3D Viz PC Help!

[portisgreg]

Hi all!

Just wondering if I could get some advice...

Its been a number of years since I last bought a pc hence I'm not really up on what the best thing is nowadays (I sound old!), I currently have a Dell Workstation (about 5yrs old), Dual 1.7GHz Xeon, 2 x 40gig HD, 1GB Ram, and a standard dual monitor graphics card (128mB i think) but I find its pretty slow now especially for multitasking.

I'm after a decent new PC. I'm a 3D Designer, I do 3D visualization, animation, graphic design, technical drawings, therefore I need a decent machine mainly for fast multitasking and also rendering and want it to last me a while without having to constantly upgrade. 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Premiere & Vectorworks are the primary apps I use but I also use it for general home use, internet, MP3's, DVDs, blah blah blah.

I'm willing to spend up to £2,000.

I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations please? :)

Also, is it worth getting a 64bit machine? What about getting 2 x Dual Core AMD's?? Intel or AMD (that'll prob start some arguements!)? Is there any imminent new technology I should wait for?

Thanks!

Greg

[rond36]

You need to decide if you want 2 940 pin sockets for duel core Opteron 200 or 800 series CPUs or 2 1207 pin sockets for duel core Opertron 2200 series processors
or
2 771 pin sockets for 5000 series (Dempsey) or 5100 series (Woodcrest) or 604 pin sockets Paxville duel core Xeon CPUs

After you get the CPU socket figured out then you need to decide on what expansion ports and slots you need the motherboard to have like:

PCI-E
PCI
PCI-X
IDE
SATA
SATA II 3GB
U320 SCSI
SAS

[rond36]

Also, is it worth getting a 64bit machine?
It would be very hard to build a workstation with the parts that are available that is not 64 bit capable. AMD Opteron processors with AMD64 and Intel processors with EM64T technologies along with the motherboard chipsets that support them are 64 bit capable.

What about getting 2 x Dual Core AMD's?? Intel or AMD (that'll prob start some arguements!)?

Won't be any arguments here. If that is what you want to base your system on go for it! I think 2 duel core Opterons would fit your needs, but the new Intel processors are much faster and about the same price.

The Intel Xeon 5160 is the fastest workstation/server system processor. A single Xeon 5160 is faster than the Core 2 Extreme X6800 (Conroe) desktop processor at default settings.

Could you imagine 128 Xeon 5160 processors in a 64 node cluster.

Is there any imminent new technology I should wait for?

Some time in the next 4 months Intel is going to release Quad core Xeon processors (http://www.intel.com/technology/architecture/coremicro/) based on the same Core Microarchitecture as the Xeon 5100 series processors

Intel will also deliver a quad-core (4 full execution cores) processor to the DP server segment based on Intel Core microarchitecture, codenamed "Clovertown." Clovertown is targeted for introduction in the fourth quarter of 2006, on the Bensley and Glidewell platforms.

[portisgreg]

Ok so a few months have passed and I still havent bought a pc!

I was browsing in PC World (yeah I know! :? ) this eve and they seemed to have a couple of really good deals!

they had:

Advent - Intel Pentium D 940 Dual Core 3.2GHz 800MB FSB
2048MB DDR RAM
400GB HD
DVD RW
DVD ROM
2 x 256MB nVidia SLi Graphics Cards
Wireless Keyboard & Mouse

For

£699

And they had an

Athlon 64 4000+ 2.4 GHz, 1GHz FSB, 1MB Cache
2048 MB DDR RAM
600GB Hard Drive
DVD RW
DVD ROM
2 x 256MB Geforce 7600GT Graphics Cards
Wireless Keyboard and Mouse

For

£599

Now I know PC world are generally crap but these just seemed like very good deals for them.

Let me know your thoughts.

Greg

[saphalline]

Both of those systems are designed for gaming, not rendering. If the rendering software you use supports the workstation-class cards from ATI (FireGL) and NVidia (Quadro) then it would be much more cost-effective for you to invest in one of those. That would shuffle more 3D rendering duties to your vid card (and off the CPU's) and significantly increase your system's rendering power.

Based on your current hardware, a dual-socket system with room for two dual-core or quad-core processors would be the ideal upgrade. If you are unwilling to spend that much, a modern dual-core desktop-class system would be a much cheaper alternative, but a workstation-class vid card would still be required.

In general, PC World is going to be utterly useless for the type of system you need. A 3D workstation is not common at all as the market is so rare. The only types of systems you'll see in an average PC magazine are basic desktops, gaming desktops, and servers. Not likely to be any useful advice or ads for the type of system you need.

[portisgreg]

Cheers Saphalline!

I was planning on getting a system that's 'Quad ready', however I contacted Scan to find out what motherboards are quad ready and they said that they've struggled to find any that have the quad bios. They advised me to wait until the chips are released next month than they should have some more info on what motherboards would be best.

The plan is still to get a decent Dual core system that I can upgrade to a quad when they drop in price. I dont think I'll ever make use a dual-socket system, and it'll set me back a fair bit too. What chip would you recommend?

In terms of graphics cards, I use 3D Studio Max 8, as far as I know this does use those cards you mentioned, but to be honest I always thought rendering was all processor based and nothing to do with the graphics card? I've never bothered buying any graphics cards that're too high end for that reason.

I'm looking at spending no more that £1300 on the system (excluding monitors).

Greg