Im planning on getting a new computer for blender and have been getting quotes
This seems to be what im settling on, what do people think? Are there any changes that I should consider for better performance that wont be to costly?
CASE: Antec P182 Won’t change
POWER SUPPLY: Zalman 600W
MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte EP45-DS3P Won’t change
PROCESSOR: Intel Q9550 Quad Core Won’t change
RAM: Kingston 8Gig DDR800 Won’t change
HDD: Western Digital 500GB SATA2 16MB Cache
GRAPHICS: ATI Radeon 4850 512 PCI Express
DVD Burner: Pioneer 216 Won’t change
MONITOR: Samsung 22" 2243 LCD
OS: Vista 64bit Won’t change
You might consider switching to NVidia. Blender is notorious for problems with ATI (though I haven’t noticed quite as many complaints recently). You can likely get a similarly featured or better card for the same price from NVidia.
Also make sure your power supply is going to be capable of running all that.
Yeah I was wondering about the ATI cards, and what power supply(PS) requiresment i might need.
I was considering a Gigabyte GTX 280 but the salesman said i mihgt need a whooping great big PS unit excess of 800Watts, which is kinda huge, and I didnt want to use that much power(my little bit for thinking of the enviromen)
Anyone know how well this ATI card performs with Blender? anyone had problems?
I’m not sure on quadcore stats or your card, but 600W power supply should be plenty. As for the card I got the 8600 GT. If I had the choice again, I’d go a little beefier and I suggest you do, but looks like you are planning to anyway. I can run Crysis fairly well and sculpt polys in the millions so I’m happy for now. I haven’t used ATI for comparison, but I’ve never had Blender kick up a fuss with Nvidia - in Windows or various Linux distros.
One thing to keep in mind - there is no set ‘installer’ for Blender 64bit on windows from blender.org, just the files to unzip. I don’t have vista, but you might want to check all that first. With 500mb you could easily dual-boot with a 64 bit version of linux as well, make the most of a variety of test builds.
8gb of ram sounds great, but you will need to push things fairly high to need it. May as well if you can though. There is always the chance that a future job will need a huge fluid sim or whatever.
The rest all looks pretty straight forward. With the monitor, I’d be interested if you have ‘shopped around’ comparing LCD’s. I use a 17inch 4/3 flatscreen and CRT at the moment because it’s what I have around, but to be honest I think the CRT colour/brightness depth still wins, although the black isn’t quite as ‘black’ as the LCD. My brother has a 22inch BenQ, not sure if I like it that much.
Now inspired to find out how many Adelaide / SA Blender users we have here on BA.org, I’ve run into a few… online though.
PSU i´d take a Corsair or a BeQuiet! and then only a 80+
600W are surely plenty. I got a BeQuiet 550W and run 2x8800, q9550, nf780i and 8 Hdds without a problem. Peak for me is ~480W Consumption of the PSU, so granted its a 80+ ~390W usage.
average load is 310W Consumption/250 usage.
Ram i´d get some low CL one, especially on 8GiB.
As for the HDD, i´d take a 1TiB, they have a better price/GiB
And because you would bite your ass a 500GiB or 1TiB HDD crashes, i suggest to get 3 and run them in Raid5, or at least 2 for mirroring.
Its cheap to get a vast amount of hdd storage place nowadays… but the bigger the drives are, the greater the loss on a hdd failure.
MSY likes your business if you know exactly what you want before you go in and probably if you plan to build it yourself like I did. Although I think they build systems for a little extra.
It is a cheap as cheap gets thing though, so for warranty and service etc it is better elsewhere. Depends on what you value I suppose.
I’d just like to throw in with Arexma, hard drives are so cheap now and the RAID config is such good insurance. At least get an external for backup, I saw a 1 tB external yesterday for $130, I think it was at TigerDirect.
