Hi there,

Doing some 3D artwork as a "Blendernoob", I already reached the limit of my laptop's abilities.
Especially in rendering an advanced texture it shows hick-ups.

Was thinking of buying a Mac Pro, but it seems I need a Nvidea graphics card to run Open GL 4 to run Awesomebump, a texturing program and so on that makes it far too complicated for me to grasp what I should buy.
It seems most graphic designers make a computer themself.

Now thís is a nice example of that:


Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 board
i5-4590 (liquid cooled)
16 GB RAM
Geforce GTX 750Ti
3 HDDs totaling 3.5TB storage
EVGA 850 W PS

Imagine that with a glass worktop, as this one would later get. (Got this picture off of Blenderartists.org, picture by Wolfmanyoda)
Could anyone give me an advice if in general a self-built computer is worth the effort?
I mainly approach this from an esthetical point of view. It looks cool and cooling seems to be one of the biggest challenges.( )
And building a desk like this seems like a nice challenge......if it weren't for the bits, bites and bobs that are wooshing right over my head.

Thanks.

.
Looking very powerful machine. If you are getting genuine spares, its worth going for assembled one.

Oh your in.trouble now king krappa is gonna yell at you for posting something.
Bad bad reindeer.

But your system looks good .I'm.only one.step up from.banging on my phone.with a rock .

Don't quite get that.

But I was a bad reindeer before.

WAY back in the day, Amiga was the way to go for a graphics machine. That's what they did all the effects shots for the series Babylon 5 on. There were some massive builds out there that would even speak Amiga and PC. I know the company was trying to make a comeback about three years ago (Mac eventually squashed them back in the day); don't know what they have available, but it might be worth looking at.