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How do!

As per the title. Have treated myself to a 3d Printer. Now I just need a new PC Worky Bits to go with it. And that’s an area I’m pretty much clueless on.

Don’t want to spend mega bucks, as PC gaming doesn’t appeal to me. So I just need it for 3d Printing, and my other crafty stuff, like Cricut. I am happy to spend on a bit of future proofing though, so definitely looking for Value over Cost.

Any suggestions?

How are you going to get your files onto the printer? Mine uses (Micro)SD Cards so I chose a laptop with an SD Card slot.

Good question!

USB/WiFi/LAN. It’s the Anycunic Photo Mono M7 Pro, if that helps.

Personally I'd just get a good quality USB from Sandisk and use that. Wifi connectivity can work but honestly unless you're running a print-farm it just tends to add another layer of complications which can cause a fail.


As for a PC - honestly for the most part any good mid-range pc will do the job. All it needs to be able to do is open and slice models. Now a higher end pc will do that latter stage a lot faster, but as printing itself takes hours upon hours its not a huge problem if your PC takes longer to slice; esp if you're not activly using it for much else at the time.
Some more advanced AA can be a REAL drain even on high end PCs, but again all you're getting for more expense is timesaved.


So I would say aim for a good quality midrange pc. You don't have to go cutting edge if you're only slicing and if you're doing it at hobby level that's enough.





You only really want to look at more power if you want to slice/print a LOT so that time saved adds up; and if you want to get into digital sculpting. Cause then you basically do want to look at "gaming PC" levels of performance.











ALSO Doc - might I suggest - TOTAL WAR WARHAMMER - its a great excuse to get a good high end gaming PC!!

Agreed mid-range gaming pc should be fine.
If you're not a huge gamer you can save some money and slightly less heat-ware by getting locked hardware (non-overclocking)...but that depends on what else you may do with it in the future where being able to overclock certain features may be advantageous.
You don't need the newest version of stuff. so ddr4 over ddr5 ram (which is expensive).
Suggest 16-32Gb of ram, you can use 8gb but it'll take forever to slice if you want a full plate or larger files or if you plan on doing modeling in the future.

The costliest thing right now is probably going to be graphics cards.
First it was years of crypto mining and now ai stuff is eating into the market for regular consumers.
You can get used/refurbished, but there's no guaranteeing it wasn't abused by crypto-miners.
I'm still using a gtx 1070, it's fine. Though I get some lag in rotating bigger files in slicers or using blender.
No issues in zbrush, but that's cpu-powered.

If I was building a system now I'd use a decent sized nvme m.2 as the boot drive to maximize the speed.
Depends on how much printing you do, or plan on keeping/reusing pre-sliced files you know work, or if you get into modelling; consider getting some additional storage drives. backups for your backups.
I filled up 3/4 of one 500GB drive in under 3 years, zero games, mostly from 3d sculpting files, but particularly from the all the exported presupported STLs coming into the mix. Being able to save as a native slicer file format (3mf) drastically cuts back on storage requirements.

Honestly modern software is a hog for RAM - I would say 32GB minimum these days.

Drive wise I'd have one 250GB or 500GB nvme m2 for the C drive with windows; then at least a 500GB nvme m2 or SSD - possibly 1TB for storage


Stuff adds up FAST these days

Where would one go for such a contraption?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I mean, is this any good? I really am without a clue.

https://www.drmem.com/xum-gaming-pc-amd-ryzen-5-5500-rtx-4060-8gb-32gb-ram-512gb-ssd-1tb-hdd/

I’m currently using a 5 year old gaming pc for model generation and it runs slicers just fine. Ryzen 5 5600x, 32Gb RAM, 1Tb storage, 1050ti graphics card.

Amazon seems to have budget gaming PCs for £300 that seem to be in this range. If you hunt about for Black Friday deals, then £500 probably nets you a decent and future proofed machine for what you want.

How much space do you have, as a mid-range laptop might be a better fit for you.

I’m building a brand new machine this year as my current desktop can’t handle a jump to Windows 11 (and my son is agitating for more gaming grunt) which is running to about £1k all in. There is a lot of preemptive Christmas money getting tied up

I would always go for PC over laptop unless you are very pressed for space or very mobile. Laptops have their place, but you'll pay more for the same power compared to a PC and you have very limited upgrade options.

A solid PC can have new drives installed for more storage; upgrade the graphics and other parts as you go. So they can be a lot more future proof.

I got a HP laptop from Curry's for around £500 for mine a couple of years ago. More than enough computer for what is needed.

I suspect the main thing you need the computer for is operating a slicer, which transforms STL files into something printable.

Would look for the following minimal requirements.

- A mid-range processor sufficient to do things fast. An AMD Ryzen 5500 is probably enough.

- RAM to handle larger files. 16 - 32GB would be the minimum I'd consider for future proofing.

- Storage to handle large files. 1 TB should be sufficient. You can get better performance with M2 SSDs.

- USB port, even if your printer works over LAN. You might want to update the firmware at some point and that's not always easy over LAN.

A setup like this is available in the US for around $500 from Microcenter (and they will throw in a keyboard and mouse, you're on your own for the monitor.) Pretty sure you can get this cheaper in the UK, there's stockpiles of the older AMD stuff floating around that retailers need to sell.

Have a probably 11year old PC with a GTX970 and it works just fine for 99% of my 3D printing.

Its only when the files go realy large that it gets a bit trubelsum opening the STL file and inspecting it.

So you dont really need that much power to just view files and print.

I do all of my slicing on my macbook pro that's a couple of years old. It works fine for it. Honestly, you don't need that much computing power to do slicing with any kind of speed. Sure, I can't get it done in a tenth of a second but that's not really an issue to anyone who isn't doing it professionally.