New desktop!

[Valkyrien]

up the ante to a 3.0Ghz chip...not that drastic a price difference anymore. The cutoff seems to be now between the 3.0s and 3.2s...and personally I'd go with a nvidia card, but that's all opinion;) Aren't radeons supposed to have problems with MAX though?:shrug:

[Emmortal1]

They also have random problems with Maya.

Emmortal

[Mvespa]

And wich nvidia graphic card do you recommend?

What do you think about transform the radeon 9600 xt into a FireGL ? I know this is possible, right?

[TheClick]

I have been wondering the same thing for quite some time. Contemplating the building of a good system without going to college or finding someone else to build it for me.
Please somebody help us.

[milkyman]

And wich nvidia graphic card do you recommend?

What do you think about transform the radeon 9600 xt into a FireGL ? I know this is possible, right?

no. softquadro is for nvidia cards.

- i'd pay not to have a fire GL.

on another note some newgraphic cards are comming out this quarter.

ti4600 off ebay. best bang for the buck. be prepared to have lots of problems with ati cards.

also go for a serial ata HD whenbuying a hard drive.

what does this (hp) mean?

i'd reccomend buying an athlon 64.

[jbw]

what does this (hp) mean?

I'd have though it should be HT - Hyper threading?

In complete agreement with Milkyman, don't suffer the FireGL!

I've had a nicer time having 4 teeth pulled! :eek:

ta,
jbw

[Valkyrien]

Originally posted by Mvespa
And wich nvidia graphic card do you recommend?

What do you think about transform the radeon 9600 xt into a FireGL ? I know this is possible, right?

That really depends on what you're using it for. If it's primarily 3d, go for a more pricey Quadro. If you play a lot of games though, get a GeForce FX 5900 .

as for the FireGL, what milkyman said;)

[milkyman]

i was just hoping he didn't didn't didn't mean hewlett packard.

[jbw]

LOL... got a bit of a stutter there Milkyman? :)

[Mvespa]

Yap, HP is hiper-threading :)
Ok, no Radeon!

The graphic cards "Quadro" area very expensive. How about to buy a Ti4800 a convert to a Quadro 980XGL?

About the hard-disk, a friend of mine said that is better a hd ATA with 8Mb Cache then a SATA.

I just whant to buy the best relation quality/cost

[iC4]

at the moment there is no speed difference between a sata hd and a ata hd.

but I would go for sata too. just buy a sata drive with 8mb cache - so there will be no difference.

I wouldn't recommend the softquadro way - you have to use very outdated drivers.

I don't know how serious you are with CG, if it's a hobby any nvidia card would do the job (gforce fx 5700 upwards)

you could also go for a quadro fx 500, its about 250? $

[jbw]

A Ti4800 should be fine for most MAX work, just turn off Nview. Not sure I'd bother 'softquadro' it. At the end of the day I'd suggest you get something that is stable rather than 'the fastest'. It's better to beable to push a few hundred polys less than your neighbour rather than none at all... which is what happened with my FireGL 8800 cos neither messiah:animate or LW or MAX would work properly with it. Crashes and UI's not showing correctly can seriously stunt your performance... so to speak :rolleyes: .

[Mvespa]

So, there isn't a perfect graphic card, hum? :hmm:

Last week I've wporked on a scene that I'm doing in Maya with a Radeon 9600se, and it worked fine. A little slow because the computer had only 512RAM, so I think the radeon 9600xt will work, don't you think?:)

I've been serching on cgtalk about "radeon" in Maya forum, and the only thing that most people don't like is the paint effects with this card.

Actually I'm getting serious on 3D, here in Portugal the most obvious work to do with 3D is arquitecture. Now I have no job and I want to bet on 3D. There are few persons to work with it.

[heavyness]

"A Ti4800 should be fine for most MAX work, just turn off Nview."

i'm running a ti4200 with Nview. does nview slow down everything that much? should i switch to dualview?

[jbw]

Depends... there have been problems with Nview and OpenGL apps like MAX and Maya. If your 3dsmax Material editor takes ages to load when there's nothing but default materials in it - that's Nview playing silly bu**ers.

ta,
jbw

[milkyman]

kole a ti4800 or ti4800SE doesn't exist. its a pot shot whether its a ti4200 or a ti4600.

also is it possible for sata dvd drives etc?

i'd like to get rid of everything ide in my comp hehe.

[milkyman]

there is no speed difference with sata and ide. the 8mb cash makes very little difference. i don't think maya requires anything performance wise from a hard drive.

unless u get a raptor. they can beat alot of scsi drives.

a point to take. air flow. even with rounded ide cable i still prefer sata. it much easier even when comming to unplugging/replacing things. all my ide cables ended up squashed to gether ie the plugs that they went into were all next to each other. this was annoying.

the connections are more spread out across the board and at least invest in rounded cables with pull tabs. also a power supply with meshed wires.

as u can see i like my case to be tidy. u can also get adaptors that will allow you to fit hard drives in 5 1/2 inch bays. then u can remove the 3 1/2 inch bay - more space and i guess u won't be using floppy discs?

[iC4]

Originally posted by milkyman
kole a ti4800 or ti4800SE doesn't exist. its a pot shot whether its a ti4200 or a ti4600.

also is it possible for sata dvd drives etc?

i'd like to get rid of everything ide in my comp hehe.
ti4800 is a ti4600 with agp8x......so it does exist :surprised

and ti4800SE is most times a ti4400 with agp8x

[GregHess]

the 8mb cash makes very little difference

I disagree. The 8 meg of cache DOES make a noticable difference.

Not only that, the 8 meg cache drives come with a 3 yr warranty, while the 2 meg cache IDE drives only come with a 1 yr.

With the current reliability rate of hd's, its worth it just for the additional 2 yr warranty. (Plus you only talking 5-10 dollars more).

(I'm not talking SATA vs IDE here...I'm talking IDE 2 meg cache drives vs IDE 8 meg cache drives)

[Mvespa]

I've found a Hard-Disk Sata with 8Mb cache (it has the good and the usefull) :thumbsup:

I found a thread about radeon vs Maya, and the only problem that seems do appear is with paint effects wich draws a red line that desapears when we click the mouse.
The nvidia fx5900 is very good, but very expensive to me.

Thanks about the hard disk tips!

PS: My english really sucks! Sorry:cry:

[iC4]

whats your budget for the graphics card?

[Valkyrien]

Originally posted by kole
"A Ti4800 should be fine for most MAX work, just turn off Nview."

i'm running a ti4200 with Nview. does nview slow down everything that much? should i switch to dualview?

I actually let windows take care of the spanning thing. Works much simpler that way

whoops, I just have all the menu extensions disabled is all;)

[milkyman]

i actually find looking at bench marks against a western digital 120GB w/8mb cache there is quite a gap in performance against a maxtor 120GB sata 2mb th sata is still faster.

[GregHess]

http://storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021018WD2000xB_1.html

The only place for hd reviews.

[Mvespa]

My budget for the graphic card is around $300. Can I bought something "good" with this?

[Sieb]

I've switched over to all Segate drives.. quiet, smooth, quick.. AND DONT DIE!

I have gone through three WD120's, the last one died right after i formatted it. I dropped Maxtors a while ago after they kept dying.. No more maxtor or western digital.. but.. your results may very. And for God sakes, stay away from IBM (even if they are fujitsu..).

And 8MB Cache drives make a world of difference, more data can be prefetched so you get faster data rates/performance which IS noticable. Plus, most 8MB cache drives are 3yr warranty as opposed to 1yr.

And the difference between SATA and PATA are not that aparent at the moment (unless you have an all SATA setup), but SATA has a higher throughput.

[Valkyrien]

yeah, seagate good;)

for a GFX card around $300 let's have a look at newegg...

here's one: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-122-173&catalog=48&depa=1
it's a little over $300, but I can tell you that I have had good experience with its little brother, the 5900 non-ultra 128MB model. And it's considerably less than it was 6 months ago

also there's this: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=14-130-179&depa=1

128 is sufficient, but the price is suspect. They probably used cheaper parts to assemble this, and the quality will no doubt suffer because of that. But it's a hell of a lot cheaper :shrug:

[CgFX]

Originally posted by kole
"A Ti4800 should be fine for most MAX work, just turn off Nview."

i'm running a ti4200 with Nview. does nview slow down everything that much? should i switch to dualview?

nview span is full native performance. It is dualview that incurs a small performance hit.

[jbw]

Originally posted by Sieb
I've switched over to all Segate drives.. quiet, smooth, quick.. AND DONT DIE!

I have gone through three WD120's, the last one died right after i formatted it. I dropped Maxtors a while ago after they kept dying.. No more maxtor or western digital.. but.. your results may very. And for God sakes, stay away from IBM (even if they are fujitsu..).

Maxtor drives are dodgy if you ask me but what's the problem with IBM drives? I've got three of 'em (1yr old, 2yr old and 3yr old drives) and they work fine? Can you please explain.

ta,
jbw

[iC4]

Originally posted by Sieb

I have gone through three WD120's, the last one died right after i formatted it. I dropped Maxtors a while ago after they kept dying.. No more maxtor or western digital.. but.. your results may very. And for God sakes, stay away from IBM (even if they are fujitsu..).


I think the new ibm drives (hitachi) are pretty nice - just a bit loud, but very fast.

I would recommend the samsung spinpoint with 8mb cache or the seagate - both are very quiet.

for the graphics card I would say go for a quadro fx 500

[3Dfx_Sage]

personally I'm about to buy myself a brand new SCSI drive. Why? because they are simply built to higher standards (and come with 5 year warranty usually, the nicer ones with 7 year!). As for IBM drives, they did have some problems with them failing but it was found to be caused when the heads were sitting idle- a simply firmware update was all that was needed, and mine already had the updated firmware when I got it. It was very bad PR for IBM but noone seemed to notice when they fixed it. Other than that, IBM (now Hitachi) drives are excellent. And, just for those who don't know- after the huge PR dissaster with all the drives failing IBM sold their entire harddrive buisiness to Hitachi. Same thing, different name.

[GregHess]

Sage,

As always pratice safe data backup! I just recently had both an Atlas Quantum III 10k SCSI drive die (2 yrs old), and a older 18 GB seagate cheetah 10k SCSI drive fail on me (bad sectors galore, 3 yrs old).

Both drives had active cooling (Antec drive bay with 80mm case fan blowing over top/bottom of drive), and just started generating errors one day.

No power spikes, no nothing.

Luckily I had performed ghost rather recently and didn't lose much data if any.

Point being...ALL of the quality levels of harddrives have dropped. Be them scsi, ide, or sata...the drives today have significantly less reliability then those of a few years ago.

I got old WD drives that I took out of systems that were over 7 years old...the new drives usually only seem to last 2-3 yrs, which is why making sure you have a 3 yr warranty really pays for itself.

[AndersZ]

You can see a comparison between nvidia and ati graphic cards here: http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030916/. I've seen similar performance gaps at other comparisons as well, for example this: http://www.3dchips.net/content/review.php?id=63&page=1.

This can probably help you, but as you can see, stay away from the non-professional versions of the cards as they can't keep up with the openGL cards.

Anders

[Sieb]

Maxtor drives are dodgy if you ask me but what's the problem with IBM drives? I've got three of 'em (1yr old, 2yr old and 3yr old drives) and they work fine? Can you please explain.

It was just the 60-75GXP (mainly the 75s) series "DeathStar" drives that were the bad apples. http://www.sheller.com/Practice.asp?PracticeID=114
There were scans of the article from MaximumPC but they took them down. IBM knew about the problem but fed the drives into their support channels and just replaced defective ones with more, especially after they had recorded high defect/failure rates compared to other drives.. Then IBM came out and said they were normal and that their limit of 333k hours of operational time was acceptable..:wip:

I had two 60GXPs show up new from newegg, both DOA, would not even spinup.:eek:

[Mvespa]

Thanks for the url's about profissional graphic cards comparison, but I think to start I'll buy a cheaper graphic card. Probably a Radeon 9600 XT or a fx9750 ultra.

[3Dfx_Sage]

a fx9750 ultra. [/B]
a WHAT?

[Mvespa]

Ups, I mean a FX 5700 Ultra :)

[3Dfx_Sage]

ahh, okay. Yeah the 5700 U has pretty impressive geometry power for the price.

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