Just wondering if anyone has any advice on buying a new PC - budget of about £800-900, mainly using rhino4/vray/autocad/adobe suite. Do not do a massive amount of rendering but still want to get something that will be quick for the money! what should i spend the money on? RAM/graphics card/processor?
Also any advice on the OS i go for - currently have xp and no problems - not heard good reports on vista. Also is it worth getting a 64 bit OS - what difference does it make?
with 32bit vs 64 bit, you can check out the FAQs…the third question from the top is what you’ll want to look at.
As to everything else, try and get as much processor (as in threads, then clock speed) as you can afford. In your case that should mean a quad core. How much memory depends largely on whether you go 32 or 64 bit, but these days if you go with 64bit, then 4 gbs of memory is a good base point to start with. A 32 bit system will max out at 3 gb. After that V-Ray really doesn’t care. For graphics card recommendations you’ll have to check up on that with Rhino/Adobe/Autodesk
if you want massive rendering, my opinion is spend with ram,graphic card and processor.you would benefit it greatly. hehe
Graphic card won’t help for V-Ray rendering.
Your best bang for your buck is building your own computer. Right now you would want to pick up an i7 920 machine before intel stops selling them to make way for the less powerful i5 CPU’s. A 64bit OS is a necessity now I feel. In this line of work nobody should be running 32bit unless they are dual booting it. If you are interested I can walk you step by step through the process.
Email: jrharvey5923@gmail.com
Thats good news. 8 Core/16 thread nehalems will be out on the Xeon side soon but you can bet they will be at least $1000 a chip most likely more. Ive also heard they will be releasing QUAD socket motherboards alongside this for 32 physical cores/64 threads in one machine. Thats pretty insane. However you can imagine what that would cost you. You would still be better off buying 4 separate machines.
QUAD socket - I suppose so this machine can’t overclocked so easy, because to much heat in a single housing. So, four i7 920 at 3.6GHz or more could be faster.
Server boards have never been much for overclocking. They just arent meant for that kind of thing. If your looking for a good overclocking multi CPU motherboard on the intel side then you will have to wait for the next Skulltrail board. I think the Skulltrail 2 should be coming out soon and support some type of nehalem based chip but its dual socket. Unfortunately it wont support the i7 920 or any other “Affordable” chip.
Yea, I can’t image why anyone would choose 32bit over 64…it just doesn’t make sense anymore…
The only downfall with building your own is that you can’t just call somebody to see what the issue is, its almost always much more involved then getting something from dell. That being said, I’m glad I’ve built my own system and I would certainly do it again.
Wow…Quad socket…the cost of that MoBo alone has to make it completely not worth while, since its probably upwards of $750…can’t I get a full quad core machine up for that??..part of me still wants it though
Very OT here (and something for John and I), I’m going through with installing XP, Win7 and Linux on my new HD either today or tomorrow…we’ll see how it goes. BTW release date for win7 is slated for Oct 22nd…
I imagine a quad socket MB would be over $1000 since the current dual socket motherboards that are worth a crap are around 500+. to about 700 not to mention how expensive the CPU’s are. Its not very cost effective but I guess its more for people that cannot distribute the load across multiple computers like Vray can. I suppose if your limited to only one computer then it makes more sense. Good luck with your tri boot setup. Ive seen some impressive numbers from windows 7 and Cad/OpenGL apps. Ive also seen some fantastic numbers coming from the latest version of Ubuntu. I still have not upgraded from the last version but I have no problems with it so I may just leave it.
$750 was being very optimistic…I built my last machine with a dual opteron Tyan board which was about $450 I think (that was almost 3 years ago). Great moBo, but definitely up there.
I think those setups are more for servers that HAVE to process the data locally. When dealing with hundreds if not thousands of requests, even shuttling processes off to other computers take time. Some times I wonder if the days of dual moBo systems will come back into fashion (not that it ever really was) as a way to cram more processing power into a more cost effective system.
I’m quite excited to see what happens with getting the new OS’s up and running…first order of business is getting XP to a point where I can work on it as I kinda need to do that. Then its getting Win7 together so I can start playing around. I’m very interested to see what V5 does on win7. Ubuntu is just for fun, provided that I get relatively bored with win7 somewhat quickly. I’m goin all open source for Ubuntu though…Blender here I come
No V-Ray for Linux, but spawners might be running on Linux with the next full version… We’ll see though.
Yea, BOXX has been doing dual MoBo systems for years now…however those tend to be the ones that are like 20 grand…not exactly in my price range (I’m still paying off my car :))
