Render Power
 

I'm currently looking at getting a new pc and i was wondering what the experts think i should get.
whats a good PC for rendering speeds? Does a dual processer decrease the render time significantly? and how much ram should i get?

I'm currentlythinking of getting a AMD XP 2400+ with 256MB DDR Ram (will take that up to 512 once i get it tho)
what do you guys think?

dual processer will make renders faster so if you can get it then do, and as far as Ram i would reccomend 1Gb as a start. although, for some weird reason,,, think its price, i keep getting a machine, now have 3 with network. Maybe you can consider, if its too expensive, then get 2 lower end machines, and network render.... hehehe can also use to play games too.. ;)

Never think of 256 MB! It realy hurts to work with to few RAM. If you wanna save money, the 2400+ is a very good choice. Best performance for a small amount of money. Get a mainboard that supports dual channel mode and buy two equal ram, i.e. 2x 256 MB or 2x 512 MB. Your system gets much faster in starting programs and booting windows.

If you gonna build your system by your own don't save money on the power supply and the cpu fan. Otherwise you get a very noisy pc.

I'm buying from a shop so i dont actually know what motherboard it has and i know nothing about them anyway lol

as for the RAM i'm planning on selling the 256 that comes with it and buying 2x 512MB to slap in (then maybe another 2 if i have enough money) can you buy 1GB sticks of RAM?

once i have my new pc i might upgrade my current pc which sucks right now lol it's a Cyrix 266MHz with 128MB SDRAM :( :(
I'll try to make it a Dual P4 with 1Gb of RAM and put it in a network with my new PC but that might be being too optimistic.

To be brutally honest, I wouldn't even consider trying to upgrade the old machine since you're going to have to bin most of the parts anyway - you'd need a new motherboard, ram, cpu, cooling, probably PSU too. The only things you'd get away keeping would be the drives, which if they're more than around 2 years old, would probably just cripple the new machine by bottlenecking data.

Keep it and use it as a Linux firewall or something :D

Never thought of that lol. I think i'll just lob it at my brother coz he wants it.

You can't get dual p4, cause the p4 isn't dual cpu ready :>. Or do you mean a hypertheaded cpu?

hmm strange i thought you could coz in a 3ds max tutorial the guy says "i'm using a Dual P4 so this might take a little longer for you guys at home" lol

the xeon it mostly p4.......... maybe thats what he ment

O yea, the new p4(prescott core) is made for the sse3 instruction set, right now mostly everything is sse2, when lightwave upgrades to the sse3 you should see speed improvements by some amount, i'm not sure how much tho.(imagine lightwave with no sse2)

They were just launched on feb 2nd and come in 2.8 3 3.2 and 3.4ghz, but they will probley be a lot. Take a look at AMDs NEW stuff, it is much better than the xp chips they made, If i remember correctly AMD did have some better lightwave benchmarks than intel.


Anyone know about lightwave on the G5, i really wanna know how it fars and if it is as fast and everyone says.

Check this out:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-195-1.htm

They test AMD (64 3200+) and pentiums (Northwood AND Prescott) and run 3d RENDERING BENCHMARKS!!!!!! :)

Page 6 is the 3d rendering benchmarks.

:(:(:(:( the athlon falls behind in the 3d tests :( NOOOOOOO

lol sorry about that i just hate P4's, i think it was my IT teacher who got me hating em.