Hardware upgrade recommendation for Sketchup+VRay

[rayulpm]

I have the following workstation:

System model:
Hewlett-Packard p6-2322es

Processor:
3,10 gigahertz Intel Core i5-3350P
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
6144 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Main circuit board:
Board: Foxconn 2ADA 1.00
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
UEFI: AMI 8.11 10/24/2012

Memory modules:
6100 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory
Slot ‘DIMM1’ has 2048 MB
Slot ‘DIMM2’ has 4096 MB

Video:
AMD Radeon HD 7450 [Display adapter] (1GB)

When I render 3D files it takes long times and huge ones clash sometimes. I’m considering to upgrade some parts of the hardware, memory and video card mainly. As you can see above, I have 6GB of memory RAM where I’m planning to change the slot which allocates the 2GB memory for an 8GB one, doubling the current memory. However, I don’t know which video card to buy to improve the performance of my pc. My budget is around 150-200 Euro. The memory of 8GB costs around 75Euro. Could you tell me if 12GB is enough to run Sketchup 2018+VRay 2.0? Which affordable video card could you recommend me? Which is the minimum GPU memory required according to your experience (I have 1GB)? Any other recommendation?

Thank you.

[Anssi]

According to the Passmark test pages, a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti could be bought at about $170. It would support GPU rendering in Vray. Or, without the Ti, at about $140 with a poorer performance/price ratio and half the memory. Checking from a local vendor here in Finland it seems the euro prices are about the same number in Euros, so about 20% higher. I don’t know if it is the same for all the Eurozone.

With the models you can process with the i5 processor, I think the 12 GB of RAM ought to be significantly better than 6GB. CPU rendering will remain rather slow because it is limited to four threads.