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Dashinuke

01-05-2009, 03:11 PM

Hey guys,

I'm looking for a new PC. The main activities are going to be Matchmoving (Boujou/PFtrack/Matchmover), 3D (Maya, lightning, Mental Ray rendering), and (somewhat heavy) compositing in After effects. It's not that I need the newest ultimate rendersystem, but atm I just have an old laptop and and even older PC, so I'm just looking for a new PC with a maximum budget of €1000/1100 euro

Now my first question is, which hardware component will be the most important for these activities, the CPU, the RAM of the Video card ? Or does it differ per activity ?

Secondly, I don't prefer to randomly ordering components and assemble it myself, so I'm looking for a pre-build system. I am now looking at the Dell site, and I came across the studio XPS system.

It has the Intel Core i7 processor, and DDR3 RAM memory. I'm not an expert at hardware, but I've read around a bit and since DDR3 and the i7 are pretty new, I think those specs are okay:

-Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 920 (2,66 GHz, 8 MB cache, 4,8 GT/sec.)
-4.096 MB 1.067 MHz Tri Channel DDR3 (4 x 1.024) (can be upgraded to 6 GB and 8 GB)

I'm only concerned about the video card. The best I can select is the "512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850".

The system I have selected now has the above components, and will cost €1040. So my main questions are:
- Are the cpu and ram okay ?
- Will the videocard do or do I really need a workstation videocard ?

Thanks for the help!

- Dashinuke

Dashinuke

01-06-2009, 01:03 PM

After some more research, I found out that the difference between:

ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB (150 euro)
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB (220 euro)

...is only 70 euro. And having 1GB, I think it's a significant improvement for only 70 euro. Only problem is that I think Dell doesn't supply this card. I should contact them about it.

Can anyone dell me the meaning of "sapphire" and "crossfire"? I see these terms come across but I haven't found the meaning of these yet.

Srek

01-06-2009, 01:15 PM

Crossfire is ATIs option to connect two graphics cards for more performance in 3D games. Like the Nvidia equivalent SLI this does not help with 3D content creation software.

Edit: i wouldn't opt for 4 RAM modules since this will slow the system down. Either go with three or 6 modules for optimum performance.
There are several threads on core i7 systems here already, maybe do a search for more info.

Cheers
Björn

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