Building new rig, what do you guys use?

gbenchar

Howdy, Im currently looking into getting a new system here for modeling and rendering, and I have mixed responses from people.

What kind of system do you guys have?

Will applications such as Photoshop CS.2, Maya 8.0, Zbrush, 3DS, recognize 4gigs of RAM? Or is that a waste?

gamedev

4 Gigs is a sweet spot. Are you looking for a desktop or laptop? I'd say go dual-core or quad-core w/ 4 gigs of ram and an Nvidia graphics card. GeForce if you like to play games, Quatto if all you will be doing is 3d work.

Psyk0

I'll certainly go for quad core and 2+ Gig of ram and most likely Nvidia card, mainly for high poly modeling tho.

I'm pretty sure most applications will "recognize" 4 gig of ram, because when you run out of ram, the OS uses virtual memory (stores data on hard drive which is much slower).

gbenchar

I spoke to a number of tech guys, all of whom build computers for a living. If the program is 32bit it will only recognize the 2gigs of ram. Also, if you dont have windows x64 nothing will be able to pick up the extra 2 gigs.

However, windows x64 is basically a beta of vista, and both are unreliable and unstable.

I ended up getting 6700 dual core, 4 gigs of 6400 ram (going to upg anyways in the future why not, right? :P) and the new GeForce 8800 GTX. Im not running a server board, so i think this will be alright for a workstation.

Rick Stirling

Max picks up more that 2megs with a tricky software switch. Or something.