Another computer advise thread.

Bronco

Hey folks.

Well its almost cristmas time and my parents have asked me what I want,my answer is no idea,thats where I need some help.

Im hoping to get a new rig early next year which my dad will build and ask for some of the parts from them for christmas. But im not sure what to get.

The thing I want to focus this computer on is purily 3d work and rendering,not so much gaming. I don't intend to install any games on it but would still like "game tech" to work on it (development tools) since myself and shallen for starters are slowly working on our own game project and im aiming for a game industry folio and its good to test and play around with stuff.

So with that in mind what advise can you guys give me?

I don't want to break the bank with the costs esither,the special spec I need but can live without is soemthing thats not to noisy,we can live with some noise but not to much since it will be set-up in my room and if im rendering soemthing overnight it would be nice to sleep .

Cheers for any help.

John

CrazyButcher

I would wait for a G92-Chip based GeForce 8600 or similar, as they will suck less power. and 512 MB for graphics will be much cheaper today, aswell. There are probably cases with a bit more "spare space" or powersupply on top, fiddling all the power cables from below upwards, wasnt exactly fun & easy...

pliang

I'd wait as well...btw I have the exact same case...its pretty light for me as well.

pior

Yeah that's one nice case to work with! Got it in black. I just don't understand why the left the power button *inside* the front flap. Or am I missing something?

James Edwards

I just built a new rig myself as well after almost 5 years of use on my old p4 3ghz and radeon x800. That was a pretty stable system, but really weak on the rendering/baking side of things. I wanted to make sure I got another one that would be just as stable and offer me the performance boost I needed.

I opted for a Q6600 (2.4 ghz quad core) this time as they are dirt cheap, a mobo that could handle that plus the new 45 nm cpus if I decide to upgrade. I went with 4 gigs of patriot 8500 ddr2 ram and a GeForce 8800 GT. I built this system primarily for doing 3d, but TF2, UT3 and Crysis all run really well on it too, which is ideal for doing games work. It's good to be able to play games on the same system you do your work on too. I've never used a high end gfx card other than a FireGL in all my career. Consumer cards have always been pretty reliable for me - both from ATI and Nvidia.

I'm a big fan of aluminium casing too so I opted to splurge a bit on a Silverstone TJ10 in silver:
http://www.silverstonetek.com/products/p_contents.php?pno=tj10&area=

Also bought one of these in silver to go with my cinema display:
http://www.aevoe.com/moshi/celesta_d.htm

Makes for a rather nice desktop package for me which is kindof important now that my system is setup in our living room area instead of a private office (sold my house).

The silverstone case ships with 2 120mm fans, one on the back and one internal that sits between the mobo and the hd rack. I added 2 more 120mm fans at the top of the casing and and enermax 720W powersupply with a 130 mm fan as well. The mobo itself uses passive cooling too, which, when combined with all those fans keeps things pretty cool. System is very quiet too. Oh and I really like how the mobo tray slides out the back so you can install all your stuff without having to dig around in the case. That made setup much easier than with previous systems.

I also opted for Vista 64 bit, after following development over the last year. So far it works great and is proving to be just as stable as my old xp system, with the added benefit of being able to use more ram, and my copy of XSI 64 bit. All my 32 bit apps run fine so far, including my games as well. There's a bit of a learning curve though, esp with the new security features, but if you've ever used a mac it will be somewhat familiar. I think the key to a happy vista experience is new hardware. I don't think I would have installed vista as an upgrade... which is why I waited till I absolutely felt it was time for a new machine. I'm not really endorsing it or anything, just relating my experience so far.

IronHawk

Per - I checked out that Asus board out and it looks pretty good. I went with a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 on my new rig. It had great reviews on New Egg and has solid caps. Using the 8600 as well since it seemed to have the most bang for the buck at the time. Running a dual boot of vista ultimate x64 and XP pro x32. Currently doing most my work in Xp since PS only seems to run decent there at least till SP1.

How many of you guys are running raid 1 setups? I've got dual seagate 320gb barracuda's. Just seemed the way to go as a freelancer. The speed hit isn't bad with 4 gb's of ram. A raid 10 or Raid 5 with a hot spare would be preferable of course but to spendy on drives for me.

Gwot - thats a great chip. Really not much more then the Dual cores. Did you get Go stepping? I still need to overclock mine. I've heard people have been getting those up to 3.1. I've got a beast of a Zallman fan on my CPU and after market cooler on my 8600. CPU runs at 27c consistently.

Bronco

thanks for the advise fellas.

My dads set up is acturally very similar to that Per,less Ram but is pretty damn good.

and would I be right in saying for now at least a duel boot is the way forward?

Cheers

John

sonic

per: the advantage of having RAID1 over just backing up to an external drive is that you have a mirror of your current drive. Everything that is written to one hard drive is written exactly the same to the other. If one begins to fail, you will be notified and you can replace the failing drive without even noticing it. Back in the day when I was a PC tech we'd always suggest RAID1 to law firms, big offices, designers, etc.

RAID5 is silly to have and should be reserved for special purposes such as backup servers, web servers, computational research, etc.