Advice on new system

[markf]

I'm hoping that some of you tech savvy people will weigh in on this.

 

I'm going to buy a new workstation and have the following config's. I primarily render high res stills using Max 9 and Vray. Occaisional short animations.

 

Dell: $3,000 (rounded)

Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz

2 G DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz

768 M nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX

750 Watt Power Supply

 

QuitePC : $3,000 (rounded

Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz

2 G PC-6400 RAM

XFG 7950GT 512 Meg - video card

Nexus 400W Power Supply

 

Both systems come with monitors, 160 GB SATA Hard Drives and other items that are equal between the two.

 

My Questions:

 

I can upgrade to a Core 2 Q6600 Quad Core 2.4 GHZ for another $200 or a Core 2 Exterme X6800 2.93 GHZ for another $600. Do either of these upgrades make sense at the price points?

 

I know nVidia and there supported by MAX etc. Is the GeForce 8800 GTX a good choice? I'm not sure about the other systems video card. Does anyone know anything about this?

 

Dell is supplying a 750 Watt power supply while the Quite PC is supplying a 400 Watt. Seems like a major difference. Is 400 W enough?

 

The quite PC is a nice concept and the pricing is the same. I'd probably lean towards power over quiet but if I could have quiet power ...

 

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with my decision making process.

[Macer]

Personally I'd upgrade to the quad core CPU (Q6600) if render times are more important - but due to the lower clock speed, applications that use mainly one core will run more slowly. Thats something that you have to weight up.

 

The dell will handle this upgrade more efficently due to the larger power supply. And it will also give you the opportunity to overclock the cpu (easily done if the dell bios allows for it?- have to check with other dell users) to give even more performance! Don't get me wrong - you don't have to tweak the crap out of it to see an improvement. A simple 10% OC will put your performance back up around that of a Q6700 (check the price difference!) and will still be totally stable.

 

An after market cpu cooler, gpu cooler and case fans can be very easily be swapped in if you find a system to noisy. It doesn't cost much either. About the only thing that you can't change is the noise generated by the power supply (without getting a new one). Generally the closer a PSU is running to its max output the more heat it will be generating, the faster the fan will be spinning and the noiser it will be. But they do vary greatly in quietness of fan etc......so you can't really tell until you hear it running. You can always resort to a bit of foam padding between the psu and the case mounting points. I wouldn't have thought either of them would be overly noisy though.

 

Both graphics cards are based on nvidia chips, the majority are assembled by third parties to nvidia's spec. The 8800 is the newer and more powerful card which is more future proof (IMO) due to the fact that it is based on directx 10 technology.

 

Hope this helps.

[markf]

your comments are very helpful!

 

Rendering time is most important. So getting the Quad Q6600 for an extra $200 vs the X6800 for $600 is exactly the kind of info I was hoping to get.

 

Thanks!

[F J]

major Quad-Core price-cuts commin' down this Summer (August i think)..

somethin' like between 40-50%..

im currently waiting..