For all decisions I suggest your main consideration (after budget) might be where is your support coming from.
If Free Republic is where you will seek support...
If most here go with AMD CPU that might be a good/best choice.
The speed differences at the top end are not huge.
I suggested Intel parts but, I am not a prolific PC support poster. I also mentioned very real patchable bugs in new Intel parts. Fixable with new mobo BIOS but that is beyond some folks to install.
The same thing goes for a flavor of Linux.
I run Slackware but it is the oldest still active distro and NOT hugely popular due to some old skool philosophy.
I do _NOT_ recommend it because I prefer to not spend my time doing support.
I mention,,, it is similar to how others might mention their preferred flavor of Christianity. (on Free Republic)
The passion involved in PC hardware/software is often quite similar to religion.
Ubuntu and Debian is where the ‘looked up’ challenge _ANSWERS_ point to. Many similar paths to the same results.
For huge RAM a new mobo ready for expensive DDR5 RAM at over 5000 MHz is going to produce noticable improvement in user experience.
DDR5 RAM come in 48 Gig sticks for a total of 192Gigs.
DDR4 sticks max out at 32Gig typically, 128Gig total with 4 slots. <<— still a very good user experience.
The video card I suggested is 12Gig of video RAM.
I think it is the max AMD GPU supported in win7 an unsupported OS where I run games. Not bleeding edge but capable due to RAM. I choose it partly because there is support for AMD GPU in the Linux kernel.
Today 12G or 16G GPU RAM is where it is at.
For gaming video RAM is very important.
I think Nvidia is the dominant GPU with ‘kids’ nowadays.
_I_ don’t have the reaction time to use the faster framerates possible. I’ll never know!!! :-)
Blender uses GPU RAM for textures. One of your mentioned desires.
Few solutions are perfect. Don’t cry when inevitably you discover that the box you built coulda had xyz if you had waited another week or read 900 more reviews.
Set expectations accordingly and avoid the tears.
There WILL be better hardware out tomorrow until forever...
>>Few solutions are perfect. Don’t cry when inevitably you discover that the box you built coulda had xyz if you had waited another week or read 900 more reviews.<<
thats where I was at a year ago when I first started researching... I take all comments and suggestions with a grain. even on this thread there are no 2 comments on hardware the same.
all comments are appreciated... well except for that cat above who is over 3K!! lol... jk...