PizzaChamp

These are all really great points - thanks! I'll have to double check and make sure that we can get MS10 for free.

Hey, all! So I'm currently a graduate student at the University of Arkansas. In a few months, UArk's "Art/Fabrication/Design" lab will have a ~$2k budget for a new PC workstation. They're hoping to run Rhino, Fusion, and maybe Maya for modeling.... V-Ray & Keyshot for rendering. Probably no video rendering. This machine will connect to a laser engraver, CNC router, and CNC plasma cutter. Probably more in the future. Wifi capabilities would be ideal but aren't required. I quickly tossed something together as a rough draft proposal - just to get some idea of the cost range that we'll be dealing with. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XWzcq4 I'm not super sure about the Mobo and CPU - but it seems that the best GPU for this machine would be an Nvidia card. Both Rhino5 and Maya seem to have issues with AMD cards - as stated on their website. I'm not new to PC building but I'm definitely no expert. How would you recommend I tweak this build? Keep in mind that around 2k is our budget - but if we can save money we can allocate it to other parts of the lab! Thanks, everyone!

Thanks for the info, guys. Does anyone have recommendations for an affordable mobo that will play well with a 3rd or 4th Gen Core i5 CPU?

Yeesh. If I'm going to need to replace her Mobo/CPU and potentially memory, I'm going to have to return this 1060, unfortunately. Money's tight - and it sounds like I need to prioritize upgrading to a new(er) CPU/MOBO. Perhaps I should run the same tests with her old GPU (960) and see if the same issue persists.

Thanks for the quick reply! Though I'm not sure how reliable my research is - I've read that a bottleneck with this setup shouldn't be more than 17%. But her performance is showing much, much worse than a 17% decrease in performance. Is it correct to assume that since Afterburner is reporting that the GPU won't go past 30-40% load that it's only performing less than half of its potential and the CPU is likely the cause since it's at 100%? Just trying to make sure I know what I'm doing with all these numbers and etc, haha!

Hey, all! I bought my mother a new GTX 1060 (3gb) for xmas. It was an upgrade from a 960. After switching out the GPUs, uninstalling old/installing new drivers and etc, FPS is still stuck between 10-40 fps in Destiny, etc @1080p. I know this should be much higher since my father's PC has a 1060 as well and it runs a smooth 60fps. Her CPU is an AMD A10 7850K APU. 450w PSU, 8gb RAM. I was thinking there might be a bottleneck so I ran MSI Afterburner and it reports that her CPU runs at 90-100% while the GPU stays under 40% load when the game is running. This would be a very significant bottleneck - which leads me to believe that the issue might be a failing CPU. However, I've never come across this issue before so I may not know what the hell I'm talking about. I've never used Afterburner as a diagnostic tool so I'm not sure if I'm understanding this correctly. What do you guys think? Thanks for your help! tl;dr: Afterburner reports: CPU load = 100% while GPU = ~35%, is this a failing CPU?