i3 my friend, I use i3, the data is safe because for the new year my stepmother gave me 1 terabyte of an external drive, yes, I know, the problem is solved, I will solve it.)))
I remember when I was making do with a 1 TB drive... my Daz install is currently on a 7.3 TB drive (advertised as 8 TB of course), and I'm in need of a second 7+ TB internal NVME SSD to make more room for my Daz stuff on the 7.3 TB drive now... all those Ren'Py and other novels/games chew up a lot of space eventually...
Not having an Nvidia GPU for Iray was painful though. My baby laptop had AMD graphics, which didn't help at all in that situation, and my 'Bulldozer era' AMD laptop CPU, while more than adequate for other tasks... well there's a reason that the first 3-4 pages in my development thread have such grainy renders... even those 'lower number of iterations at lower resolution' renders were taking hours to bake...
My 12.6 TB HDD backup - advertised as a 14TB drive of course, still thinking that there needs to be a class action false advertising lawsuit about that or something... is not quite full yet, but it's getting there... yeah I have a lot of .duf files and Daz assets and other stuff to back up at this point...
My OS is on it's own 2TB NVME drive. I have two spare NVME slots, hence why I'm looking at another NVME drive. I already know that a 4 TB drive isn't gonna cut it in the long run, but 8 TB NVME prices are insane (over $1000 atm). The 8 TB SATA SSD drives are priced more reasonably, but I only have room for one of those in my uber laptop, and that spot is currently occupied by, you guessed it , an 8 TB SATA SSD...
I missed the boat on cheap 3090s (less than $1000). I could buy one used/refurbished, but I'm not going to, I don't trust used...
I was considering a 4090 maybe at some point, but I'm using an older Nvidia driver on Uber Laptop here (the newer drivers disable my laptop screen, so I can't use it), so I probably can't use a 4090 via Thunderbolt 3 on this laptop. My trusty 3060 is doing the Thunderbolt 3 thing now...
I'm already supplementing with USB drives, but that's not ideal in the long run, and those drives are almost full too...
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Not sure why I felt the need to share all that. Every time I was ready to grab a 3090 in October, they were out of stock, even 'just' $1000 is a lot of money for me, and I'm afraid to spend money at the moment.
Back to your situation
ZeroBOY1. I'm making do with a 4 core/8thread i7-6820HK. For Daz stuff, you really don't need a faster CPU with more cores if doing the Iray thing. It's nice, but not necessary. So your i3 is adequate.
If you are looking for suggestions:
It's the GPU that's the best place to spend money, I highly recommend the RTX 3060 if you can afford one because of the 12GB of VRAM. It's also faster than my dual 1080s on uber laptop here, for comparison, so I hardly use those anymore.
I CAN combine all three GPUs to do a faster render IF the scene size is less than 8 GB, but these days my scenes are often larger than that, since i like to render multiple characters in one pass if I can... plus the fans in Uber Laptop get REALLY loud trying to cool those 1080s when they are rendering, and even then the temps climb a lot. The 3060 stays in the 60c to 70c range when rendering, so it's not really struggling at all, which is why I mostly render just on said 3060 eGPU these days.
And don't cheap out on the storage, a 4TB SSD drive, or a larger HDD, would be my suggestion if your system is otherwise doing OK. Not sure how much ram you have, but 16GB is suggested, 32 GB is nice to have, and anything over 32GB is essentially overkill as far as Daz Studio is concerned. Over 32GB helps a tiny bit, but you don't NEED it...
But if you are strapped for cash, yeah I get it. Been there, kind of there now. If you can achieve RTX 3060 status (if not there yet already), that'd be my first suggestion, but even those are in the $350-400 US range. And a large spinning rust drive when you can get one on sale for cheap... That 1 TB drive of yours will fill up fast, hence my concern. Unless you get a kick out of deleting stuff after you make it...