Ahhh, go on then, let’s have a go.
So, given the value of stuff in the UK is generally awful (though not as bad as Norway it seems), I really struggled with this. I suggest reading this thread first, as some of the parts come from here, and I adjusted accordingly:
I cannot keep your cost under £1000 unfortunately, because of the stupid GPU. Here, I just use Scan PC where I can, and give the LN stock numbers.
MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK WIFI DDR4
LN129298 - £219.98
This Z790 will allow you to upgrade to 13th or (theoretically) the incoming Raptor Lake refresh CPUs (14th?). HOWEVER you are stuck with DDR4 here to drive down RAM cost.
Intel Core i5-12400
LN122253 - £159.98
Good, well-reviewed CPU. It should offer some benefit in terms of pure architecture evolution over your i7-8750. If we were to take CPUBenchmark at its face value, then the newer CPU should be about 50% better than your current one in your laptop. Standard 12400 gives you an iGPU as well as a back up.
Corsair Vengeance LPX Black 32GB 3600MHz DDR4
LN119251 - £79.49
Can’t go wrong with Corsair RAM, this ide more than decent enough. Maybe there are downsides to the clock speed, relative to DDR5 in Rhino or Vray, I don’t know.
WD BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
LN123938 - £44.39*
Same reasoning as other thread. Decent, gets you directly to 1 TB. Advise another drive in the future, rather than dumping everything on here.
Seasonic Focus GX 750, 750W PSU
LN100738 - £139.99
Same reasoning as other thread, should permit upgrades to CPU, GPU, or even both if Intel make their 14th gen efficient.
Fractal Design Focus 2 RGB TG
LN120264 - £64.99
I have one of these at the moment. Same reasoning as other thread.
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE
Amazon - £29.90
I have a non-SE version, which is slightly more expensive, but for your use, this will be fine.
£30 for one of the best 250 W air cooler on the market! I think Amazon is the only vendor in the UK.
Sigh… here we go, blowing money on stuff that is… meh. What choice do we have; the GPU…
MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB VENTUS 2X BLACK OC
LN137436 - £289.98
The 4060 isn’t great, but it’s about as good as I can get while remaining on the latest hardware and within budget.
EDIT: I am going to add a serious reservation here, especially regarding the VRAM. 8 GB is probably going to be way too small for “large” renders.
It’s absolutely woeful value, and I would seriously consider just waiting and seeing if you can get at least a 4070, but the 4060 Ti 16 GB, for the sake of sheer cost is (excluded from total):
** MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB VENTUS 3X OC**
LN138517 - £459.98
I can’t stress how bad value this is. But it is the only nvidia card this end of budget that has 16 GB VRAM, that is close to your budget. The 4060 Ti has been demonstrated to be worse in some cases than its previous equivalent! But nvidia has backed everyone into a corner with terrible VRAM allocation.
TOTAL - £1040.20
Thermal paste is trivial cost, I used Arctic MX-4 for my Thermalright air cooler.
As always, make sure that you cross-check my opinion, and have a look at the good reviews for the GPU, CPU, and cooler. I tried to make a balanced build. However, this came somewhat at the expense of the GPU. In reality, it would be nice to have an RTX 4070 (though still not great value, to be honest).
I don’t think there’s much wrong with sticking with DDR4, and many reviewers seem very much passive about DDR5 outside of more intense gaming and overclocking.
My reasons for not advocating an AMD or Intel GPU is poor generalised render compatibility. Vray support is none for anything outside of nvidia, and unfortunately remains the case for many renderers. I have an Intel Arc on my own PC, but all of my rendering is CPU based. For Cycles, all three big GPU vendors are now supported to hardware raytracing levels now (Optix, HIP, & Embree) for Blender 3.6+.