Looking to build a machine on which I’m gonna set up my working environment as I’m not getting much done on my little laptop. I’ll be running Ubuntu on this machine, and will also need to work out how I should go about wireless - usb or pci card? Here’s what I have so far. Total comes to just over 800 euro. Any advice, especially from anyone in Holland is much appreciated. I’ll be getting my machine from alternate.nl which is based in Rotterdam. I’ve looked at Tweakers.net, but I’d rather source all my parts from a single vendor. Also maybe there is a place in s’Hertogenbosch or Eindhoven area where I can get these specific parts?
1 x AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 EE 4600+
à € 99,-
1 x Club 3D 7600 GS Silent
à € 79,-
Moederborden Socket AM2 -
1 x Asus M2N 1394
à € 69,-
Geheugen DDR2-800 -
1 x OCZ 2 GB DDR2-800 Kit
à € 89,-
Harddisks 3,5 inch SATA -
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (320gb)
à € 69,-
Monitoren LCD 20 inch -
1 x LG L204WT-SF
à € 239,-
1 x Logitech TrackMan Wheel
à € 39,-
1 x Antec Solution SLK3800B-EC (case 400w psu)
à € 85,-
That machine is similar to mine and I am very happy blending on it. I was using Ubuntu, then went to Fedora 7. This weekend I took the plunge to try Gentoo.
Don’t Intel core duo’s perform better these days? I’d still go with AMD myself, but objectively, Intel is faster. There is however some architectural error in those new Core processors, which can cause random crashes. I don’t know how severe, and in which models it has been resolved. Tweakers.net had a news item about it, some time ago.
About the RAM. If you work with complex scenes and high resolution texturing (having GIMP and Blender open at the same time), 2 GB of RAM may be somewhat on the small side. I have 2 GB, and it’s gone before you know it.
Choice of video card should always be Nvidia on Linux, as you have. And Seagate hard drives are the most reliable, so that’s cool too.
With Nvidia ( 7300) I had some problems with Ubuntu. They don’t use the most up to date drivers and Nvidia never released any driver source. Certainly avoid ATI integrated, but it seems people with the more advanced ATI ( 9800) have had good results.
Since you’re not using Windoz , 2GB ram is plenty. I only have 1GB, and when using linux, I can run loads of apps and my swap partition is still empty!
Try to avoid wireless items like modems and keyboards. Ubuntu ( at least up to edgy) had problems with some wireless.
Use the search on the Ubuntu forums and see if those hardware names show up.
If Ubuntu occasionally locks up ( as it did for me) try Sabayon. Its an easy install version of Gentoo.( ultimate power… tricky to use.)
whew!! your hardware specs looks good!
mine is an AMD K6-2 500MHz, 192MB ram, Riva TNT2 M64 32MB video card. 10 year old 10GB seagate + (bad cluster filled) 20GB seagate harddisks. …and i’m not joking, this really is my PC, i do blender here, i guess my patience is improving :D. I envy you!
i wish i could have something close to yours!
EDIT: my 10GB harddisk is only 7 years old, see? forgot its age already?!
Since you’re not using Windoz , 2GB ram is plenty. I only have 1GB, and when using linux, I can run loads of apps and my swap partition is still empty!
I use Gentoo myself, and I still recommend 4 GB when working with high memory projects. The rendering of my latest project takes up 1 GB easily, partly because there are several 4096x4096 textures. Having the 10 layer 4096x4096 GIMP file for the texture open, also increases memory requirements…
But, it all depends on how heavy your projects are.
If Ubuntu occasionally locks up ( as it did for me) try Sabayon. Its an easy install version of Gentoo.( ultimate power… tricky to use.)
In the end, Linux is Linux. If it locks up somewhere, it’s not the distro’s fault, and it should be fixable without changing distro’s.
Thanks for the input so far guys. Seems like I’m on the right track with my setup. As far as the ram goes, I’m sure 2 gig will be ok fpr now as I’m still only beginning with Blender. As I’ll have 4 slots and I’ll get two 1gig dimms, I’ll still have space for more ram if I need it. You can mix new ram up these days so if I would need to go past 4 gigs I could put in a pair of 2 gigs to take it up to 6. In the meantime the price can only drop!
As far as core duos are concerned, from what I’ve heard, they are better for games, but when it comes to processor intensive work like 3D, the athlon x2s have integrated memory controllers on the cpus (whereas the core2s rely on the motherboard chipset for that), which means that they are generally as good if not better for 3d apps and video and encoding and stuff, which rely more heavily on the cpu and the memory. They’re also half the price currently of core duos and are actually somewhat more energy efficient. Perhaps the one advantage of having a core duo is that i could upgrade to a quad core at some stage (quad core amds aren’t out yet afaik), but I have a feeling that if I’m going to be rendering huge amounts at some stage, then distributed rendering might be the way to go.
Wonder if any dutch guys can give me some tips on finding an even better deal than at Alternate? I think alternate’s prices are so good because they literally sell their stuff from the warehouse near to the port where it is shipped into the country.
Also, when it comes to wireless I was surprised that my laptop’s wireless card works with ubuntu out of the box, so what I may do rather than buying a usb wireless card for the desktop, is to use the laptop as a bridge, so the desktop accesses the wireless network throught the laptop. There’s a good post on the ubuntu forum about how to do that here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=76346
i have intel core2 duo on my laptop, and have never experienced any randomn crashes that i could not attribute to accidentaly dropping it or a hard drive problem, its also interesting to note that my laptop runs twice as fast as my dual core desktop. amd cores are faster initialy, but supposedly they dont handle heat as well and get slower quicker. if you do get a nvidia video card, get something in the 8000s because they have the ability to use cuda, which upcoming renderers will be able to take advantage of, and thus you’ll be able to use the video card for rendering stills.
amd cores are faster initialy, but supposedly they dont handle heat as well and get slower quicker.
I have never heard of processors getting slower when hot. Sure, the transistors can switch faster when colder, but as long as the switching speed is still enough to accommodate the clock speed, you should not notice anything. It’s either constant operating speed, or a crash.
if you do get a nvidia video card, get something in the 8000s because they have the ability to use cuda, which upcoming renderers will be able to take advantage of, and thus you’ll be able to use the video card for rendering stills.
Are the internal renderer or yafray ever going to use the video card for rendering? Right now, as I understand, they only use the CPU.
I have two 8000 cards (an 8600GT and 8800GTS) and they both work well with Blender as far as OpenGL acceleration. The 8600GT has dropped in price and is a good deal. I got a Gigabyte one with the Silent Pipe heat pipe cooler.
As far as Cuda, it appears that some free renderers out there may use it to accelerate rendering. I have not heard anything concrete about Blender yet though.
