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Which app are you/will you be using. Better to find whether they're optimised for a particular card or CPU before you splash out on something that may not help at all.
duncs-
I checked out 3DS Specs and they only recommend NVIDIA QUADRO or AMD Firecrest, but apparently that's a really outdated position based upon what's now substandard chip architecture so tests with 'consumer grade' quad core cards like the GTX 1070 actually show a better performance. I think the main problem after that is bottlenecks with RAM amounts so pure professional machines used for lots of complex rendering have 64GB, but any system with that amount that I've seen is $$$$$$$$$$$
The only pooter I could find with 'pro' Quadro spec within my budget was https://www.europc.co.uk/dell-precision-3620-mini-tower-workstation-windows-10-pro-64-bit-intel-xeon-e3-1240-v5-3-5ghz-16gb-ram-256gb-ssd-dvdrw-4gb-nvidia-quadro-k2200-dell-3-year-warranty-119910.html?utm_source=google_shopping&gclid=CJO2is3Z9NICFW0R0wodyMYDwA
again, refurbed but half price of the normal unit and almost identical in spec in every other regard as the i7 is also quad core but higher frequency so I could use the difference in price to boost the RAM to 32gb?
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Thanks for the insight chap. It's mostly for 3D design applications like Cinema 4D/3D Studio Max with some CAD/Illustrator/Photoshop at the moment, but I also do some Photogrammetry and video editing at 1080p and this is something that might be expanded in future as I'm planning on getting a UAV license later in the year to do aerial survey stuff.
I kind of get the video card aspect but not really sure how all this translates into performance for particular programs-I'm Mac based atm but a lot of the 3D/CAD stuff is PC orientated so that's why I'm making the change. I'm just getting really frustrated with machines at Uni that aren't powerful enough to run 3D apps as it takes 20 times as long to do anything because of repeated crashing... I'd pay another £500 to avoid dealing with that over the next year as with so many assignments I want to be able to work as effectively as I can at home and spare myself the caffeine fuelled purgatory of the computer labs.