Work PC Questions
polycounter lvl 18
Been trying to discuss this at work recently, I know lots of art dev folks have some awesome rigs at work.. but I know some folks that work at smaller indie studios that have to scrounge for whatever they can get to find a decent pc to work off of.
Where do you fit in?
I'm trying to find a solution for the company showing them the money savings on time and productivity alone would be worth it. I could actually do more work faster at home and come in a couple days a week for meetings rather then work on this slow PC I'm working on at the moment.
I often have to close 3dsmax to open photoshop and/or when trying to test things in our game.
I have a
Intel Core Duo 2.66GHz
2 gig of ram
Nvidia 8800 GTS
It's not necessarily the slowest machine around, but for working in art 8 hours a day, max, zbrush, photoshop, our game.. it's kinda rough.
Where do you fit in?
I'm trying to find a solution for the company showing them the money savings on time and productivity alone would be worth it. I could actually do more work faster at home and come in a couple days a week for meetings rather then work on this slow PC I'm working on at the moment.
I often have to close 3dsmax to open photoshop and/or when trying to test things in our game.
I have a
Intel Core Duo 2.66GHz
2 gig of ram
Nvidia 8800 GTS
It's not necessarily the slowest machine around, but for working in art 8 hours a day, max, zbrush, photoshop, our game.. it's kinda rough.
Replies
i feel your pain. i recently had to sell the idea of getting upgrades to my boss. making that sale can be difficult, especially in the economy.
now keep in mind the rig is mostly used for photo real rendering and custom shading networks. render times can get high and eat up the machine leaving me unable to perform any other single task during render times. so i was able to upgrade memory and operating sys. the machine was bough like 6 years ago or something when i knew a lot less than i do now.
the longest part of the process was getting exactly what i wanted and doing the research to make sure it was compatible with the motherboard since it was fairly old.
i was running:
2 intel xeon 3ghz
2gig ram
128mb ati (can't remember which one)
32bit xp pro
now i'm running
2 intel xeon 3ghz
8gig ram
512mb 9600gt
64bit win7
the biggest boosters were the ram and 64bit operating system. now i can do layouts in the background of render jobs with little to no slow down.
i know the rig isn't mind numbingly amazing, but given the age of the hardware, it's pretty much maxed out unless i bought a new board, which i just didn't want to bother with. if i did get a new board, i would deffinetley have purchased something capable of an i7 and of course the processor as a purchase... budgets budgets budgets.... it's all about the washington's!
So, in my case, I'm out say (we will make the math easy
When you are doing work on your machine, keep a sheet handy to track how long it takes you to do various daily tasks. For instance, how long it takes to render scene X on your current machine. Then, take that same scene to a different machine with higher specs (assuming, of course, this is available) and do the exact same thing with the only changed variable being the hardware/os specs and track the info for that.
In my mind, and I believe the mind of most bean counters and management, if you can prove with hard evidence of "It took me xx time to render this out on our current setups as opposed to xx with these increased specs and here is the difference in cost of the hardware" you will have a lot more leverage to work with to get some new beefcake rigs on your desk.
This doesn't really answer your question of what everyone else uses, but it might be a way to get your current systems upgraded.
Management likes numbers.
hell, I can't even imagine working with 2 gigs of ram anymore.. especially if you're using sculpting apps.
To answer your question though, 6-8gigs and an OS that supports it are a good upgrade, and fairly cheap.
I had 2 gb of ram, upgraded to 8 gb and win7 64 bit. Rendering maps with xNormal got much faster(I moved to the x64 version of xNormal as well). Working with Zbrush got a lot more fun also.
1.5 gig of RAM
64 mb integrated ATI Mobility videocard
This is the IBM ThinkPad I use at work. Not Lenovo, IBM...this should indicate how old it is. When I tested out a Ubuntu bootable disk for someone that needed it to diagnose and fix a virus or hardware problem, it indicated that 80% of the 80 gb hard-drive contains bad sectors. The only fan on the unit is louder than the on board speakers at half volume. It has a whopping two usb ports, one of which is used by a mouse, the other by a keyboard. If I have to put something on a flash drive, I have to make a choice between which of those two to disconnect. I've tried a USB hub, but even with a powered one anything plugged into it will sometimes stop responding as if the device has lost power.
I use Maya 2009, Adobe After Effects CS3, and Adobe CS 1. Sometimes two of them at the same time.
I feel your pain.
At Mythic we had about the same as you've got there, just a weaker vid card. I can sympathize with those frustrations of running those different apps in addition to the game.
There isn't a whole lot you can do to that machine now without having to go 64-bit. An extra GB of RAM will make a little difference, but a new vid card won't necessarily benefit your setup.
Seems like the PCs were picked out and distributed before the decision to use zBrush. -,-
My current home PC is in dire need of an upgrade though.
- Core2Duo 2.4gz
- 3GB ram
- 9800 GT 320MB
After a handful of hours of max+photoshop+chrome (ref/movies while working) my system gets real real slow
I want to upgrade to a quad core, Win7 and another 5GB of ram for 8GB total.
An upgrade from 3 GB to 4 GB with your current system may give you a noticeable performance increase, as 3gb = turning off dual channel ram. You need even # of ram sticks to run in dual channel mode.
Your mobo should support a nice quad core too, i've got a q6600 which is fantastic-awesome-great, but it looks like they dont even sell them anymore.... You can get a quadcore q8300 for $150 on newegg that would help alot with 3d apps that are properly threaded.
Firebert, nice rig. I'm running Qaudcore, 4gb ram and core216 gtx 260 with approx. 869mb and win 7 64 bit.
How come you didn't go for a better video card?
core i7 2.8ghz
8 gb of ram
gforce gts 240
win 7 64bit
better than my one at home, wich is alright but should get more ram
q6600 quad (EQ is right, its super awesome
4gb ram
gforce 8800 gts
win 7 64bit
Core i7 920,
4 gb ram,
radeon HD 4800.
64 bit vista.
Definitely have the record of how long various tasks take, but keep a second sheet on standby as well for how much time you lose to crashes. I remember before I upgraded countless times where I pushed maya or zbrush just a little too far and lost a bunch of work (especially bad when zbrush crashes on saving)
This may not be all that common of an occurrence but the occasional loss of 30 - 60 min of work will rack up quick. (I know one would be a fool to not save more frequently but occasionally absentmindedness prevails)
Anyway,
intel i7 940
12 gb ddr3
quadrofx 4800 1.5gig
Running 8 gigs ram, 3 ghz, windows XP 64 bit, Nvidia GeForce GTX 260.
Only time i curse slowdowns is during high quality light bakes in UDK, can say i'm very happy with this rig. Missing out on some cool photoshop functionality because it's XP and not vista or windows 7, but it's glitzy crap you don't really need.
Overall the PC performance seems to be on par with my home PC (quad 2.66, 8800gtx sli), except I like my Intuos and my 30" monitor much better
I don't think you need that much of an uber rig to do great work though. I never worked at a place where everyone had an uber rig, yet all the artists still get their work done properly.
Most difference seems to make: enough RAM, a 2nd monitor -which should be of the same make as the 1st - two different monitors with different colors will drive you nuts. Also make sure the systems you buy are stable and reliable - this beats speed any day. Of what use is a fast PC that crashes all the time or where the hardware flunks out and there's no service?
I feel your pain...hehe I work with you. Our first generation Wacoms are not cutting it. Mine still connects through the serial port, which the MB didn't even have. They had to buy a peripheral card in order to get the rig to recognize it. The drivers are dumped after a reboot.
I'm glad you posted this thread because I am very curious to see what others in the industry work on. When we start using Zbrush or Mudbox on a regular basis, the current hardware is going to have some issues (PS, Max, subdivision modeler and the game)...ouch.
Amd Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+
2.01 GHz, 3 GB of RAM
NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX
And it's taken me three years to get something that good. We're a gaming/simulation place but the software department is rather small. 2 artists, 4 programmers. Took me a year to get 2 monitors and 2 years to get a wacom tablet. When i have been able to get upgrades, it's been when I've been able to show how much time I was losing due to crashes, slowdown, etc.