@Gibsalot said in If you had to choose:
@Darkbane so the real question would be a good GPU or a good CPU ? lol cause in that case Ram has no effect , i have never had any luck running in direct mode, and stoped using GPU in buffer when Xplotter came out.
well I already mentioned to the others, don't answer the question with "mining" in mind, answer it with what do you do daily on that computer that would benefit you personally every single day... if you play lots of games a better GPU should be the focus, if you use a lot of applications a better CPU should be the focus, perhaps if he's running out of system RAM then he should focus on that...
plotting is a single event that doesn't need to be done again after its been completed, unless you add more drives, so you should approach this with the mindset of, it took me 2 days to plot, now what will I do with this for the next 363 days of the year, hence why how you use the computer should be the focus...
ultimately for this particular cryptocurrency more HDD space would be better than a faster CPU/GPU in general, unless those are both saturated and he can't read through all his plots in time, but if he has so few plots he likely hasn't reached that point at all, even with low end hardware... he could alternatively if he has a boot drive that is an old HDD, he could upgrade to an SSD and now use that old boot drive to create more plots on, so he not only increases his overall enjoyment of his computer and applications, but he expands his plot capacity at the same time... a win win for every day use and mining...
improve your daily life first, your mining life second...
P.S. I mean what if the guy responds and says he has an i7-7700k CPU with 32GB RAM and an 1080 TI GPU... we would both be screaming he doesn't need to upgrade anything, and should be getting more HDD space... but we don't know, because he didn't post his information, so we're at a complete loss for specific answers and can only give vague general ideas to work with...