Hardware upgrade advice required

john2

My PC has ECS - H61H2-M2 motherboard. It has 8GB DDR3 RAM. The processor is i3-2100 @3.10 GHz. The graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 of 2GB capacity. The power supply is 450W. The motherboard, processor, one stick of 4GB DD3 RAM, power supply were bought in 2011 or 2012. The second 4GB stick of RAM was bought in 2017. I am using Windows 10 pro 64 bit.

The CPU cabinet was bought in 2005 or 2006. I do architectural work which involves making 3D models of buildings in SketchUp and still image photorealistic rendering in V-Ray.
I also do photo editing work in Photoshop and use layout and graphics software viz. Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop. I do occasional video editing that consists mostly of slide shows and the videos are of 4-5 minute duration in Adobe Premiere.

I am planning to buy a new i7 processor or AMD Ryzen 7. I want to keep 8GB RAM or maybe I will upgrade to 12 GB RAM.

I have the following queries.

Which processor should I buy from the following ?
Intel Core i7-7700 Processor 8M Cache, Up To 3.60 GHz 7th Generation which will cost me 24,596 bucks
https://www.amazon.in/Intel-i7-7700-Processor-Cache-Generation/dp/B01N0L41N7/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1516977881&sr=1-2&keywords=intel+i7+processor

AMD RYZEN 7 SERIES OCTA CORE PROCESSOR 1700 for 25,088 bucks. Not much of a price difference between the two processors
https://www.amazon.in/AMD-RYZEN-OCTA-CORE-PROCESSOR/dp/B06WP5YCX6/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1516978188&sr=1-1&keywords=ryzen+7

Would I require any additional cooling for AMD Ryzen processor as the amazon web page mentions “WITH WRAITH SPIRE COOLING SOLUTION (AM4 SOCKET)”

Should I upgrade my graphics card also? The current graphics card that I have i.e. NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 of 2GB capacity was bought in 2017 only.
Should I buy a new power supply? I recently faced a hard disk trouble (WD hard disk bought in 2012) in which the pins of hard drive got blackened out that rendered it useless.
A friend of mine is suggesting to buy a new i5 processor or AMD Ryzen equivalent instead and buy a heavier better graphic card.

His point is to invest more money in graphic card in order to get better performance instead of sticking to a low end graphics card and pumping money in a high end processor. Is that true?

I am attaching screenshots of my hardware specs, the photographs of power supply and damaged hard drive.

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HARD DRIVE.jpg

Glenn at home

No need to get the i7 as Vray uses the GPU and CPU so get the fastest i5 you can afford (save some $$) and a good GTX (1050 Ti). That's still 4 cores (or 6 depending on the model). 16 gb ram, no less and buy a motherboard that uses m.2 ssd hard drives. My $.02 anyway

juju

@glenn at home said:

and buy a motherboard that uses m.2 ssd hard drives

and when you do get m.2 SSD drives, make sure they're the PCIE flavor, else there will be no speed advantage over a regular SATA SSD.