My review of M70.. first impressions
polycounter lvl 18
I have to say... Its pretty damn good.
A touch on the heavy side, but considering its packing an NVIDEA card (I have finally given up on ATI for producing good cards) its lighter than I expected.
I started off by opening up my denser mesh models for normal mapping, and found it can tumble them all around nicely. Screen refresh speed is all that gets in the way of a perfectly smooth tumble. Unlike the wildcat I have been playing with, all the screen modes in 3dsmax work correctly. Transparency sorting seems to be excellent straight out of the box.
Render times are also a pleasure, with speeds sufficient that activeshade has suddenly become a proper part of my workflow now(!) The render times naturally carry across to the normal and displacement render to texture times too, I might add, meaning less 'king of grumpiness'.
With the 2.13 GHZ option and packing 2 gig of memory, its not cheap.. but I definately feel I have my moneys worth here.
Apart from the 'minor' technical problem of the disk drive not being able to eject whilst the pre-installed cheap burning softwares disk controller is installed (nero fixed that), I have had no problems at all with the setup.
A nice touch is that the DVD rom ejects and can be replaced with a 40gig hard drive in a few moments, which I find is useful for using as a render dumping ground overnight.
All in all, a pretty cool unit.
A touch on the heavy side, but considering its packing an NVIDEA card (I have finally given up on ATI for producing good cards) its lighter than I expected.
I started off by opening up my denser mesh models for normal mapping, and found it can tumble them all around nicely. Screen refresh speed is all that gets in the way of a perfectly smooth tumble. Unlike the wildcat I have been playing with, all the screen modes in 3dsmax work correctly. Transparency sorting seems to be excellent straight out of the box.
Render times are also a pleasure, with speeds sufficient that activeshade has suddenly become a proper part of my workflow now(!) The render times naturally carry across to the normal and displacement render to texture times too, I might add, meaning less 'king of grumpiness'.
With the 2.13 GHZ option and packing 2 gig of memory, its not cheap.. but I definately feel I have my moneys worth here.
Apart from the 'minor' technical problem of the disk drive not being able to eject whilst the pre-installed cheap burning softwares disk controller is installed (nero fixed that), I have had no problems at all with the setup.
A nice touch is that the DVD rom ejects and can be replaced with a 40gig hard drive in a few moments, which I find is useful for using as a render dumping ground overnight.
All in all, a pretty cool unit.
Replies
Good to know.
(I've been using a HPzd7000 for about a year now, handles everything I can throw at it. I'm not hoping much for games on the horizon... but a 3.2HT p4 with a GeForce5, 1gig ram seems to handle a lot)