My boss has asked me to build a system for his daughter, mostly for art and design related, no gaming. Budget of $700 or so. Currently she is using her drawing tablet pad with an older laptop. She's heading off to college later this year. So far I've got this list: i7-6700 (non K edition) $305 Asus H110M-K mobo 55 16Gb GSKill DDR4-2400 memory 64 Samsung 750 EVO 120Gb SSD 52 EVGA 600w 80+ power supply 50 $526 The case isn't that big a deal, for $30 I can get a small tower and I have a 1Tb HDD and a dual-band WiFi card I'm giving him. So basically it comes down to what video card and how much VRAM it should have. 2Gb enough, 4Gb? AMD RX-460 4Gb cards run about $140, RX-470 4Gb $190-$200, an R9-380 4Gb $190 and GTX960 4Gb cards run about $200. 2Gb cards range from $140 for GTX 950's up to $190+ for R9-380's. Bumping the total cost up to around $750 is doable. Prices are all from Newegg. Thanks for any input. Sam
Hi Sam Really depends on what SW she will be using,but most of art or design related SW are mostly or use OpenGL,regarding VRAM 4GB should be mimum,but this depends on SW,I know in some SW can be VRAM hungry if you are starting to use 4k maps Some other SW do use OpenCL or CUDA then you have two choices get AMD or Nvidia card And regarding the case,get her at least good case like is Define R5 or Phanteks Enthoo pro or Eclipse,those cases have very good airflow and they're solid build,I wouldn't skimp on the case Hope this helps Thanks,Jura
Please make the SSD at least 250GB. They don't cost that much more, but at least she can store some of her stuff on it before the PC starts to complain about running out of storage space. Nobody should be getting 120GB anymore if it's not for some strictly special purpose PC (like firewall, HTPC/home fileserver OS, etc). An i7 CPU and 120GB SSD, come on, man.
As I stated in my post I'm also adding a 1Tb HDD, which I have and am giving to them along with a wifi card. Sam
I ended up getting an i7-6700 (non-K model), 16Gb DDR4, MSI motherboard, GTX 1060 3Gb, 120Gb SSD, 600w power supply, DVD-RW drive and a case for $750. I have a 1Tb HDD and a wifi card I'm giving him. Sam