HELP w Spec for Architectural Visualization

[guppy]

Hi

 

I am a Architectural Visualization Artist looking at getting a pc at home that can handle large 3D scenes and render complex animations. I got this spec from a friend (as I don't know a lot about building a PC). I would appreciate it if anyone could comment or give advise on what to change or add.

 

I would also like to add 4 more gig of memory, as I would like to be able to apply possessors to render 1 scene and still work on another scene on the same P.C. I find that the render farm at work cant find maps or don't even register some CPUs at times. Thanks

 

My budget is round about $ 6250

 

SPEC

 

Intel 2.33Ghz Xeon Prosessor, 1333FSB, 8Mb Cache,(active)

 

Intel Vernonia Dual Core Dual Prosessor Xeon Pedestal Server Motherboard(SATA)

 

4x Transcend 1Gb ECC DDR2-667 240-Pin Fully Buffered DIMM

 

Intel SC5299WS(Pilot point 4 WS) Chassis- Fixed 600W PSU, Rack Mountable

 

Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 8800GTX GPU, 768MB 384Bit, Dual DVI+hdtv, DirectX10

 

2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 Series-160Gb Serial ATA II (SATA2) Plus - Serial ATA 300

 

LITEON Litescribe DVD Multi-Writer, 18x+R/-R, 8x+R/-R DL, 8x +RW, 6x -RW, 12x -RAM

 

Microsoft Windows Vista 64 Bit

[Tommy L]

Hi

 

I am a Architectural Visualization Artist looking at getting a pc at home that can handle large 3D scenes and render complex animations. I got this spec from a friend (as I don't know a lot about building a PC). I would appreciate it if anyone could comment or give advise on what to change or add.

 

I would also like to add 4 more gig of memory, as I would like to be able to apply possessors to render 1 scene and still work on another scene on the same P.C. I find that the render farm at work cant find maps or don't even register some CPUs at times. Thanks

 

My budget is round about $ 6250

 

 

You would be much better off buying more than one pc. If you want to spend $6250US I think you could buy one high end workstation and 2 powerful render-nodes. You want to render complex animations? On one machine? ten minutes a frame takes 25 days to render 2 minutes of animation. Without turning off the machine. If you use it at the same time, you will slow it down further and be working on a machine that is slow.

 

If I had 6250 to spend and I was intending to do animations, I would spend $2000-$2500 on a custom desktop, then use the change to pay for online rendering, and use the change from that to go out and get wasted on a regular basis.

 

But as a rule, I would never plan to work on a machine that was rendering.

[manta]

I take it those are quad xeons ?

 

Ya I would add the xtra 4 gigs, that way each cpu has 4 gigs, you can set 4 of the cores to render, and work on another scene with the other 4 cores...

 

The only thing that worries me is Vista, you might want to rethink that...X64 maybe...