Need Advice for a new system

[Tarkus]

Hi, im a student and use Maya and Zbrush for my modeling and animations, and i render with Mental Ray.

 

I was thinking of going with a dual-core amd 4200+ and getting an ATI FireGL V5000 or a Nvidia Quadro.. A8N-SLI Deluxe, and probably 1GB at least of DDR400.. Will a system like this run very fast and efficiently in the viewport while im working?? renderin time isnt that big a deal for me, i just need great working speed for the viewport..

 

my budjet is $1,600.00 CAD. and im only buying those 4 parts.. (cpu, video card, mobo, memory).

 

Answers are greatly appreciated, Thanks in advance..

[chuck]

I'm looking at dual core's right now too, but more because i want quicker renderings. As far as the video card goes, I have the x700 that the ATI FireGL V5000 is based on. It's been good for games, but I have routine display problems in MAX and sketchup. At work I use a nVIDIA 1300, and it's been pretty solid and I have better framerates in MAX. I realize I'm comparing a gamer card (with 256mb ram) to a workstation card (with 128mb), but I'd rather own a nVIDIA. For my next card at home, I think I'll be modding one of the high end nVIDIA's into their quadro series. The quadro's have the same hardware as gamer cards (6800gt=quadro 3400 I think) and a software mod to the bios tricks it into the quadro. At that point, the drivers make all the diff for pushing high poly counts.

 

Are you thinking of getting two vid cards? The SLI motherboard sounds nice...but I'll never be able to justify buying two cards.

 

I'd try to get 2gb of ram too....

 

Chuck