Bitchin' PC

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mid_gen
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Bitchin' PC

Post by mid_gen »

I'm considering foregoing the full 10-week Maya course I was going to do after uni, and instead get myself a bitching system, train myself to a decent standard then go for the 4-week course.

Obviously I'd use the money saved on a bitching workstation.

I'm looking at a dual Opteron/Xeon system, not really sure what the differences will be. I will run WinXP 64, and most likely the packages I will be using will be released with 64-bit version soon, so I do want to take that into account.

Any ideas Chief etc? I want a beeeetching machine probably get 1x 19" and another 17" hitachi tft in addition to the 17" I've got at the moment aswell.
mid_gen
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Post by mid_gen »

Looking at benchmarks, dual 3.06Ghz Xeon outperforms the dual Opteron 2.8 systems at 3D rendering for the same price.....maybe Maya 6 64-bit will be out by then and spank it, but hmm...
LemonSHARK
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Post by LemonSHARK »

A bit off topic, but I was wondering what course you did at uni.
LazyManc
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Post by LazyManc »

/me shakes head
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Post by LazyManc »

Why not:

Get a second Hitachi 17" TFT and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1000 or 1100 and put them on you're current (already pretty fucking good) PC.

Put the money you've saved not buying yet another machine towards driving lessons and your first car.

Surely that would make a damn sight more sense than replacing a PC you only bought in December?
rib?
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Post by rib? »

that money tree you planted last year already come into bloom? :roll:
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mid_gen
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Post by mid_gen »

I was asking for hardware information, not financial advice thx.

In the world of 3D, my pc is pants. It will, however, make a perfectly good render node. Rip the 9800XT out, pop that in the new machine, job done.

Buy a new dually opteron/xeon mobo/cpu, coupla gigs of ram, a 10k raptor for OS then a 200gb for storage, good solid case. Xeons aren't actually as absurdly priced as I thought, and after sneaking a few renders in on the dual Xeon server, fook me they are worth it :)

3.2Ghz P4 = £250 (1-way only)
3.06Ghz Xeon = £350 (2-way +?)
2.8Ghz Xeon = £288 (2-way +?)
1.8Ghz Opteron 244 = £350 (2-way)

Both Xeons outpunch the Opterons by 10-25% in 32-bit applications, 64-bit remains to be seen. BTW, plain P4's absolutely destroy single Opteron's at this kind of work. I guess the Hypertransport bus helps them a lot when really big volumes of data are getting churned around between two cpus. The Opteron's did score *very* well on 64-bit FPU benchmarks however...so they could be a very good option for the future.

I'm thinking a pair of 2.8 Xeons with a little fsb tweaking is a good option ;)
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