The recent ‘coffee on laptop’ incident has reminded me that the laptop is getting a bit “old” now.
So I’m thinking of splashing out on some new machine. I’m partial to Apple for some strange reason and I’ve just been looking at the current range of machines. It seems that its possible to order a range of different specs above their default models.
At the top of the range:
Dual 2.7GHz PowerPC G5
which includes
• 8GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 8x1GB
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL - 256MB GDDR3 SDRAM
and costs somewhere in the region of £4000 = $6000+
Lower down the range there is the
iMac 17" 1.8GHz PowerPC G5
• 1GB DDR400 SDRAM - 2 DIMMs
• ATI Radeon 9600 - 128MB DDR
which costs about £1,000 = ?$1,500
My questions are:
what do people think are
a) absolute minimum
b) good
c) omg thats freakin awesome
specs for making Blender work well?
Out of the elements of chip speed, RAM and video card, which will make the biggest difference?
Celeron 2.88GHZ (was a 2.6 but overclocked a lil)
1 gig DDR 133 184 pin.
Dvd RW 8x/CD RW 48X Combo
80 Gigs ATA HD
BEarbones kit -Mini me Epox
Cost: $550 USD
I can still upgrade the CPU to a 3.2Ghz 800mhz bus HT technology Intel 4 (probably can overclock it higher too, then my crappy celeron). My gig is maxed, which I am not happy about. But you cant beat that, it a CD player with no OS, as well as dvd player that supports surround sound.
The intel chipsets suck, I bought a cheap 20 bucks g-card and its enough to mess with blender, anything about 600,000 tends to slow down though.
Overall, just get a shtiload of ram, a crappy g-card (blender’s opengl isn’t advanced) and a decent cpu (hell a 677mhz celeron gives enough juice to run blender, but python scripts tend to be slow)
If you can afford the dual proc (or the new dual-core… don’t know if they’re out yet…) go for it! With the multi-thread render on 2.37 this will be a huge timesaver for you in the future. Even in the current version, I can halve the time of rendering an anim simply by firing up two command line renders and letting it run overnight on my dual-proc workstation. You’ll not regret it. (Also, crank the RAM up to as high as you can afford!)
I think blender will run well on almost anything - it depends though on if you want to do alot or rendering - dont know. Any apple will do fine. I though not an apple fan myself I really do like their desktops (but their laptops sux imho) . My only concern is the stablity of blender on apple - dont really know about it. Most of the devs use linux, followed by windows, followed by mac. If you want to do heavy amount of rendering youll need maxed ram/cpu speed.
My suggestion if you want a cheap powerful blender machine: build your own computer and use linux as the OS. You can built some nice machines for under $800 and load it with Ubantu or Debian and you have a kick @$$ box.
This community never ceases to amaze me. Thanks ever so much for the replies.
I had a look at the links ascotan. It looks a little bit complicated though. Some of the ‘high end’ DIY PCs look quite expensive ($5000). How long do you think it would take to learn the essential elements, build a half decent computer and figure out how to load up linux onto it? I’m not completely dim, but there appears to be a lot to learn.
I like the mac option because I’ve been using it for the past couple of years and its only rarely that I need to put my grey matter to work on figuring out how to get it to do what I want. The only frustrating thing has been rendering speed and increasing delays in the 3d screen when the vertex count rises.
I´ve got all computers (lucky me…hm…)
Anway, I´ve got these notes for you:
Blenders internal render will render fastest on an AMD chip for some
reason, but in some cases it will render fastest on an Intel chip. Point is…
the Internal renderer will render fastest on an x86 architecture.
The Yafray renderer (in my experience) will render hellaciously fast
on an Apple G4 or G5. And it will render with decent speeds under Linux
with a Pc.
The OpenGL environment that Blender needs for fast and efficient
modelling workflow - operates best on a PC…in fact…best on Linux to my
experience with an Nvidia card. It´s about 40-50 % slower on an OS X
platform (I know…I have both computers), but my guess to why this is
is that the Apple OS X platform utilizes OpenGL as a native part of the
OS GUI. (OS X). Hence…why you get those fancy transparent terminal
windows and fancy Exposé function with smooth flying windows …it DOES
steal some OpenGL powers…
In all cases:
Ram is extremely important.
A decent graphics card for smooth viewport workflow.
Dual CPU if you can afford it. No doubt that it makes things run smoother.
I hope that helps you out a bit.
Any questions about the different platforms at all…just PM me and
I´ll try to answer it.
It depends on what you do with it. My Mac Mini will support scenes with a few hundred thousand polys, which is enough for me. When it comes to rendering, I would only use a renderer that supports Altivec. If Blender is compiled under Tiger it should be optimised a bit better than usual.
The important thing to remember is that rendering will take a long time no matter what you use. Lets say there is a 5 times difference in render performance bewteen high and low end machines. You just need to optimise your scenes a bit and maybe wait 2 or 3 nights for it to render instead of one. Big deal.
I say go with a cheap machine and learn how to make your scenes efficient. It discourages you from making cubes with full GI settings and waiting for hours just to post the results on benchmark sites. Just think, all the CG movies that made your jaw drop years ago were rendered on machines similar to cheap machines available today. If they used slow machines you can too.
Lets face it, it’ll never end. I mean now they are bringing out HD video that most computers (even my new one) won’t be able to play. Why do you think that is? Ever heard anyone complain about the low quality of DVD before? No, it’s just people are greedy and push for ever faster/bigger/better things.
Get something good enough that will let you do what you need and when you outgrow it, then get something better. Don’t get the best and work up to it - it’ll depreciate faster than you appreciate.
BTW, if you get an imac, don’t get one with a superdrive - they only burn most DVD media at 2x. Get the cheaper model and an external firewire case and stick an IDE drive in it.
I´ve been running lately 2ghz dp G5 with happiness. Fast reliable (usually a month without booting)
Its my work machine and its not only for blender work. I normally have indesign, photoshop, freehand, mail, browsers, text editors, dreamweaver, flash, open simultaneously. PLus i am rendering with blender same time im working with other software.
So i think G5 is good, almost too powerful. I only have a 1,5 Gig ram on it so that 2,7 DP G5 8 gig ram could be a very good machine for u a long time!
And especially now when blender supports dual cpu rendering thers no comparison :D, iguess, dont hang me
…and G5 dp is a very very silent (no sound at all), and there havent been no viruses with my mac and anyone i know.
Only the pc´s are a little bewtter with veryveryvery high poly models cause macs dont have the best graphic cards.
I am running 2,5 gig P4 at home and it mostly sucks
Well, I’m currently on an AMD 500mhz, 120MB RAM, and a nice 8MB video card that doesn’t do OpenGL acceleration, and I’ve learned not to complain about it, since it’s all I can afford.
I’m completely broke (Gandhi probably had more money than I have), as I have to (constantly) spend my monthly allowance on school work, and food for evening classes (I hate school). But I’ll soon get out of it, and will begin looking for a job to help me through college (If I decide to study any of the crappy careers here) and buy a more decent computer.
The only thing I can say to you is go with AMD processors, they’re simply the best.
If you have got an ATI Rage 8 MB card, there is a HW-accellerated driver for Win NT (3.51 i guess). If not, does your board have an AGP slot for the graphics card?
I recently did a test of most of the Apple kit at my local dealers. Took in a USB key drive with blender and a project on it.
The 1.8 Single chip Powermac performed well even with a Nvidia 5200 play back of subsurfed character was smooth as long as the level was set to 2. Better machines were faster, more ram would have helped further. Tiger too.
I have a simple policy of Linux boxes for cheap workstations, Macs for (almost everythng else). Clients Windows boxes for CAD, let them pay for admin, licenses and hassle.
If it’s me you’re talking to, nope, it’s not an ATI card. And no AGP slot (just PCI). I know there are great PCI cards, but I’ll just try to save for a better computer, as I can’t spend money on anything other than school right now. Thanks anyway.
