New computer on its way. Dual 1gig P3's

[chesty]

Dual 1 gig p3 processors
1 gig of memory, Rimm pc600, 4x256,
nvidiageforce2gts, 32mb DDR, pws420
16Xdvd, 12Xcdrw, w/decod (GEforce/450)Wsx2
Sony 21 inch trinitron monitor
40gigb, ide (ata-66/100)#1, 1", 7200rpm, pws420
win2kpro, service pack 1
256K fullspeed cache
sound blaster Live! 512V, soundcard, pws
acs340 speakers surround
10/100 ethernet card

Yeeeoooowwww!

I will of course be upgrading the video card to a much better one (oxygen or something like that with full on freaky 3D capabiltiy) in near future and getting the DV500pro video capture card as well!

 

[HappyScrappy]

1) how much did it cost you
2) what are you using it for?
the video card it comes with is fine for games, an oxygen implies that you will be doing 3D graphics. there are actually better cards than that, but that one is good (the oxygen varients)

 

[TxCollegeguy]

cool...sounds like your new toy will be fun

 

[Kryp2o]

Congrates dude! Were did you get it and how much did they hit you for if you don't mind me asking?

What brand also?

 

[tomcat]

I think IT just moved in my pants....

 

[chesty]

I got it from dell for 5K, yes I plan on doing some intensive 3D graphics and modeling. (typical engineer stuff) I will have to investigate the cards, oxygen was just the one that came to mind.

I will be using it for engineering, a server, and video editing and for photographic work as well as net surfing.

 

[MattTheSkywalker]

will your other components support that much processing power? (ie bus speed?)

Skywalker thinks not.

 

[chesty]

I believe so, it has a 133mhz bus speed and most of my peripherals will have that or more. I need them for their number crunching power due graphics programs and such.

 

[cyberflash]

nvidiageforce2gts is already good ...

why didn't you go for the Silicon Graphics machine ... their bus pipelines were built for real-time 3D graphics

i use IronCAD for 3D solid modeling ... it rocks ...
for volumetric lighting and texture mapping .. 3D studio max

 

[WODIN]

You could run a small country with that thing!!! Damn. Hell at work I just put in for a new 1 gig server with dual pIII @ IGHZ, but that is the company's money!

Damn bro...

 

[chesty]

I certainly hope so. You would be surprised at some who think this is over kill, others who think it is not enough. Those who think it cannot be a server, those who think it is fine for a server. It almost makes me believe that no one really knows what they are talking about.

 

[WODIN]

I would say 85% of them are full of shit. LOL!!!

 

[JeetKuneDo]

u do know that by running a duel processor, u r not running at 2000ghz ... u r infact only running @ 1000 till its thruput is reached, then the other processor will b used, so this may b usefull for your graphix ... u may also wanna investigate changing to a SCSI system, the miss ratio on RIMMS is quite high, so page faults will b a problem, u can hide this with a low latency HD .. also u may wanna bump the cache on your processor to 1MB , and on your Graphix card, makes a huge diffrence.... other than dat, sounds like a well put together machine. Troulbe with buying from dell is they will charge u an amount such as 5k, but hey if u got the money everybodys happy!

 

[chesty]

Well, day to day apps are limited for an sg machine and at about 30k for the cheapest one, I think not. I have heard some good things about 3d studio max

 

[supersizeme]

max is cool, you should grab it if you can. takes a while to figure out if you have never used it before. it's good pretty good tutorials though.

 

[chesty]

I am not sure how much improvement I will get switching to scsi devices. I did that with my printer and didn't notice any difference in transfer rates. Tell me exactly how that will help, since the hardrive I have has the same rpm and stats (7200) as the scsi ones.


Yes, one of the problems I continually run into is that with a single processor when I would say enlarge a picture, my cpu would start cranking and my computer would become useless for about twenty minutes. I have an 800mghz machine now. That is one reason for the dual processors. I know alot about computers, but not near enough any help from Wodin or other knowledgeable people here (if they can all agree on what they talk about) would be appreciated so that I can fine tune this machine into a true mucle computer.

 

[JeetKuneDo]

the reason the Scsi will work is becuase it gives each device its own interface, so where as on a standard bus u will see each device using the same limited thruput on your bus, the scsi devices are independant of oneanother, and thus can communicate on a 1 to 1 basis, as apposed to using the same bus, going thru the motherboard. ... The ultrawide scsi is very good, altho u r looking at alot of money, try looking at the seagate cheeta, i think its around 15,000 rpm .... also u should look at the transfer rate and latency, as the rpm of rotional media is only 1 element of the equation.

 

[chesty]

Sounds good. I just got the hard drive that I did becasue it was inexpensive and it would give me time to do some research on better larger hard drives and such.

I will be looking this weekend at some devices.

 

[JUSTINCREDBOL]

I have a pIII 1gig with 512 ram and 32 video ram. Trust me when I say you should have gone with the PIV.
These are great systems but the bus limits it.
The new bus on the PIV makes processing run 50 percent faster.

 

[chesty]

Yes, but without dual processing my graphics and analysis still bogs the computer down when attempting to do other things during the processing. And the price is too expensive right now.

 

[peter8581]

amd

AMD athlons really beat everything when it comes to 3D aps. Even against the dual Intel systems. Layout in Maya , max, and lightwave are all faster from my experience on the athlons. If you have multi threading though in your render, then the dual p3 for now is faster. The p4 is slows as hell. It only has good memory bandwidth, which will only make big difference on specific aps. Like video editing.. Anything that moves memory in big chunks, due to the design of rdram. Everything else I have ran on a p4 has no improvement over the 1ghz p3s even with pc800. Dual p3s were a better move than going P4….

Dual athlon boards are coming out this summer along with the 1.5ghz pali chips. The dual athlon boards don’t have the processor sharing the same bus like the dual intel systems do. So it will be a hell of a lot faster. When you multi thread with the dual p3, the processors start to share bandwidth. spliting it in half alomst.

 

[chesty]

We shall see. Does anyone know how much 3Dstudio max is? I heard in the thousands. The seagates at 15,000rpm and 4.6ms access only come in 18.6 gig sizes. What a bummer.

 

[JeetKuneDo]

Yeah max studio 3D is alot .... BUT ...... get it from a warez site! ..... costs you nothing at all. As for the seagate, its fast, VERY fast, but then there is a price to pay .... a rather large one. Sorry i could not help u more buddy. Wanna know anything else, get at me. If u were here i could lend u the Max3D CD, but your not. Find out if there is a trial version to download, if there is, download it, then get a crack.... make sure its the full thing tho. Max studio is good, have you looked into VRML? Virtual Reality Modelling language. Not as advanced or as easy as Max3D, but u can get similar effects. As standard Max 3D saves as .max i think. But i think u can convert this to .wrl which is VRML........ look up the VRML sourcebook 2.0 on any search engine. If u wanna see what it looks like i have a link to some of my prodjects on http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~ex201/ its then under university, then comp graphix. Bear in mind, this project was done after learning the language for only a week. You may need to download a plug in such as cosmo player to navigate the world tho. .... u need any more help., just holla. Take it easy mate.

 

[Dr. E]

If you are doing Graphics specific stuff then why wouldn't you buy an SG machine or even a Macintosh. These computers are designed with graphics and rendering in mind. The problem with a Dell built machine is that the processor architecture is designed to support a wide variety of components and must be built for the lowest common denominator (eliminating the possibility for graphics specifc Pipelines running in parallel with the regular system pipelines). Also, Macintoch and SG can use an enhanced instruction set designed to make use of many of these graphics oriented architecture features.

If you wanna plays games, then a Dell is cool, but anything higher than a 600 MHz processor is overkill because there are no games out right now that will make use of this extra processing power.

The Doc

 

[Dr. E]

You can upgrade your components all you want, throw a terrabyte of memory in there and tweak it left and right, but in the end, the parallel processing ability of the CPU and an enhanced instruction set makes all the difference.

When you render an image, it is a very basic process for the processor (its a matter of multiplying a shitload of matrices and doing some other simple dimensional math). If you are stuck with an Intel architecture, the only thing I can suggest is at least a quad processor.

 

[chesty]

I not only do graphics, but I am an aerospace engineer and do a lot of finite element modeling and cad. Most of the software I use for this has been optimized for dual processors if present. I have noticed a big difference in those types of programs and windows 2kpro is designed to take advantage of two or more processors.

As before, I am not going to be doing graphics for the movies industry but for engineering and for photographic/video work and web page. The sg are way too expensive and so are rs6000's as well. I just plain can't stand Macintosh and there are not a lot of available programs for them. Especially the ones that I run which are mostly engineering applications.

I have also had memory problems running with 256k, especially with multiple windows and processes going on. Gaming is only a past time for me and any gaming I do will be internet based. If I need more power and the business volume warrants it then I may move up to an sg machine in the future, but for now I think this will do quite fine.

 

[Rexx]

Sounds cool

Looks like you're going to have a good time with your new toy. I just ordered the stuff to upgrade my computer. For about $190 I boosted my computer up to:

AMD k7 Duron 750Mhz
52x speed CD-Rom
AGP 4x graphics w/ 64Mb Video ram
10/100 Network Interface (ethernet)
3d onboard sound
128Mb+32Mb+32Mb SDRAM = 192Mb SDRAM
2.1GB Hard Drive for Windows
4.3GB Hard Drive for Files
1.08 GB Hard Drive for files
(Total 6.5 GB Hard Drive space)

It came with some other shit that I don't need [case, ect.] so I'm just going to sell that and the old stuff thats no longer needed to make some back.

 

[chesty]

Sounds great! I am going to add some hard drives for specific things such as scratch files, files, os, and stuff like that.

I can't wait for it to get here. It is in transit right now from dell. Left yesterday. Get this, I paid for overnight shipping and it won't get here till next wensday. Strange new math.

 

[Rexx]

Good ol' overnight shipping. Ever so reliable.

 

[thesuperstar]

in the military we had silicon graphics systems, they were the best for 3d graphics.

 

[Burning_Inside]

Chesty:


Do yourself a big favor and go to this site:

www.Speedguide.net

Go tot he computer hardware discussion forums. Those guys there are all types of people that thrive on top of the line this and that and know what's what and will give you the exact info you want instead of beating around the bush at a fitness general chat forum. Post your system specs, tell the what you're going to be mainly using it for, and watch the reccomendations roll in.

 

[Jeff_rys]

nothing beats SCSI

certainly if the machine is used as a server, Scsi drives are a must.

There are Petium 4 out, running at 1700 mhz.
Maybe already faster now.

 

[peter8581]

stuff

Dr. E i can't even believe you put Macs up with SGI! PC's now days are light years ahead of MACs as far as hardware and OS goes. 1.4ghz athlons will step all over the fastest g4 in rendering and you can bet the dual athlons will destroy the dual g4's. All mac hardware is the same as PC hardware besides the processor.

It’s not like it was in the old days with macs.. back in the day they were great for graphics, but now they have just fell behind. There is nothing you can do on a mac that you can't do on a PC. PC hardware is just so far ahead of it now.

You would be surprised ... A lot of production houses send there animations out to a Intel render farms to render than SGI farms. 100 dual Intel boxes on an render farm network will render a lot faster than 20 sgi boxes.

The titanic was all rendered mostly on Intel Linux boxes