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View Full Version : Need help building PC - fast

Theodocious
10-17-2007, 04:24 PM
Hello, I am working for a pretty famous sculptor who uses a lot of 3d modeling in his work, laser scanning and prototyping. We are building a new machine that needs to be here fast because his old machine died. He wants something that will be viable for at least the next three years so he is thinking about purchasing more power than he probably needs. specifically, I have questions regarding hard drive configurations - would you go for SCSI, SATA or SAS? I don't know anything about SAS. he is not doing almost any rendering but I think a quad would be good because he runs many software packages simultaneously - solidworks, Maya 8.5, and rapidworks among others. I would love suggestions for video cards that can handle huge realtime data sets used in the 3D scanning and prototyping process.

He also wants a RAID setup configured so that there are two physical drives that appear from probably four separate striped disks. ideally, he would have one set of drives in the RAID for programs (that doesn't need to be mirrored) and another for data storage that should be mirrored. I'm not even sure if this configuration is possible so I am open to suggestions.

We are looking at various "The Boxx" configurations but if you know of any other reliable custom builders or good value configurations from major brands I'd love to hear it. Thanks,

TG
mummey
10-17-2007, 08:45 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor

order the Boxx. Get a reliable support contract that Boxx can provide and most other custom builders can't. You sound like you're in over your head, else you wouldn't be posting this question to a web forum.

Apologies for being too 'blunt'. :)
-b
niva
10-17-2007, 09:16 PM
SAS is a ... well I'll also point you to a wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

It is good for servers with massive access requests, especially for databases... single user, bleh, he can determine if it fits in the budget but I don't think it's prohibitively expensive anymore. I think you'd get more of a bang out of a solid flahs drive for windows and main apps though and storing data on a serial ATA or SAS drive.

NVidia's Quadro or ATI FireGL cards are good choices for pro work and sounds like he might actually make use of them.
Theodocious
10-17-2007, 09:47 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor

order the Boxx. Get a reliable support contract that Boxx can provide and most other custom builders can't. You sound like you're in over your head, else you wouldn't be posting this question to a web forum.

Apologies for being too 'blunt'. :)
-b

no apology necessary, although I wasn't really in over my head. I respect and value the opinions I've gotten here before so I thought the additional input couldn't hurt. Thanks for the help.

we did end up going with the boxx with the following setup, especially because they have fast build times

quad zeon 2.3 ghz
6 gigs ram
2x300 gig raptor 15k rpm in an SAS RAID1
quadro FX 4500 756mb

I can't believe I get to work on this monster. He's also getting a stereolithography machine. Check out his work

http://www.artthrob.co.za/01june/images/bitstreams01a.jpg
http://www.refgrafika.com/blogo/whitb8.gif

obviously, these are not photoshops. it's one thing to see them in pictures and entirely another thing to see them in rl

Also THANK YOU MODS for moving this thread, I swear I looked for a hardware thread but couldn't find it
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10-17-2007, 09:47 PM
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