So I've recently decided to build a new PC . My budget maximum is ~$900 for everything, but I'd obviously like to save as much as I can. I would like to maximize my slicing performance for 3D printing. I play some games, but not often. I'm going to start with one monitor and eventually scale that up to 2 or 3 monitors,but this is several months away.
Right now I'm using Slic3r that's built into Repetier-Host and AutoCAD Inventor Fusion for 3D modeling.
I've been doing a lot of background investigation into what sort of core components would be good for me. The problem is, most of the benchmarks focus on gaming. Tom's Hardware has done some benchmarking in other areas as well, but I'm not sure how to match this to slicing performance. i.e: 'Productivity Benchmarks?'
I've fired up the Windows 7 resource monitor and it seems like slicing performance is very memory intensive. Does anybody know if there are slicers out there that are OpenGL enabled? If not, I can definitely save some money on graphics and dump it into SSD/processor/memory.
So far I've narrowed it down to some flavor of multi-core processor with at least 8 GB of RAM. My current setup is quad-core Intel with 4GB of RAM and I've noticed it goes to the page file quite a bit when slicing larger objects, so I think that's my main bottleneck. I should also mention that my current setup is 5 years old as of this year.
Right now I'm torn between AMD/Intel systems. Here's a good picture of an AMD System that looks interesting. But for and extra $150, I could get something like this Intel system.
My question is: is spending the extra money on an Intel processor worth it? I'd love to hear some of your opinions/recommendations. Ideally, I'd be great if we could get a couple of people to do some benchmarks....
Right now I'm using Slic3r that's built into Repetier-Host and AutoCAD Inventor Fusion for 3D modeling.
I've been doing a lot of background investigation into what sort of core components would be good for me. The problem is, most of the benchmarks focus on gaming. Tom's Hardware has done some benchmarking in other areas as well, but I'm not sure how to match this to slicing performance. i.e: 'Productivity Benchmarks?'
I've fired up the Windows 7 resource monitor and it seems like slicing performance is very memory intensive. Does anybody know if there are slicers out there that are OpenGL enabled? If not, I can definitely save some money on graphics and dump it into SSD/processor/memory.
So far I've narrowed it down to some flavor of multi-core processor with at least 8 GB of RAM. My current setup is quad-core Intel with 4GB of RAM and I've noticed it goes to the page file quite a bit when slicing larger objects, so I think that's my main bottleneck. I should also mention that my current setup is 5 years old as of this year.
Right now I'm torn between AMD/Intel systems. Here's a good picture of an AMD System that looks interesting. But for and extra $150, I could get something like this Intel system.
My question is: is spending the extra money on an Intel processor worth it? I'd love to hear some of your opinions/recommendations. Ideally, I'd be great if we could get a couple of people to do some benchmarks....