Help with specs for new machine...

[jinsley]

I have been asked to spec out a new machine to help with the rendering and modelling I am doing for our office. It is getting more popular now and production time is becoming an issue. I have a few questions:

 

1.) I have suggested going with a 64-bit system to increase memory capacity and the RAM footprint. They won't allow me direct access to the network so distributed rendering seems to be out the door... are there any other options?

 

2.) Will a machine running 64-bit cause problems in an office which runs primarily 32-bit?

 

Here is the machine I am looking at,

 

Dell Precision T7400

 

Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5430 2.66GHz,2X6M L2,1333

 

Genuine Windows Vista® Business,SP1, with media,64,English

 

Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5430 2.66GHz,2X6M L2,1333

 

3 YEAR BASIC LIMITED WARRANTY

 

8GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (8 DIMMS)

 

No Monitor Option

 

512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX1700, Dual Monitor DVI Cable

 

48X/32X CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive with Cyberlink Power DVD™

 

Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeMusic (D), w/Dolby® Digital 5.1,

 

C2 All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 2 drive total configuration

 

160GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache™

 

80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache™

 

Thanks all for your time and comments.

 

-JI

[Stan Zaslavsky]

hi james

 

i'm using a 64-bit machine and using net-render to render with other 32-bit machine and i just have to send it through to render with 32-bits.

 

having 8G of memory sure helps with rendering

 

my only comment about the above config - why such small HDrives? you might need more space if you are only using this machine for modeling and rendering.

 

hope it helps,

[jinsley]

The hard drives are smaller because the office works over a server and I was told that I wouldn't need anyhting larger... does having a huge hard drive make a significant improvement to performance???

[Tommy L]

Nope. Doesnt help or hinder. a 10,000rpm drive would be marginally quicker.

[Stan Zaslavsky]

as long as you've got plenty of space to save your stuff to - then u dont need it on the actual machine.