computer help please
looking to buy a new PC soon (within days) .
below are the specs i'm reviewing.
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i7-940 (2.93GHz, 8MB cache) "I belieave that is a quad Core?"
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate (English) Service Pack 1 64-bit
MEMORY 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 at 1066MHZ (3x2GB DIMM)
VIDEO CARD SLi, Dual nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
HARD DRIVE 500GB - SATA-II, 3GB/S, 7200RPM, 16MB Cache
SOUND CARD Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
COOLING OPTION Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fins
Currently priced around $3,200.
I use zbrush and XSI heavily therfore I am looking to push maximum visuals with minimal "slow down".
Am I on the right path? Any suggestions?
below are the specs i'm reviewing.
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ i7-940 (2.93GHz, 8MB cache) "I belieave that is a quad Core?"
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate (English) Service Pack 1 64-bit
MEMORY 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 at 1066MHZ (3x2GB DIMM)
VIDEO CARD SLi, Dual nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
HARD DRIVE 500GB - SATA-II, 3GB/S, 7200RPM, 16MB Cache
SOUND CARD Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
COOLING OPTION Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fins
Currently priced around $3,200.
I use zbrush and XSI heavily therfore I am looking to push maximum visuals with minimal "slow down".
Am I on the right path? Any suggestions?
Replies
what motherboard? case? what about a 500GB sata2 drive with 32mb cache instead of 16mb? they arent much more expensive but Im not sure the 32mb makes much difference to 16mb?
Anyone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the benchmarks on SLI 9800's weren't anything to rush to the store over. I don't think the extra arm and leg is worth the dule performance cards anyways (more like bragging rights that mean nothing in the end). I would get the machine you have in mind and get only one 9800 for now... If you think you absolutely need the other then you can always get it later an upgrade.
Hope this helps...
You can skip the dual 9800GTs and go for a single GTX 280 or 295 card... I think that's a whole lot more power than 2 9800s... the new line of NVIDIA cards are dual core GPUs, meaning they have 2 video processors on 1 card.
I have a 1 gb 9800 gt... I'm thinking I should have just threw in another 100-150 to get a gtx260.
It would help even more if you listed what manufacturer/brand of the actual parts and their cost. Some brands are known to cause issues with other brands. Also, what power supply are you planning to use?
edit...
is there a reason why you want to go with such an expensive cpu? the 940 is pretty much double the price of the 920... are you going to get double the performance?
The i7 920 will be a blazingly fast cpu, why would you need to spend so much more for a marginal increase? For the 250-300$ you can save by going with the 920, you can put it into a faster video card and a 2nd hard drive for faster swap space.
The rumor is that the i7 will be getting a die shrink later this year, and prices will come down... so in 6 months, your 600$ 940 will probably be worth 300 bucks when faster/more efficient i7s hit the market.
A computer is like a car... it's a constantly depreciating asset... buy the best ratio of performance to price until it needs an upgrade.
So, between a
nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
or
SLi, Dual nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
Which is better?
a single gtx280 will probably be more than enough for anything anyone around here can throw at it in terms of 3d work.
It's a gaming 3d card... not a 3d workstation card.
The worst thing you can do right now is start throwing money at a system like this.
What else comes with this system? what monitor and size, keyboard, mouse, etc... list everything.
cause I'm well under 2k right now with a similar system built from parts from newegg.com
I haven't used zbrush or xsi yet, but I can tell you my quad core 9300 has yet to start chugging at anything I've thrown at it in max. That i7 configuration is probably faster than my system by another 30-40%... and my system probably would have cost around 900 to build if I were in the US.
I petty much know dell is rapping me in price. However, for me, from a personal stand point, i cannot stand putting my own pc together. My current PC was put together and it barely runs now. The process of Software initialization alone was horrible (bios set up and such). What's worse is i know its my fault or non understanding. However all that aside, at the moment i simply have zero time to even put one together because of a hectic work schedule. Thus my willingness to pay alittle extra for a more reliable assembled machine that was not put together by a monkey (me). Not to mention the piece of mind. I'm going through dell because my work machine is dell and has yet to fail me.
Oh thank you, yoru right,.....it borught my pc down about 300bucks. Thanks.
What's most important toi me is the ability to work efficiently, with little to no slow down, on my 3d stuff at home.
To further discuss vid cards, which is better then for the purposes above?
SLi, Dual nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
or
nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB
or
one single nVidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB
btw, what do you need vista ultimate for? Most users won't even need the extra options in ultimate...
Even with your i7 940, I have priced a similar system from newegg without such a fancy automotive painted case for 1900$
A few looks around the web... like the EVGA board can tell you what to match up in terms of parts, and they'll be known to work. My system works fine because I put an evga motherboard with an evga video card, corsair powersupply and corsair ram. the 1900$ selection of parts I came up with are not cheap parts, they all have either lifetime warranty or extended warranty from factory.
Hell with the money left over from building the system you can buy a cintiq.
Shopping on new egg though still requirs me to assemble the parts.
Also, would vista home be better or do you recommnend just going with XP 64??
xp will not support directx10, though with non realtime rendering, xsi might not even use dx10. not sure about zbrush... you might want to look into it.
bleh... 1 hour tops to put the rig together... and that's if you're dirt slow and you're clumsy. From there it's another hour to install the os. Is your time that valuable?
I'm very clumsy :P
As far as time, yes, but additionally i commute to LA from OC every day for work "54" miles and have to spend time with family as much as possible on weekends ya know.
Intel® Core i7-920 (2.66GHz, 8MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (English) Service Pack 1 64-bit (i'm hoping my XSI and zbrush will run under 64bit system)
MEMORY 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 at 1066MHZ (3x2GB DIMM)
VIDEO CARD SLi, Dual nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB - is this good for a 3d work station?
1.5TB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 750GB SATA-II, 7200 RPM HDDs)
SOUND CARD Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
COOLING OPTION Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fins
Priced at about $2,700
Am i better off going SLi for either one or just a single option?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-gtx-280,1953-29.html
If you wanted a workstation card then you would have picked a quadro (which absolutely sucks for games).
You should go with 8GB of ram, and last time i checked, the DDR3 performance wasnt worth it considering the price (lower DDR3 might be dirt cheap now?). Some boards support both DDR3 and DDR2 that means a maximum of 4GB tho so watch out for that. Spend money on the CPU first then a GOOD motherboard and pick a kickass power supply. RAM is pretty much the same thing, one will argue that ram timings is still better than higher clock but that is not always true depending on the task performed.
RAID setup? you do know that adding a 2nd hard drive into the chain doubles your risk of data loss?...unless it's RAID-5...in which case you need 3 disks.
-RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and full capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails.
-RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk.
So yeah just my thoughts
I have about the same system except I have a single card and 2TB of HDD space instead.
Also I got my system a lot cheaper. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of sites that charge less for building your computer.
I really cant imagine having trouble pushing a couple million polys with this beast. I just put together my own desktop on a total budget of around 400$ and it can push two million polys in my main modeling app without breaking a sweat.
6 gb of ram on that system should be stupid fast, i7 is brand new archietecture that has no front side bus and must use ddr3.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15816
yse 2 gtx 280s is absolute overkill... that's basically quad SLI since a single 280 has 2 processors on it. There is not a single game on the market that will need this.
I doubt even any workstation applications would use this kind of power, the only thing anyone would want to SLI 2 GTX 2xx cards is to say they have a bigger dick than someone else, since there's no use for it.
Right, i built a system with a q6600 quad core, 8 gigs of dd2, and a pretty standard($120) 8800. This is a mad fast system, and it can easily handle 32 million polys in mudbox2. Total cost of the system was around $1100. 2 280's is just..... crazy overkill, a decent 8800/9800 will give you all the performance you actually need, with the CPU/Ram that you will have. Actually, with the cpu/ram you have your bottleneck is going to be your hard disks, when dealing huge files the biggest problem you will have is reading/saving them to disk.
Honestly i would just set a budget of about $1500-2000(if you want the latest CPU etc), get the best you can for that price range, and you i know you will way more than happy with it. But really be careful buying top of the line cpus, you often pay 2 or 3 times more, for a very marginal performance increase 10-15% for 2/3 times more? No thanks.
For example
i7-940 is $560
i7-920 is $290
Both of these CPUs are very good, quad core cpus, but one is 1.9x more expensive.
Now lets look at a benchmark here:
http://www.techspot.com/review/124-intel-core-i7-920-940-965/page5.html
The twice as expensive cpu gives a very small performance increase, to the tune of a couple % REALLY not worth it for any reason.
Even the 965 which runs about $1000, or 3.4x more epensive than the 920, is at best 20-30% better performance.
You gotta look at the price curve of this stuff, high end stuff is never worth it, this sort of shit is marketed to retards who just want to brag about how much money then spend.
This is less than 1000 euro in spain with a top videogame card, and installing some expensive components to do overclock. I have an stable processor at 3,8ghz.
- Cooler Master 690
- Noctua NH-C12P
- Intel core 2 quad Q9550
- Mobo Asus P5Q
- 4GB Ram Corsair DDR2 800Mhz CL4
- Zotac GeForece GTX 285 AMP! edition
- x2 HD Seagate 640GB Barracuda 7200.11
- DVD/R LG H20N
- PSU Corsair HX620
I builded the system in 2 hours and i saved a lot of money buying the gig piece by piece in different stores.Prices in USA are far cheaper than in Europe, you could easily build a great computer for less than me.
To build a computer is more easy than building a lego XDDD
I own a pair of workstations (dual xeons + quadros), and i'm really surprised with the perfomance of the machine i builded only for gaming and modo. The unique difference i find are rendering times, and the perfomance in programs like Max (the gtx285 is a shit compared with quadro in wireframe views and edition).
SLI is mainly for hardcore gaming and to waste a lot of watts. I don't recommend it to do 3d, your electricity bill would grow ^^
With core i7, 6 or 12 gb ram. DDR3 is quite expensive, so 6 gb would be the recommended, you will have enough to work very well with Zbrush.
Try to make a configuration piece by piece, and look how much money you can save. Dell has become a very expensive brand, and imho, it's better to mount a good mobo instead a dell one (made in china). I have ran problems with dell due to its bad components, with one psu and with one quadro (not pny, dell made in china).
hope this helps. The more money you save, the better
if you take a good look at stats on cards e.g stuff like
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16504/10
you will see that the latest cards only make a difference in "artificial" load, ie the insane resolutions and insane AA settings in shader intenstive games noone will run stuff at. Not to mention the insane noise and power consumption caused by top cards. And power means heat in the system, means more fans, ... it just isnt worth it imo.
Get something that is fabricated in 55nm which means you get a decent per-watt performance.. or pick a older generation, but within the generation also the "smallest chip"
rendering a single model is much easier for cards, vs the complex setup in shader intensive games with lots of variations, many meshes... Hence you can push millions of triangles even on old cards.
buying the latest is just stupid for the reasons mentioned (it loses value too quickly. and one hardly can make use of all the performance, but you pay the "power" even when idle)
i'm also looking for a similarly specced system that i can order online, and had a look at Dell, and also Alienware. The prices are crazy, especially compared to someone like pcspecialist.co.uk ... in fact looking on that site, i've upped my spec to something ridiculous i'll never use, including 22" monitor, and it's still coming in at something like £500-600 cheaper than alienware without display
edit, i clicked the wrong thing on the alienware. Call that £800 more with no monitor! What the hell do you pay for here?
I'm abit on the fence related to buying through dell now but there are the revised computer specs i've decided to go with now. Any furuther advise is greatly apreciated.
PROCESSOR Intel® Core i7-920 (2.66GHz, 8MB cache)
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (English) Service Pack 1 64-bit
MEMORY 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 at 1066MHZ (3x2GB DIMM)
VIDEO CARD nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024MB Single
or
nVidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB Single
Still on the fence between these 2 becuase i use a gt8800 at work and so far so good. But hen again the gtx280 (according to that link) seems to outperform the 9800. but then again thats only in games. I want a vid card to do well in both 3d modeling and gaming.
300GB Western Digital Velociraptor - SATA-II, 3GB/S, 10000RPM, 16MB Cache (mayb e this will help with data transfer rates?)
SOUND CARD Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio edit
OPTION Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fins
Current price= 2000
Thoughts?
As far as the video card, i think you will see pretty similar performance in 3d work, and either of those cards will be good gaming. I wouldn't buy a high-end 3d card from some place like dell, because you'll probabbly pay more for it than its worth, it might be worth considering buying the WORST POSSIBLE 3d card dell will sell you with your pc, and buying a better one on newegg(changing a 3d card is really easy).
You can get a GTX280 on newegg for around $325, so if its adding more than that to your final price, i would buy it yourself. I wish they would sell you one with NO video card.
A 9800 GT will run you as little as $130 on newegg. For that price, the value is REALLY GREAT. Again paying 2.5x for the GTX 280 on newegg, and probabbly paying dell $500 for it, or 3.8x! For another fractional performance increase.
Really, at the end of the day that quad core CPU, and DDR3 ram is going to be EXTREMELY FAST even if you were running a voodoo2 as your video card =D Oh, also 6 gigs of DDR3 will run you about $190 at newegg, so if you're paying dell $500 for it, you're throwing money away.
1) Are the programs I use going to make use of SLi and if so what is the gain over a single card?
My answer) I can tell you from personal experience that SLi doesn't make much of a difference with Maya, 3dsmax, Silo, Mudbox, Zbrush or Photoshop. Any detectable difference came in the form of benchmarks designed to spot the differance. Durring day to day use it wasn't any different. BUT with SLi enabled I was forced to only use one monitor. I don't know if they have changed that or not, but when I tried it out, I found it VERY limiting. The only way I found to run two monitors, was to turn off SLi...
2) 3k every 2 years to get a new system, or 1k every 2 years for upgrades?
My Answer) Putting your system together yourself can be scary. But its a lot cheaper and easier to upgrade. Is it really that scary that you want to spend 2x as much and have it be less upgradeable? Also parts manufactures are getting used to people putting their own systems together, many come with big fold out maps and lots of quick start guides that anyone could follow. Most even make the manuals and quick start guides available online in case you ever loose the paper version.
3) Proprietary software/hardware. Am I reliant on Dell to provide updates or can I get them myself through the normal channels?
My Answer) In order to maximize profits dell gets cheap deals on parts. Often asking manufactures to cut corners or shave out features. Then they pass you a bill for 2x, sit back and have a good laugh because now it often means you end up relaying on Dell for update drivers. The reviews and things you see online for the latest Nvidia cards aren't going to include the latest Dell deals, you can count on the same card coming from Dell to probably under preform at 2x the price.
In closing if you're set on buying a system out of the box, the one you choose is pretty good, might be a bit of overkill and you probably won't push the boundaries, even if you paired it down a bit. But I have to agree with everyone else. you can make a better rig, in less time with less cash and get exactly what you want/need without having to comprise. Good luck with whatever you decide to do, I think you'll be fine either way.