Restricted to a DELL

[imashination]

If youre going to ask for help, at least throw us a bone and spend 10 seconds telling us what you have, what you want and what youre going to use on it.

Otherwise, dont spend more than £300 for it, that will do everything you need it to.

[pancreasboy]

Consider the bone thrown :)

At the moment im on an intel mac G5 with Parallels 3.0 running XP SP3, with 3ds Max 2009. But when rendering to vector (using Swift 3d) I can't render more than 300 frames before it crashes (even only when in Bootcamp) and I also can't do Reactor calculations.

So going for an actual PC machine should provide more stability.

I work for an educational group who provide animations for lecturers to use as teaching aids, so animations can be detailed.

Hopefully that's a bit more helpful and sorry for not elaborating.

[salmonmoose]

Otherwise, dont spend more than £300 for it, that will do everything you need it to.

I hope that's £3000 (which seems a bit rich) Otherwise I'm moving to the UK for super-cheap computers :) Do they have decent brands like ASUS at that price too? :)

[imashination]

Consider the bone thrown :)

At the moment im on an intel mac G5 with Parallels 3.0 running XP SP3, with 3ds Max 2009. But when rendering to vector (using Swift 3d) I can't render more than 300 frames before it crashes (even only when in Bootcamp) and I also can't do Reactor calculations.

So going for an actual PC machine should provide more stability.

I work for an educational group who provide animations for lecturers to use as teaching aids, so animations can be detailed.

Hopefully that's a bit more helpful and sorry for not elaborating.

How are you using bootcamp on a G5? Bootcamp makes the machine natively load up windows, but its impossible to use it on a G5.

What sort of budget do you have and what are you expecting? You can get a machine which will run max perfectly fine (and many times faster than your mac does) for a grand or two. You'd be looking for something like an intel i7 940, 6 or 12 gigs of ram and an nvidia 260 or 280 gfx card, these would likely be listed as gaming machines, but the components are the same.

If youve got some more loose change to throw around, 3k+ then look at their nehalem xeon workstations. These will basically be almost twice as fast as the above machine when rendering, giving you 8 physical cores and 16 virtual cores of processing. 12gigs+ of ram will sit nicely here.

The gfx cards are going to be a thorny issue. Most people are perfectly fine with consumer geforce gfx cards, theyre fast and relatively cheap. Some people swear by quadro gfx cards, but theyre massively more expensive and provide very questionable benefit for the price.

My £300 was a jab at the sort of advice he'll get unless he actually tells us what he wants ;-)

[pancreasboy]

Sorry I meant a Mac Pro (my head is living in the past :) ).

Ok well work has come back with this...

http://www.twistedpancreas.com/3d/DellXPS730x.pdf

how is that sounding? The 3x2GB will be taking up all RAM slots, and I won't be needing a monitor because i'll be using my mac one (ie I'll still be keeping the mac and using the PC solely for 3D)

[imashination]

That machine is horrifically overpriced, bloody hell how did you manage that?

Ok first of all the gfx cards, theres no need for 2 gfx cards, they wont do anything in your 3d software except sit there idle, one card is fine. Secondly, theyre old stock. the 9800 is almost 2 years old, theyve been replaced by the 280 since last year

ram, the pdf you linked shows its using 3x 1 gig sticks, even if youve upgraded these to 2 gig sticks, the motherboard should have 6 slots. Dont add 3x2gigs to a machine that has 3x1gig sticks in it. The triple channel will fail and youll lose a chunk of speed.

That spec machine should be half that price, for $4500 ex tax you should be getting a high end dual xeon system. Not some overpriced machine with feeble specs like 3 gigs ram, a single 750gig harddrive and 2 year old gfx cards.

Phone dell up, go straight to their business/schools section and tell them what you want. Ask them to spec you this and see what they come back with, it should be around the same price as that other machine you listed in the pdf:

Dual 2.66ghz nehalem xeons
12 gigs of ram
a geforce 280 gfx card

If they try fobbing you off with a quadro gfx card (they will) tell them youre not an idiot and will go try somewhere else instead

[pancreasboy]

Yeah I know, I work for a University and we're on managed machines, so my hands are a bit tied.

I've now been given another quote on this...

http://www.twistedpancreas.com/3d/DellT3500.pdf

A few questions I have are...

Would a dual processor version be better but at a slower speed for the same cost?

And is 12Gb of RAM an over kill when the graphics card is only a 512Mb Quadro?

Is Quadro not the way to go and if so why?

Thanks in advance.

[imashination]

A dual 2.66 machine would probably be preferable to a single 2.97 machine in most cases

The amount of ram on the motherboard compared to the gfx card is fairy irrelevant, they dont have much to do with each other. However... that gfx card is pretty rubbish. Its based on a geforce 9500 which is even older and much slower than the 9800 card you had quoted for the other machine. 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

I dont understand where youre getting these quotes from, are these pre-configured machines or is some dell rep giving these quotes based on what the IT guys are asking for? They keep palming you off with crappy old hardware which was low end even when it was released.

The reason you dont want the quadro is because you havent mentioned a single piece of software you have which would use it.

Lets put it this way, I wouldnt buy either of those machines you mentioned, theyre both overpriced and put together with old stock theyre trying to shift from the warehouse. Go bribe the IT department and get them to pull their fat lazy fingers out their arses.

If I worked in IT, I would be ashamed to give you that quote with a straight face.

[spindraft]

A dual 2.66 machine would probably be preferable to a single 2.97 machine in most cases

Most definately it would. I read a benchmark a while back where they used cinebench (essentially shooting off a render w/ cinema4d) running a dual 2.8 xeon setup against an oc'd single i7 at around 4.2ghz (I don't remember exactly what model it was though). The dually tore it to shreads. So yeah, on a dell your not going to be doing any oc'ing on anything anyway, so 2x 2.66's will absolutely win out against a single 3.0. You'll thank yourself every time you fire a render off.

Also, I'd definately go for the 12gb of memory. You will find a way to use it.

I really have to agree about the quadro cards though. Unfortunately, in my past experience, dell will not sell you consumer/enthusiast gpu's on a machine for a business account. I always thought that was really stupid and hope they're not still doing that. But if they are then you stuck w/ it.

+1 on the price. Don't know what to say really, but just wow.....really expensive for what you're getting.

[pancreasboy]

Thanks guys and sorry this will be for using 3ds Max, so I'd be wanting something grunty to work with complex objects in the viewports and then something to render out at a decent rate (eg HDRI scenes, etc). Would a Quadro not be suitable for this? I thought they were built specifically for 3d software like Max.

Let me just make sure I've got this all right too: RAM and the graphics card will be for how much I can view and pan around etc in Max's viewports and the CPU speed will effect rendering time, is that right?

And yeah these are quotes from the IT guys who manage our machines. And I agree on the pricing, but management is fine with it, but I'm asking you guys so that maybe I can get a better configuration for the same price. I punched those specs into the DELL site as well and got the same costing (minus the monitor, which I will be using my mac monitor).

[spindraft]

Well, a quadro's certainly not going to hurt anything. I think what we're saying is just that for what you're doing you really don't need it, & considering the cost would go w/ a high end consumer card instead if you have the option to do so. If not don't worry about it, I just wouldn't make it a priority in the budget is all.

The system memory will prob. help w/ your viewport display etc., however that's really more the gpu's stomping ground. The reason I recommend getting as much memory as you can is that it affects how much you can get away with rendering in a single shot. The more memory you have, the more geometry & maps (or higher res maps) can be loaded at once for a render. Or, (and this may not apply to you) if you need to render out at extremely high resolutions. There's work arounds ofc. to do all that stuff w/ less memory, but having the mem. to do it saves you work and in turn time. Also offers the ability to do some things that would be impossible otherwise.

[pancreasboy]

Ok thanks for all your help folks,

looks like we're going to order the following for around $5k AU

T5500
Dual Quad Xeon 2.26 GHz Processor
12Gb RAM (6x2GB)
768MB Quadro FX1800 Graphics Card
250GB HD
additional SATA 500GB HD

time will tell I guess with how it goes.

Thanks once again.