New PC (Patreon)

So,

I've had an old PC for 10 years and I finally saved up enough money to upgrade. I can't complain - the old potato I had allowed me to make STELLAR INCOGNITA and 8 DAYS WITH THE DIVA. But moving forward, it was always the plan to get better tools.

My timing was really lousy though, because many will agree that now is not a great time to upgrade and this is mainly the fault of NVIDIA. They're making so much money supplying AI centers with chips that video graphics cards are suddenly a secondary concern for them and it shows - the new 50 series of cards are overpriced and are only minor improvements over the older 40 series. But for enthusiasts that make games as a hobby, there is no option other than an NVIDIA card if you want to use DAZ3D, the most popular 3D rendering program. This is because DAZ uses Iray GPU rendering, which takes advantage of CUDA core processors, found only on NVIDIA graphics cards. But to make things even more complicated, the latest version of DAZ3D is not compatible with the new 50 series of NVIDIA cards, and enthusiasts will have to wait a while until they release a new version of the software that can make 3D renders with the hardware on the latest 50 series cards.

NVIDIA headache aside, I was out of the PC enthusiast scene for a while, so I had to learn all about recent CPUs (Intel has been having problems with their 13th and 14th generation CPUs), RAM, motherboards and storage options. My goal was to get a higher end PC for productivity with upgrade capability, especially around the graphics card. I originally planned for a 4080 Super, but by the time I was ready to buy, they were only available on the secondary market, since NVIDIA discontinued them to make way for the lackluster 50 series.

So what did I get? For those of you that are interested, the basic specs are:

CPU - Ryzen 9950XMotherboard - B850-PRAM - 64GB 6000Mhz C30Internal Storage - 4TB Kingston KC3000 SSD and 8TB 3.5" HDDPower - ADATA 1300W Platinum (overkill, but it was a good price)Graphics card - NVIDIA 4070 Super (12GB VRAM)

When I talk about upgrade capability, I only really mean the graphics card and maybe an extra SSD. When DAZ3D finally does release with a version that can use the Blackwell architecture of the new 50 series NVIDIA cards, I'm thinking I may try to get a 5080 or a 5070 Ti. The 5080 is the closest to the 4080 Super I originally wanted but the 5070 Ti currently seems to be the "best value" in NVIDIA's underwhelming 50 series lineup. It's crazy to me that 16GB of VRAM is what NVIDIA are going with for their most modern cards - it's a form of shrinkflation, but in the tech industry.