John_Charles Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 Hello It's time for a new desktop computer for both myself and my wife as we work what we have pretty hard and I'm seeking suggestions. As I've seen other posters ask what is needed for the computer to do, I've detailed that below. Bit of quick background on what we have... I have an HP Omen i7 9700 3.00 Ghz running 32Gb DDR4 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX1660 Ti 6Gb... (it's about 4 yrs old). My wife has an HP i5 9400 2.900Ghz running 24Gb DDR4 (about 3 years old). We both have two Asus 27" VP278QG monitors (one with HDMI cable and the other with VGA cable due to outputs). As we are both developers, builders and designers, we tend to have a LOT of browser tabs open during work (my wife can have 300+ tabs open quite easily) and some of the web sites she frequents when we are either buying/selling our projects and then specifying the fixtures and fittings are RAM hungry. We've tried a number of solutions re resource management of RAM such as tab closers/suspenders but some websites alone with only 1 or 2 tabs open consume up to 1Gb of Ram, and then when she uses several hundred it gets SLOOOOOWWWW. My use of browsers is less frequent and I've gotten by with minimizing but do tend to go down a rabbit hole when looking for a specific product to achieve what I want on a build, and when I do so Chief gets slow or I have to completely walk away for a ray trace.... I'm finding as I have large (full house) Chief Files there is often about a 1-2 second lag on clicking something and it opening/changing. That said, as we mostly do our own projects I am not doing as many drawing projects as others here who do it full time as I'm then off actually doing the build. I looked into upgrading our Ram on both machines with my wife being a mutli tasker (and she prefers switching between multiple windows of browsers each with anything up to 50 tabs each) and although both the i5 and i7 support up to 128Gb of Ram, the motherboards in both of our computers only support 32Gb... so we are already maxed out.... Which brings me to my question... I have tended to buy a pre built unit from a reputable store and brand with a focus on the specs I need but as I have found out, they generally don't give you the ability to later upgrade RAM and video card to your specific needs or as eg Chief Architect gets hungrier several years and versions later. I looked online at some no-name (to me) brands available from Amazon then went down the rabbit hole of numerous bad reviews on this brand failing vs that brand last time and in the end just plumped for the HP. Problem is, the HP is reliable but unless I go down the replacing motherboard route for each computer, we are at our limit on daily usage. Not as much a problem for me if I stay away from ray tracing but really an issue for my wife. If I stay with a brand from eg a Best Buy it gets up to the $4-5K mark real quick so I'd like to get the best bang for my buck... So, can anyone suggest a reputable web site or brand that I can configure high RAM (thinking in the range of 64Gb at least) and video cards with motherboards that allow future expansion? My budget is typically up to $4k for my machine as its' the CA workhorse and up to $2.5K for my wife but ideally I'd like it less than that if possible (don't we all?) Thanks..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Renerabbitt Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 15 minutes ago, John_Charles said: Hello It's time for a new desktop computer for both myself and my wife as we work what we have pretty hard and I'm seeking suggestions. As I've seen other posters ask what is needed for the computer to do, I've detailed that below. Bit of quick background on what we have... I have an HP Omen i7 9700 3.00 Ghz running 32Gb DDR4 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX1660 Ti 6Gb... (it's about 4 yrs old). My wife has an HP i5 9400 2.900Ghz running 24Gb DDR4 (about 3 years old). We both have two Asus 27" VP278QG monitors (one with HDMI cable and the other with VGA cable due to outputs). As we are both developers, builders and designers, we tend to have a LOT of browser tabs open during work (my wife can have 300+ tabs open quite easily) and some of the web sites she frequents when we are either buying/selling our projects and then specifying the fixtures and fittings are RAM hungry. We've tried a number of solutions re resource management of RAM such as tab closers/suspenders but some websites alone with only 1 or 2 tabs open consume up to 1Gb of Ram, and then when she uses several hundred it gets SLOOOOOWWWW. My use of browsers is less frequent and I've gotten by with minimizing but do tend to go down a rabbit hole when looking for a specific product to achieve what I want on a build, and when I do so Chief gets slow or I have to completely walk away for a ray trace.... I'm finding as I have large (full house) Chief Files there is often about a 1-2 second lag on clicking something and it opening/changing. That said, as we mostly do our own projects I am not doing as many drawing projects as others here who do it full time as I'm then off actually doing the build. I looked into upgrading our Ram on both machines with my wife being a mutli tasker (and she prefers switching between multiple windows of browsers each with anything up to 50 tabs each) and although both the i5 and i7 support up to 128Gb of Ram, the motherboards in both of our computers only support 32Gb... so we are already maxed out.... Which brings me to my question... I have tended to buy a pre built unit from a reputable store and brand with a focus on the specs I need but as I have found out, they generally don't give you the ability to later upgrade RAM and video card to your specific needs or as eg Chief Architect gets hungrier several years and versions later. I looked online at some no-name (to me) brands available from Amazon then went down the rabbit hole of numerous bad reviews on this brand failing vs that brand last time and in the end just plumped for the HP. Problem is, the HP is reliable but unless I go down the replacing motherboard route for each computer, we are at our limit on daily usage. Not as much a problem for me if I stay away from ray tracing but really an issue for my wife. If I stay with a brand from eg a Best Buy it gets up to the $4-5K mark real quick so I'd like to get the best bang for my buck... So, can anyone suggest a reputable web site or brand that I can configure high RAM (thinking in the range of 64Gb at least) and video cards with motherboards that allow future expansion? My budget is typically up to $4k for my machine as its' the CA workhorse and up to $2.5K for my wife but ideally I'd like it less than that if possible (don't we all?) Thanks..... Sounds like you’ve got some other issues in chief, post an example plan through a Dropbox link. Are you on win 11? Much better ram management there. Are you using google chromes new features for suspended tabs? Also, I don’t know of anyone who can efficiently keep track of 20 tabs let alone 100, it would be far more efficient in terms of hardware specific workflow to bookmark tabs in a temp folder. 32gb should be plenty. I would upgrade your hard drives to m.2 nvme drives and your graphics card to a 4080/90 or a 7900xtx if you want higher end Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_Charles Posted January 16 Author Share Posted January 16 8 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said: Sounds like you’ve got some other issues in chief, post an example plan through a Dropbox link. are you on win 11? Much better ram management there. Are you using google chromes new features for suspended tabs? 32gb should be plenty. I would upgrade your hard drives to m.2 nvme drives and your graphics card to a 4080/90 or a 7900xtx if you want higher end thanks RR... yes, we are on Win 11... and as I said above we've already tried tab suspenders etc. It's interesting that browsers are using more and more ram to serve a web page... this page alone with my posts and yours takes 200+ Mb of Ram, and my wife likes to have LOTS open (just how she works)... some Amazon ones take 400+Mb on their own. We've tried Edge, Firefox and Chrome and found that Chrome is the biggest resource hog when we are browsing although that also depends a lot on what extensions are active and what the specific task is... I know it goes in stages every few years and we generally switch around looking for a light weight browser from time to time... That said, my wife (despite discussions) just prefers to work with multiple tabs open as she multi tasks a lot so I don't see much option to do anything other than increase RAM or find a way to resource memory better than I'm already doing. RE the video card, I figured if I'm going to have to spend $1k plus on a card, as well as finding a solution to the RAM I might as well buy another one and be good to go for another few years... although I haven't looked into a SSD for a HP motherboard (great suggestion as I did it to an old mac years ago and hadn't thought of it for the HP's)... and that may be the issue for the lag as I have Chief located on my C: drive (which is almost full) and my work files in dropbox which is on a partitioned (D:) drive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Renerabbitt Posted January 16 Share Posted January 16 15 minutes ago, John_Charles said: That said, my wife (despite discussions) just prefers to work with multiple tabs open as she multi tasks a lot so I don't see much option to do anything other than increase RAM or find a way to resource memory better than I'm already doing. Are you experiencing slow downs? Win 11 RAM management is built to use advanced memory compression and allocation, so it uses as much ram as possible and then reallocate as needed...its not like the way we used to manage ram back in pre-win 10 days...so even though it shows a heavy utilization, this doesn't directly correlate to a lack of avaialble memory. A suspended tab is one thing, but bookmarking and closing a tab kills the process of that tab Are you using the new memory saver of chrome. Chrome is the big resource hag because every tab is its own process. If the wifey is hard up on her tabs(I'm heavy into system analysis, and would poke one more time that this is terribly inefficient) then its time for a motherboard swap, and at that point you'd question budget for such a thing and if its worth it to grab a new machine. Are you sure that 32gb is max? Some mobo mfr release bios updates to support more ram. NVME drives are just way faster than traditional SSD's Motherboards for that socket type are less than $100. DDR4 Sticks are super cheap, like $50. You'll need a bigger power supply for the newer cards. a 1tb NVME drive is cheap rn too. You could save $1K by revaming your machine. Up to you Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John_Charles Posted January 17 Author Share Posted January 17 yes I get both system slow downs and tabs hanging.... and I've already played around with virtual memory.... I'm actually not using Chrome at the moment as it got pretty bad at taking resources and we've found Firefox better over the last year or so... ha ha... yes have had MANY conversations with the wife (as has my son) and we've pointed out the realities of having so many tabs going, but in fairness to her, we SO OFTEN find (as builders) a product has come in as defective/damaged/missing components from transport and the supplier is out of stock/wants the damaged product returned/ we have to find someone local to repair it and she has to overcome supply chain issues to locate an alternative / other brand complete re-selection that hopefully matches set outs (usually doesn't) whilst reviewing specs, availability, dimensions, transport, etc or doesn't.... in this process book marking and saving tabs takes a back seat to being tenacious and finding a solution to yet another supply chain issue (but that's another story... ) and that's without her opening tab after tab of property either in the MLS or the Trulia's (resource vacuum) of the world either for sale or being sold (as we buy and sell our own projects)....so yes... I get her approach.... I agree, motherboard swap is the key and it's led me down the replacement rabbit hole.... I've actually installed CPU-Z on each machine to get the complete specs on each machine so have found the mainboard model numbers, looked them up and found the hardware limits for the boards are actually 32Gb eg HP Rother -Memory upgrade information Dual channel (1 DIMM per channel) memory architecture Two DDR4 UDIMM (288-pin) sockets Supports PC4-21300 (DDR4-2666) Supports 8 GB and 16 GB DDR4 UDIMMs Supports up to 4 GB on 32-bit systems note: 32-bit systems cannot address a full 4.0 GB of memory. Supports up to 32 GB (unbuffered) with two 16 GB DIMMs on 64-bit computers note: Maximum memory shown reflects the capability of the hardware and can be limited further in the operating system. So apparently I'm SOL on the RAM upgrade unless the MB comes out... I saw on a an old thread someone had said they buy their computers from a particular website and I both have no idea on reputable (configurable) brands other than the big ones or where to go next in finding and building a system.... I'd be interested in something like your main laptop but as a tower.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Renerabbitt Posted January 17 Share Posted January 17 3 hours ago, John_Charles said: yes I get both system slow downs and tabs hanging.... and I've already played around with virtual memory.... I'm actually not using Chrome at the moment as it got pretty bad at taking resources and we've found Firefox better over the last year or so... ha ha... yes have had MANY conversations with the wife (as has my son) and we've pointed out the realities of having so many tabs going, but in fairness to her, we SO OFTEN find (as builders) a product has come in as defective/damaged/missing components from transport and the supplier is out of stock/wants the damaged product returned/ we have to find someone local to repair it and she has to overcome supply chain issues to locate an alternative / other brand complete re-selection that hopefully matches set outs (usually doesn't) whilst reviewing specs, availability, dimensions, transport, etc or doesn't.... in this process book marking and saving tabs takes a back seat to being tenacious and finding a solution to yet another supply chain issue (but that's another story... ) and that's without her opening tab after tab of property either in the MLS or the Trulia's (resource vacuum) of the world either for sale or being sold (as we buy and sell our own projects)....so yes... I get her approach.... I agree, motherboard swap is the key and it's led me down the replacement rabbit hole.... I've actually installed CPU-Z on each machine to get the complete specs on each machine so have found the mainboard model numbers, looked them up and found the hardware limits for the boards are actually 32Gb eg HP Rother -Memory upgrade information Dual channel (1 DIMM per channel) memory architecture Two DDR4 UDIMM (288-pin) sockets Supports PC4-21300 (DDR4-2666) Supports 8 GB and 16 GB DDR4 UDIMMs Supports up to 4 GB on 32-bit systems note: 32-bit systems cannot address a full 4.0 GB of memory. Supports up to 32 GB (unbuffered) with two 16 GB DIMMs on 64-bit computers note: Maximum memory shown reflects the capability of the hardware and can be limited further in the operating system. So apparently I'm SOL on the RAM upgrade unless the MB comes out... I saw on a an old thread someone had said they buy their computers from a particular website and I both have no idea on reputable (configurable) brands other than the big ones or where to go next in finding and building a system.... I'd be interested in something like your main laptop but as a tower.... well I have someone that would upgrade your existing if you wanted to go that route. I might even help him out. I just finished kindve a whacky build for myself. I am sponsored by AMD so I just put together a hybrid build based on a test bench: Kind've a fun project. If you don't want to put together a frankenbuild, I might suggest cyberpowerpc for desktops and eluktronics for laptops. More to come tomorrow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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