New computer on its way. Dual 1gig P3's

[peter8581]

amd

AMD athlons really beat everything when it comes to 3D aps. Even against the dual Intel systems. Layout in Maya , max, and lightwave are all faster from my experience on the athlons. If you have multi threading though in your render, then the dual p3 for now is faster. The p4 is slows as hell. It only has good memory bandwidth, which will only make big difference on specific aps. Like video editing.. Anything that moves memory in big chunks, due to the design of rdram. Everything else I have ran on a p4 has no improvement over the 1ghz p3s even with pc800. Dual p3s were a better move than going P4….

Dual athlon boards are coming out this summer along with the 1.5ghz pali chips. The dual athlon boards don’t have the processor sharing the same bus like the dual intel systems do. So it will be a hell of a lot faster. When you multi thread with the dual p3, the processors start to share bandwidth. spliting it in half alomst.

 

[chesty]

We shall see. Does anyone know how much 3Dstudio max is? I heard in the thousands. The seagates at 15,000rpm and 4.6ms access only come in 18.6 gig sizes. What a bummer.

 

[JeetKuneDo]

Yeah max studio 3D is alot .... BUT ...... get it from a warez site! ..... costs you nothing at all. As for the seagate, its fast, VERY fast, but then there is a price to pay .... a rather large one. Sorry i could not help u more buddy. Wanna know anything else, get at me. If u were here i could lend u the Max3D CD, but your not. Find out if there is a trial version to download, if there is, download it, then get a crack.... make sure its the full thing tho. Max studio is good, have you looked into VRML? Virtual Reality Modelling language. Not as advanced or as easy as Max3D, but u can get similar effects. As standard Max 3D saves as .max i think. But i think u can convert this to .wrl which is VRML........ look up the VRML sourcebook 2.0 on any search engine. If u wanna see what it looks like i have a link to some of my prodjects on http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~ex201/ its then under university, then comp graphix. Bear in mind, this project was done after learning the language for only a week. You may need to download a plug in such as cosmo player to navigate the world tho. .... u need any more help., just holla. Take it easy mate.

 

[Dr. E]

If you are doing Graphics specific stuff then why wouldn't you buy an SG machine or even a Macintosh. These computers are designed with graphics and rendering in mind. The problem with a Dell built machine is that the processor architecture is designed to support a wide variety of components and must be built for the lowest common denominator (eliminating the possibility for graphics specifc Pipelines running in parallel with the regular system pipelines). Also, Macintoch and SG can use an enhanced instruction set designed to make use of many of these graphics oriented architecture features.

If you wanna plays games, then a Dell is cool, but anything higher than a 600 MHz processor is overkill because there are no games out right now that will make use of this extra processing power.

The Doc

 

[Dr. E]

You can upgrade your components all you want, throw a terrabyte of memory in there and tweak it left and right, but in the end, the parallel processing ability of the CPU and an enhanced instruction set makes all the difference.

When you render an image, it is a very basic process for the processor (its a matter of multiplying a shitload of matrices and doing some other simple dimensional math). If you are stuck with an Intel architecture, the only thing I can suggest is at least a quad processor.

 

[chesty]

I not only do graphics, but I am an aerospace engineer and do a lot of finite element modeling and cad. Most of the software I use for this has been optimized for dual processors if present. I have noticed a big difference in those types of programs and windows 2kpro is designed to take advantage of two or more processors.

As before, I am not going to be doing graphics for the movies industry but for engineering and for photographic/video work and web page. The sg are way too expensive and so are rs6000's as well. I just plain can't stand Macintosh and there are not a lot of available programs for them. Especially the ones that I run which are mostly engineering applications.

I have also had memory problems running with 256k, especially with multiple windows and processes going on. Gaming is only a past time for me and any gaming I do will be internet based. If I need more power and the business volume warrants it then I may move up to an sg machine in the future, but for now I think this will do quite fine.

 

[Rexx]

Sounds cool

Looks like you're going to have a good time with your new toy. I just ordered the stuff to upgrade my computer. For about $190 I boosted my computer up to:

AMD k7 Duron 750Mhz
52x speed CD-Rom
AGP 4x graphics w/ 64Mb Video ram
10/100 Network Interface (ethernet)
3d onboard sound
128Mb+32Mb+32Mb SDRAM = 192Mb SDRAM
2.1GB Hard Drive for Windows
4.3GB Hard Drive for Files
1.08 GB Hard Drive for files
(Total 6.5 GB Hard Drive space)

It came with some other shit that I don't need [case, ect.] so I'm just going to sell that and the old stuff thats no longer needed to make some back.

 

[chesty]

Sounds great! I am going to add some hard drives for specific things such as scratch files, files, os, and stuff like that.

I can't wait for it to get here. It is in transit right now from dell. Left yesterday. Get this, I paid for overnight shipping and it won't get here till next wensday. Strange new math.

 

[Rexx]

Good ol' overnight shipping. Ever so reliable.

 

[thesuperstar]

in the military we had silicon graphics systems, they were the best for 3d graphics.