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Currently I have a desktop running Windows 10 with the following parts seen here:

  • CPU Intel Core i7-3820 3.6GHz Quad-Core Processor;
  • Motherboard ASRock X79 Extreme4 ATX LGA2011 Motherboard;
  • Memory Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory, Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory;
  • Video Card EVGA GeForce GTX 760 4GB Dual FTW ACX Video Card

What I'd like to do is make some improvements for 'future-proofing', and make some other minor upgrades.

Currently this is used for software development (running VMs, VS2015, eclipse), some rendering (Blender whenever I have the time to work on it), as well as some games (mostly MMORPGs, occasionally Skyrim, Kerbal Space Program, Civ V, with potentially Fallout 4 being added in). A future use case will be more photo and video processing, as my wife wants to be able to use Photoshop and other editing tools.

What I'd like to is change the video card and put in a 9XX series graphics card in there (I'm sticking to NVIDIA for CUDA work), and maxxing out the RAM to be 32GB (which is the maximum that motherboard can support). Given my use cases, would I gain more value simply upgrading the video card, and leaving the memory the same, or should I upgrade both? (Note: already have an SSD, just concerned about the components I've mentioned in the scope of the question)

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  • This question is being discussed in a meta post
    – Andy
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 3:57
  • if you use blender (and its cycles engine) better put a GTX 980 Ti into your system. A single one will do and it will max out most games as well as perform well for productivity purposes. You want to go with SLI x2 if you want maximum power. Three are not currently as stable (I have read in many places).
    – Farhan Anam
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 20:34
  • @FarhanAnam You do not need SLI to run two GPUs with blender.
    – Rubydesic
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 23:01

1 Answer 1

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Adding more RAM might possibly help with your VM's. You should check task manager when running them to see if you are using most of it.

When gaming, more RAM won't help. You'd need to be running two games, skype and a couple browser tabs to get close to using all that RAM while you're gaming. Your GPU, on the other hand, is a different story. Upgrading to an R9 390 ($330), or a GTX 980 Ti ($650), would massively boost your performance. Depending on your price range, the GPUs I listed would be a massive upgrade to your current GPU, for blender (when GPU accelerated), and games.

I'd also recommend using your old 760 as a PhysX card, especially if you actually play a game that supports PhysX. You could also just use it as a booster for Blender, as Blender supports rendering across heterogeneous GPUS.

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