What kind of computer would I need to run this?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I apologize if this is in the wrong place, as a forum admin myself I know it’s a pain, but…

I was looking over blender a year or two ago with an old gateway which surpassed the system requirements but was horribly slow. I just got a new laptop and was wondering if it would be capable of complex 3d modeling and animation. When you see system “requirements,” it’s just that, requirements. What would be needed to comfortably create full scenes at high quality without 10 second lags between each pan, zoom, and alteration?

I’m ultimately looking to create a 5 min short using blender and Final Cut on an old powermac G4. Will this laptop do the job? ultimately I’m worried about the graphics, as it is a laptop and has a low-end card. Also I was turned away from the 64-bit version so I’m not getting full 64-bit support because the site says not all features are available, currently plan on running blender 2.49b 32-bit.

Intel Pentium Dual Core T4400 @ 2.20GHz
Windows 7
4GB RAM
320GB HD
ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4330 256MB

Hoping to use a dual-monitor setup if possible, anyone have luck with a system like or below this?

For comparison, the machine I was having trouble on had the following:

Intel Celeron @ 2.40 GHz
1GB RAM
500GB HD
256MB ATi Radeon 9600 PRO FAMILY (A cheap edition of the 9600 pro that is worse in performance than a standard 9600, really threw me off when I bought it)
Windows XP SP2 (at the time)

Thanks for the help, and here’s hoping my learning won’t go in vain! :cool:

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should be fine. Your old comp looked good except for the Celeron. Not sure what 9600 you had but I had one for yearsssss (pro I believe) & it was a great card.

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Ok I wanted to be sure before starting a huge complex scene and then having it crash :slight_smile:

While you may have had a 9600, the PRO FAMILY edition is the worst of the bunch, it could barely run the windows vista interface when I had it on another machine, and it was in an AGP 4X slot (2X in the Gateway), which made it worse.

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The 9600 came out years before vista. I used it on 2K. You had a bad OS for it. :wink: It was the lowest end ATI (but better then the equivalent Nvidia’s) that supported DX9. It was not as fast as the 97/9800 but was faster then the 8500 by quite a big &, well, supported DX 9.1 vs 8 that the 8000 series supported. :slight_smile:

I never heard of “pro family”, just “pro.” The pro’s were the basics, then you could go lower & higher (ie XT).

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I hadn’t heard of it either until I installed it, but still it was much better than the Intel GMA in the gateway before. But thank you for the info. I guess laptop graphics have improved quite a bit since I last checked a few years ago.