Re: a question for mr dark science or anyone else with the knowledge
- From: "DarkScience" <jeff AT Applied Visual dot com or something like that>
- Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 10:58:16 -0600
Well, what are you trying to accomplish? Sadly, there's not a whole lot
more out there that's better than what you have unless you want to spend
some serious money and it's not going to help you with Lightwave much at
all. Right now, the best CPU option for the most power is the 2.8GHz
dual-core Opteron which is just now trickling into distribution channels.
2.6GHz models are readily available and about $450 per CPU cheaper. For
Xeon CPUs, I think the 3.2GHz dual-core is now starting to show up, but
Intel's current dual-core design for the P4 and Xeon chips isn't anything
special...
Depending on your mainboard and what it may support, you could swap your
CPUs for dual-core chips and effectively double your CPU power for renders.
Adding more RAM (beyond 3GB) is a waste of time unless you'll be running
WOW-XP64 (AKA: WOW! That's buggy!). Windows Vista has been delayed yet
again so a true 64bit environment is several months off, perhaps even as far
off as next year.
I was hitting the 32bit memory wall for some time on a few applications and
I had to add a couple Mac G5 Quad systems just so I could put 8GB of RAM in
a workstation and actually be able to use it in a semi-stable environment.
Now I'm running a mixed Mac/PC installation and it's not bad, but the extra
hardware and software licenses were a hard hit to set up.
Your best bet is to throw another 1GB in your system for a little cushion
(that way you can give a full 2GB to lightwave) and sit tight like the rest
of us in PC land. Microsoft dropped the 64bit ball and as for most other
software and driver vendors, they never bothered to pick up the ball in the
first place. It will take some time. If you need raw CPU power for
rendering, then put together some AMD64-X2 dual core based render nodes.
It's nice to dream about the power we would like and we often think that we
may "need" a lot more than we have. But the reality is that these are the
tools we have and no amount of money is going to change that over night.
And as slow and sluggish as your system may feel, just remember that it's
more powerful than any individual workstation used on such films as The
Matrix, Toy Story 2, or Star Wars I. 2GHz CPUs didn't exist and 2GB RAM was
mostly unheard of in a workstation class system only 6 years ago.
I think what you're after is more render nodes (but I'm just guessing). If
that's the case, I would recomend AMD dual-core CPUs each system can have a
mainboard that has all the video and I/O right on it, the CPU, 2GB RAM and
that's it. You can boot the systems off a network server if you have such a
thing set up, but it may be cheaper and easier to equip each one with a 20GB
HDD for like $40. You can use an external-bootable CD drive to load
software to each system and save the $30 per render box of installing a CD
drive. I haven't priced this stuff in the last month or so, but you're
probably looking at $1000 to $1500 per render node. I know you could build
them for a lot less than that, but you need to make sure you use decent
components to save yourself of trouble down the road and also to be sure the
systems are powerful enough that you'll get the performance you need. If
you're going to run WinXP as your OS and you need more than 10 nodes or
systems accessing a network volume at once, then you'll need a server
capable of more than 10 connections (XP is limited unless you buy additional
client packs). Consider a Linux box or a dedicated NAS or SAN setup. I
wouldn't recommend running Windows Server. It's a nice OS and arguably the
best product Microsoft has to offer (along with their SQL server), but it's
rather expensive.
"marc" <null@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2pt4325sn6dovs45se51682nukfa36ge7l@xxxxxxxxxx
Hi,
I have dual 2.8 xeon with 2 gig of ram and 6600 nv gcard I
need loads more processing power and double the ram at the least.
can anyone suggest a good route to go down? and the rough cost.
I built my last system but have been to busy to keep up with the
technology.
cheers Marc
.
- Follow-Ups:
- References:
- Prev by Date: Sharing a tip for "Saslite flicker"
- Next by Date: Re: Problems with Nvidia dual view
- Previous by thread: Re: a question for mr dark science or anyone else with the knowledge
- Next by thread: Re: a question for mr dark science or anyone else with the knowledge
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
