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System Upgrade for Acad, Viz, Brazil


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This is my first post. I would like to thank everyone for their input, especially Greg Hess. Speaking for the silent majority, your insight is invaluable and appreciated.

 

I am about to upgrade a computer for use primarily with Acad, Viz, and Brazil. I have a couple of questions about the video card and cpu.

 

The video card I use now is a ES tornado 3000. While it is still quite useable, it is a little slow with wireframe in Viz, and in dealing with many textures. I am wondering if it is worth it to upgrade. I would only be willing to spend around 400-500. Have the new midrange cards outpaced the high end cards of a few years ago? Would a quadro 4 700 perform better? Is there a particular card that is best at wireframe/edged faces?

 

Concerning the cpu... I understand that brazil is 'officially' optimized for the pentium. Is this actually true? I have also read somewhere that an early version of Brazil was slower on Athlon's.

 

Thanks for your help,

 

Chris LeBlanc

3D Artist

DesignVision

www.designvis.com

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Chris,

Welcome aboard, and congrats for stepping out of the silent majority...

 

You mentioned an "upgrade", and you also mentioned "$400-$500"

Did you mean upgrading your system with some new parts, or upgrading to a whole new machine?

For components upgrade, We need to know what you have right now in your rig; especially the motherboard.

For a new machine I believe you will end up spending a little over $500 (but not much). We will need to know about things you had in mind (want raid? want to go dual cpu? dual monitor?...)

 

I'm sure Greg will add his input, but I believe he too would want to know the info I just asked for.

 

Welcome again.

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"I'm sure Greg will add his input, but I believe he too would want to know the info I just asked for."

 

Ya. Think of your question like this. I want to soup up my car. I have X amount of money. What do I do?

 

Its like fishing without bait, without a boat, and without any hippos.

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I am actually planning to build a system, and I'm considering reusing some components (16 gig scsi, 80 gid ide, removeable 80 gig (for offsite storage), tornado 3000, dual monitors, dv500, curently running NT).

 

I would consider spending 400-500 on the video card alone. I don't have a price set for the system as a whole, just look for good price/performance.

 

I am looking to build:

Dual Athlon - new

1 Gig Ram - new

16 Gig SCSI for system/cache

80 Gig Raid for data (mirrored)

Removeable 80 gig for offsite backup

Pinnacle DV500

Tornado 3000? (quadro 700?)

Motherboard?

Windows 2000 (xp?)

 

I am trying to decide if I should upgrade my video card or continue using my tornado 3000. I would be willing to purchase a Quadro 700 if it were going to be significantly faster (on the scale of 2x or more) than the 3000 I currently own. I have recently read that the Quadro series do well with wireframe views, which is where I notice a slowdown now.

 

Concerning the Brazil question, I will be using Brazil and want to make sure Pentium wouldn't be more appropriate. I haven't seen anything conclusive that says the Athlon wouldn't work well with Brazil... just the system requirements on Splutterfish's site and a random posting somewhere.

 

While I'm at it, I might as well ask for a motherboard recommendation. Can I find one with integrated Raid (1,0) as well as Network? If you have a recommended case I might as well ask that too :)

 

Thank you,

 

Chris

 

-----------------

Chris LeBlanc

3D Artist

DesignVision

www.designvis.com

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Now it looks more like it...

 

Answers:

I believe Brazil works just as good on the Athlons. Its like saying Ford trucks works best with Chevron gas... Ford either gets the gas for free while developing, or gets paid.

 

Motherboard: While I can't really recomend one (I have the tyan tiger 2466) I think they are all more or less the same. I know that the Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW+ has raid (think its the only one though). I think that today I would take the MSI board instead of the Tyan.

 

Cases: there are tons of them at an enormous range of prices. All you need to do is go to www.newegg.com see it all and buy it there. recomended!

 

Good luck.

 

BTW: the vid card - thats Gregs part;)

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