Upgrade?

[Tentative Tom]

Hello LTT forums,

 

There is this wonderful gentleman that does CAD (mainly on sketchup then to lumion and so forth), but I saw his rig and felt its update is long overdue. According to him, the rig was pre-built but he water-cooled it. 
This is his current rig:

• Windows 7 Pro (For some reason he declined the free upgrade)
• Core i7 - 3770 (Water-cooled, I wasn't able to take it apart, it reads "Thermaltake" faintly and the radiator(?) is mounted on a hdd rack)
• 32 GB RAM 
• 2x Asus GTX 660s in SLI (4 Gb vram)
• Asus Maximus V Extreme Mobo
• Thermaltake 1375W PSU

(And a crap ton of HDDs strangely not in RAID)

He also has a BOXX PC (pre-built) with a 980 in it as a render farm.

I thought his current rig could use a GPU upgrade (and drop the SLI), RAM seems to be sufficient and the PSU could take a CPU upgrade(?). Considering the watercooling loop I was thinking it could take way more than a i7-3770.

 

Any suggestions are welcome, I am quite new to this.

 

Tentative Tom
 

Thanks for the reminder: budget upwards of 700 to 1000 USD

[Himommies]

Budget

[Tentative Tom]

14 minutes ago, Himommies said:

Budget

Thanks for the reminder

[masterkickass7]

15 minutes ago, Tentative Tom said:

Hello LTT forums,

 

There is this wonderful gentleman that does CAD (mainly on sketchup then to lumion and so forth), but I saw his rig and felt its update is long overdue. According to him, the rig was pre-built but he water-cooled it. 
This is his current rig:

• Windows 7 Pro (For some reason he declined the free upgrade)
• Core i7 - 3770 (Water-cooled, I wasn't able to take it apart, it reads "Thermaltake" faintly and the radiator(?) is mounted on a hdd rack)
• 32 GB RAM 
• 2x Asus GTX 660s in SLI (4 Gb vram)
• Asus Maximus V Extreme Mobo
• Thermaltake 1375W PSU

(And a crap ton of HDDs strangely not in RAID)

He also has a BOXX PC (pre-built) with a 980 in it as a render farm.

I thought his current rig could use a GPU upgrade (and drop the SLI), RAM seems to be sufficient and the PSU could take a CPU upgrade(?). Considering the watercooling loop I was thinking it could take way more than a i7-3770.

 

Any suggestions are welcome, I am quite new to this.

 

Tentative Tom
 

Thanks for the reminder: budget upwards of 700 to 1000 USD

don't really need to upgrade cpu there's very little innovation

[Tentative Tom]

8 minutes ago, masterkickass7 said:

don't really need to upgrade cpu there's very little innovation

So I'm guessing a 1080 upgrade would be plenty powerful? (And lose the finicky SLI)

[masterkickass7]

9 hours ago, Tentative Tom said:

So I'm guessing a 1080 upgrade would be plenty powerful? (And lose the finicky SLI)

That's overkill good upgrade wait for the 1080ti there announcing in a a couple days and rx490 at ces

[Quaker]

11 hours ago, Tentative Tom said:

This is his current rig:

• Windows 7 Pro (For some reason he declined the free upgrade)
• Core i7 - 3770 (Water-cooled, I wasn't able to take it apart, it reads "Thermaltake" faintly and the radiator(?) is mounted on a hdd rack)
• 32 GB RAM 
• 2x Asus GTX 660s in SLI (4 Gb vram)
• Asus Maximus V Extreme Mobo
• Thermaltake 1375W PSU

(And a crap ton of HDDs strangely not in RAID)

Thanks for the reminder: budget upwards of 700 to 1000 USD

He probably doesn't really "need" to upgrade the CPU and that would involve  a new CPU, motherboard and DDR4 RAM to be meaningful.

(But if he did, I'd suggest an i7-7700(K) with an H270 or Z270 (to overclock) motherboard and 32Gigs of DDR4-2133/2400)

 

He could replace the two GTX-660s with a single GTX-1070 and get better performance.

 

The 1375 watt power supply is massive overkill, even for 2x 660s. With a single GTX-1070 he'd only need a 500-550 watt power supply. But, there's no special reason to replace the power supply.

 

I'd be willing to bet that his "crap ton" of HDDs is mostly older, relatively small drives. I'd suggest that one good upgrade might be to get a 250-500Gig SSD to put his OS and main apps on and then replace all the HDDs with a couple of 2TB WD "reds" in RAID1 for mass storage.