I'm currently building my new rig and was pondering whether to go with a 8800GTX, which is currently the best multimedia card, or get one of the quadros. THE problem is that the quadros come in at different price points, and the top ones are VERY expensive, but I imagine it works like gaming cards, in that only the top ones are much good, and the cheap stuff is mediocre at best. Therefore, I decided it makes more sense to get the top gaming card than get a low to mid range quadro card. The fact that you're not sure if the cost of the quadro was justified, even for the very expensive and best one, is as good an answer as I need 🙂
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Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. CG artists are stuck with an interesting dilemma. The middle end workstation cards suck and the cost as much, if not more than highend multimedia and gaming cards which are, as far as specs gp, more powerful than all but the highest end workstation cards. And these high end workstation cards are identical to the high end multimedia cards. The only difference is the drivers and the firmware. For that small difference the, you get crippled with over a thousand dollar tax! It sucks. It seems that a lot of guys are using the 8800 for cg now, but many of them have issues with the opengl in their main 3d package. Even so, next time I'll will opt for something like the 8800 as opposed to the quadro. If you are just using Mudbox and rendering in Zbrush, you don't have to worry. The GPU is hardly utilized at all by these programs. (As you can see from the "mudbox test" thread.)
I've already got my monitor (same as your 24") BTW, I'm sure you've calibrated it properly by now, but when you first used it did you notice the reds were too strong. I've had to turn the red down to 80% to make things look what I consider normal. |
I have the dell 2407fpw. It's probably the best purchase I've made in a long time. It cost half of what my "artist" friends paid for their 23" mac monitors and they are consistently blown away when they come to visit me. It looked great right out of the box. I still calibrated it though because the bulk of my work is for print media. and I'm dealing with various companies in various parts of the world so calibration is very important because I need to know that my color profiles are accurate when I ftp my finals in. But a lot of things affect the color you see on your monitor, including the lighting in your workspace. That is why I had to purchase a hardware colorimeter. (I use Spyder). I only recommend this if you are working for print and you have a lot of different clients. Otherwise, adobe's free calibration utility is more than enough.
I'm going with intel quad core, which will be great for render speeds, 8 gigs of mid range ram, which again, I think is better than buying 2 gigs of faster top end RAM. The difference in speeds is not that great, but the difference between having 8 or 2 gig storage capacity is a lot.
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I firmly believe that you are correct in your thinking. Even if Mudbox can only currently use 2 gig ram, mud 2 will be able to use virtually unlimited amount of ram. I have 64bit maya and believe me that extra ram has made a lot of difference. And I've heard nothing but great things about the quad core.
I'm also going to get two of the WD 10k drives (the 74 gig ones, which are currently the fastest) and hook them together. I know a guy who has that, and the benchmark is superfast compared to my single 7200 drive. We're talking 10x performance. |
i can definitely vouch for that. For a while I had two 15k scsi drives in raid 0 and two 10 WD raptors also in raid 0. The performance benefit is tremendous! I'm back to one raptor and one scsi right now, but it's only temporary and mostly because of heat issues. I will do it again after the summer is over.
There are two things that I think you should look out for and it's very important. The 10k drives are extremely hot and so is all that ram. Make sure you spend some money on cooling. Nothing brings a computer to it's knees faster than heat! I think that more system crashes and bsod are caused by inadequate cooling and bad airflow than anything else. Believe me I learned the hard way. My current computer sounds like a refrigerator, but I haven't had a single crash no matter how hard I push it.
Also, if you do a RAID 0 setup for speed, make your stripes really small. Large stripes are good if you are working with really large files. Like movies. But if you are using raid to speed up you system, the large stripes make raid 0 configuration useless. This is because the OS and the programs are constantly acquiring data in very small chunks. If your stripe size is bigger than the snippets of data, then the data doesn't get broken up into stripes. Anyway, learned that by trial and error. I hope it makes sense.
Obviosuly I'm ogign to have to get either XP or Vista 64, and again I'm not sure which, sicne there are pros and cons for both. XP is obviously dead in the water now, but Vista still has a lot of compatibility issues with drivers and hardware, and some have problems running quicktime movies with a RAID setup in Vista. |
That's a dilemma right there. I'm using xp64 and I'm quite happy with it. I haven't had any driver issues. I would like to get vista, but I'm a little annoyed at how expensive it is to get a pro level version. I could care less about the widgets and eye candy, first thing I do is turn that crap off, but it's the advanced networking capabilities that I need. I'm also not too happy with the amount of resources you need just to run the OS.
I have a few few friends who have upgraded and they don't seem too happy. But they aren't graphics people.
Let me know which one you go with.