New Dell System

[Ky Lane]

Hi guys,

 

As someone who is new to 3D, I decided to put the horse before the cart and went and bought a new Dell Dimension 9150 system. It cost me a packet (and Im still waiting for it to be delivered), so I assume its going to be good for a design.render workstation; however id like some of your comments as to wether Ive chosen the right thing, or could improve?

 

Im currently teaching myself on an old Athlon 1/4Ghz, with 1Gb SDram and a half decent ATI vid card.

 

The new Dell has:

• Pentium® D 945 with Dual Core Processing (3.4GHz, 2X2MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB)
  
• 1GB (2X512) NECC Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz SDRAM Memory
  
• 256MB PCIe™ x16 nVidia® GeForce™ 7300LE T 1
  urboCache™ w/TV-Out,VGA&DVI

Plus all the other obligatories....

 

This a decent system to get started with?

 

Cheers,

 

Ky

[AJLynn]

The Pentium D isn't as good as the new Core2 Duo chip, but there's nothing you can do there and what you've got is pretty fast anyway. You'll be fine for now, but if you start getting into heavy duty work you'll want to add more RAM and upgrade the video crad - the 7300 is the low end of the latest generation, and TurboCache is a euphemism for slow - it uses a small amount of memory on the card and gets the rest by borrowing system memory, which is slower and reduced the system memory available to your apps. ATI's euphemism for the same technology is "HyperMemory".

[Ky Lane]

Cheers Anythings better than this old 1.4 Athlon.

[robertherrick]

I think you've chosen a great starting machine, its likely though 1 gb will not be enough memory, your probably best to upgrade to another gb or two. One tip don't buy the extra ram from dell they charge a fortune go to ebuyer or Kingston, just make sure the ram timings and spec match.

 

It’s a shame in way you didn’t wait a little while until dell make the inevitable switch over AMD. There should be some pretty reasonable fast machines coming out soon. Time to increase the render farm…..

 

Also did you get your machine from the dell outlet? Or maybe from the dell ebay store there some real deals there.

 

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Dell-Outlet

[Greg Hess]

I'd wait and get a duocore2 Dell instead. The performance difference between the two is substaintal. E6600 would be my choice. If its a bit out of your price range, I'd just wait. I'm not kidding...wait. A stock E6600 makes a Pentium D look like its sitting still. (Over a 40% performance difference)

 

Looking at dell's site, the coreduo2 chips are already available under certain configurations.

[tecton3d]

... what Greg said;) A decent Core2 system (even from dell ) will get you more than just over the learning and will provide much better performance than the old-gen P4D. With the Core2 as the base of your platform, once you start doing more advanced modeling, you can simply upgrade to a faster video card and have a fast/current machine.

 

to piggyback on what AJLynn recommended - even though you're just starting out , I'd stay away from shared memory video cards... for something cheap, I'd watch E-Bay for anything from the Geforce 6800 and up - or get a new Geforce 66xx series. (they can be had for about the same price as the 7300LE and IMO, are worth it : )

[manta]

Next time, don't be shy and ask here what's your best upgrade solution...it'll save you lots of headaches...

 

here are some stats on the new generation of chips...

 

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=11

[Ky Lane]

Thanks for all the advice.