, the Balyan family is very interesting, a whole realm I'd not seen before. The Dolmabahçe Palace has a very exotic European / Eastern synthetic quality, a bit like grand Russian 19th Century architecture that was influenced by French styles, but more subtle and disciplined formally.

You have extraordinarily good English and I noticed the Jars computer site was mostly in English as well. Did you live in an English-speaking country or does Bulgaria have a strong English use and education?


Cheers,

BambiBoom