Thanks songstaforlife. I'd love to know how your experience in After Effects went, as that's what I primarily use.
If my build's performance in AE isn't amazing, I might end up getting a second GPU at some point, so perhaps I should stick with the 75W PSU. Price isn't really a problem.
Thanks again!
Hey Melvyn. Sorry for the delay, but it took me a little while to figure out how to get my CUDA cores running in AE. I've run a few tests to check out the speed of the new GPU and CPU and here's what I found so far.
I used this handy benchmark project file for raytracing: forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1019120
My time was 6min 49sec. Not the best time, not the worst. However, since raytracing is a CPU oriented task, I'm assuming that the initial poster in that particular thread had the main advantage of having an i7 3930K @4.7 ghz.
I have not had the time to overclock my CPU just yet, mainly cause I have no experience in what I should do, so I am running stock speeds on my i7 3770K @ 3.5 ghz. Just to reiterate, my GPU is a PNY GTX680 4GB, and that is also running stock.
I also ran some tests for open GL in Element 3D. Let me just say, it was quite the experience. Sorry for the lack of technical details, but I used the blob model with the gold paint texture, replicated the particle to a count of 540, animated the replicator array, added camera movement with motion blur @ 16 samples, added a background environment, rendered some glow, fog, and an additional lighting preset, enabled depth of field and subsample post and rendered at full resolution at 1080p and got 1 frame per 11 seconds. When disabling the subsample post, I got about a frame every 2 seconds. Disabling the DOF but keeping the subsample post, I got about 3.8 fps. Without subsample post, DOF, and motion blur I got about 11.8 fps. VERY workable. Way faster than my late 2009 MBP at the very least.