Machine running very, very slow

[Obraxis]

Originally posted by rickmann


AMD 1 ghz (I beleive it is a thunderbird)
I believe the bus speed is 400mhz so I don't think the memory is pc2700 or anything.
256 mb of ram
ATI Radeon 7500 AGP 4x with 64 mb of ddr sgram/sdram
Maxtor 7200 40 gig drive


That, my friend is your problem. Methinks its time to upgrade. I mean, its a 180 meg file...........seriously.

Oh, and your bus speed is 133mhz BTW ;)

[rickmann]

Methinks you are correct! Do you or anyone here ever have maya scenes that get up to 180 megs? Yes I beleive you are correct my bus spped s 133 I believe the chip set is 400mhz cause that is what my IT friend told me.

Thanks

:thumbsup:

[GregHess]

Its probably because your running out of ram.

When your in 2000 and performing the operations in Maya, press ctrl alt del, and go to task manager, then performance. Whats your available memory?

From the sound of things, your running off the hd's performance, instead of your systems ram.

I don't know exactly how much ram maya takes up when its generally running, but I'm sure you have less then 180 megs of ram available when the os and maya have finished loading.

Try the task manager/performance thing I mentioned to see how much ram is available. If its in the single digits, double the ram in your system, and that should restore a good portion of your performance.

(That should also cost less then 100 dollars)

[derelict]

I agree with Mr Hess,

3d with HDD swap is a very very bad Marriage. What you're doing in a long run is called "How to Murder Your HDD quickly" Because sooner or later your HDD tech-head WILL call it a day. Unless yours is a solid state HDD.:p

[Valkyrien]

hey Obby, what's up;)

I agree with upgrading your RAM rick;)

[rickmann]

:cry: yeah you guys are both wright:cry: My total of ram says 261 just running maya, with nothing going on leaves me with 77 megs and man oh man I tried opening that large file and by the time it got to 50% opened my memory was gone!!!

Let me ask 2 other things:

1. is xp better that 2000

and
2. My video card is a ATI Radeon 7500 AGP 4x with 64 mb of ddr sgram/sdram

should I try a better card? I am looking around at quadro FX 100 128mb 8x agp (if I can get it cheap on e-bay)

or a QUADRO FX 500 128 MB 8X AGP
here are the specs: Quadro FX 500 Description:_128MB 8X AGP Full 128-bit floating-point precision pipeline 12-bit subpixel precision Hardware accelerated antialiased points & lines High-speed 128MB DDR memory Fully programmable GPU (OpenGL 2.0/DirectX 9.0 class) Hardware OpenGL overlay planes Hardware accelerated two-sided lighting 3rd-generation occlusion culling DVI-I and VGA Connector AGP 8X with Fast Write ATX Form Factor Window ID Clipping Functionality.

or a: Gainward Nvidia GeForce FX 5600 XT 8X AGP 128MB (64bit) Retail

what ya think?

Thanks
Rick

[rickmann]

well my buddy is helping a machine, here's what he's got so far:

1. ASUS P4P800-DX I865P DDR 800FSB S/R/GBL/SATA/FW Motherboard
2. 512MB PC3200 400MHz ram
3. P4 2.4b 512k with 533 fsb
4. hopefully one of the video cards above
5. Maxtor 40gig 7200 hd
6. cheap floppy, cd, ethernet, modem, case
7. i have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and sound

so all this and try to keep it under 600, i'm up to 378 on just the first 3 things!!!


Rick

[elvis]

That's not a bad upgrade. I'd definitely be going for the Quadro cards if you can. The faster the better.

RAM is still pretty cheap these days. If you can afford 1Gb then go for it. The more RAM in a system the happier it is!

[jbw]

I'll second Elvis - get the gig of RAM. You'll find that with a 180 meg file you'll soon start churning up that RAM.

As for the video card - if you're looking to save cash wait until the system is built and try these large scenes with your Radeon 7500. If you're still getting slow down then fork out for something with a little more poke! ;)

laters potata's,
jbw

[imashination]

Originally posted by rickmann
Now the scene size is 180 mb.

Windows 98

AMD 1 ghz (I beleive it is a thunderbird)
256 mb of ram
ATI Radeon 7500 AGP 4x with 64 mb of ddr sgram/sdram
Maxtor 7200 40 gig drive


How should I put this...... hmmmmmm. You have an utterly, utterly, utterly shit computer.

The software costs 10x as much as the hardware you're running it on.

If your computer were a car, it'd be a Skoda.

To be honest, Im amazed you could even load the scene file.

Go sell the fluff in your belly button and buy a new computer.

[imashination]

Originally posted by rickmann
well my buddy is helping a machine, here's what he's got so far:

1. ASUS P4P800-DX I865P DDR 800FSB S/R/GBL/SATA/FW Motherboard
2. 512MB PC3200 400MHz ram
3. P4 2.4b 512k with 533 fsb
4. hopefully one of the video cards above
5. Maxtor 40gig 7200 hd
6. cheap floppy, cd, ethernet, modem, case
7. i have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and sound

so all this and try to keep it under 600, i'm up to 378 on just the first 3 things!!!


Rick

With such a low budget, don't even consider a quadro card. There are other more important bottlenecks to remove first.

1) Get a gig of ram, THIS is your main priority.
2) keep your harddrive
3) Find a motherboard with built in modem and NIC.
4) Do you really need a floppy? I havent touched a floppy disk in years.
5) Considering you paid thousands for the software, why do you have such a small budget for the hardware? I'm guessing its the obvious answer.

[rickmann]

Originally posted by imashination
Get a gig of ram

Yeah my budget is now been tightened by the wife. Also cause we are getting ready to make the move from Tampa, FL to Los Angeles, CA!!! (need all the money)

So do you guys think I should just keep the system I have now and just beef up the memory.

I mean by doing that will I notice my scenes open up quicker or is that part of the processor? Plus when I go to do something it won't take 5 minutes to do it, or is that the processor?

I figured the lack of rendering time (very slow, it took all night to render my animation for the juice box in this thread: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=132255&perpage=15&pagenumber=12 )

was because of the video card.
Plus I found this one: QUADRO FX 500 128 MB 8X AGP

here are the specs: Quadro FX 500 Description:_128MB 8X AGP Full 128-bit floating-point precision pipeline 12-bit subpixel precision Hardware accelerated antialiased points & lines High-speed 128MB DDR memory Fully programmable GPU (OpenGL 2.0/DirectX 9.0 class) Hardware OpenGL overlay planes Hardware accelerated two-sided lighting 3rd-generation occlusion culling DVI-I and VGA Connector AGP 8X with Fast Write ATX Form Factor Window ID Clipping Functionality.

Rick

[GregHess]

Replace the processor with at LEAST an HT chip.

A 2.4B Is 150 USD retail...

A 2.8C is 179 USD retail (HT enabled)

A 3.0C is 226 USD retail (HT)

A 3.2C is 286 USD retail.

If I was you, I'd go right for the 3.2C, and at least get some bang from my buck.

If you can't afford it WAIT. You've obviously dealt with this piss poor system for quite some time, you can wait another few weeks to scrounge up another 100 or so bucks. To do otherwise would be a waste of money, and just plain...well...not very smart.

Target your system budget to project what would be most useful in your situation in the future, not what will barely scrape you by for the next few months.

I'd say scrape the whole plan and start over.

You want a

3.2C Pentium IV on an I865 or I875 Intel chipset.
1024 Megs of PC3200 DDR (2x512 dimms)
Antec Mid-tower with a 430 Watt Antec Truepower
Some sort of DVD+RW burner (their only like 80-100 bucks now)
Some sort of DVD-ROM reader (to bypass the huge ms access time of a burner)

Ethernet should be onboard the motherboard...modem's are usually given away free at most weekend computer store sales. (Check sunday sales papers)

Hold off on the video card if you can't afford it now, your current one will still do the job for right now. Obviously you've been using it, so if your really caught for budget, don't get a new one, and concentrate your funds on more cpu power and more ram.

That hd in there is probably old, so swap it out with a nice 8meg cache seagate or WD JB drive.

Upgrading your current memory would cost less then 100 bucks, and it would just stop the whole "takes 4 to 5 minutes to do anything) problem.

[CGLearner]

I just bought a new set of hampsters for my WIN 95 system. That seems to work ok now...

Won't run Maya, and it takes a long time to open notepad.... Maybe I should get different hampster food...

[rickmann]

Hey greg thanks for the advice and cg I use to have that problem but i just replaced the 2 I had with one horny male and one young femal and encreased the amount viagra I gave him and now that little sucker was clocked doing 60 mph on his little treadmill, poor little guy still hasn't caught up to the female.

[Obraxis]

With that setup u wanna buy, DONT buy a B class P4. Buy a C class - they are cheap, cheerful and have Hyperthreading.

Examples are:

2.4C, 2.8C, 3.2C etc etc.

Oh, and hi to Valk dude ;) LTNS!

[rickmann]

well I guess I am not going to worry anymore because the other day I was on ubid.com (kinda of like e-bay) and well I was bidding on a sony vaio, here's the specs:

Processor Speed: 2.80GHz
Processor Type: Intel® Pentium® 4 with HT Technology
RAM Type: PC2700
RAM Standard: 512MB
RAM Expandable to: 2.0GB
Hard Drive Capacity: 120GB, ATA-100 (7200 RPM)
Floppy Drive Capacity: 3.5inch 1.44MB
Modem Type: V.90 data/fax modem (REN 0.8B)
Sound Card: AD1981B
Video Card: NVIDIA® Geforce™4 MX 440 with AGP 8X
Video Memory Standard: 64MB max.
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
DVD Speed: DVD-RW and DVD-ROM drive included


and well the price seemed like it was getting to high so I got out well long story short, it showed up on my door step today.

So last thing should I trade out the Nvidia card and use my radeon 7500?

By the way I got the machine for $545, I hope that was a good deal!!

Rick

[Obraxis]

Not a bad deal! Tho keep the GeForce 4 - u will find it is a little bit quicker and more compatable with some 3D apps.

[Keiyentai]

I personaly would Keep the Radeon 7500 cuase the MX versions of the GeForce 4's are crap. My friend had a GeFOrce 4MX 420 and he had a pain trying to play games with any AA or anything. WOuldent play the Doom III APlha or anything. Finly it died and he put in his Step Dads 7500 and it would run the DoomIII Aplha no problems. THeres not much performance difference between the G4MX Cards and the 7500(Last I looked anywho. I dont use NVidia I need to look at the specs again). ALso Radeon 9000's are like $70 and are 3X's fater then G4MX based and even faster then the FX5200. I have a Radeon 9000 and I am pleased :D. Next stop Radeon 9800XT 256 :D

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.