Dual xeon system - best setup?

[mhinks]

Hi all

 

Hope someone out there can help shed some light on a new system we've got.

 

Its a dual 3.06 xeon, 1meg cache, 533FSB, 4 gig DDR2100. It runs well, but it never seems to really get pushed. We use max 6 with brazil, so we're getting 4 buckets, and the processors seem to max out a far bit, but the memory use is minimal.

 

Is there a way to get the system to use more ram, using XPpro. If the machine only really needs 2 gig, ill move to chips to another machine!?

 

Are there any good programs that can monitor the system usage better than task manager?

[STRAT]

i wouldnt complain!!!!!

 

if you want to push ram useage then add particle systems gallor!

 

and if you want to monitor ram useage perfectly, then download this free app - http://www.simtel.net/product.download.mirrors.php?id=56220

 

its a live ram monitor/freer. i use it and wouldnt be without it. i've decreased animation rendertimes by up to 75% managing my memory with this little baby

[mbr]

I can't imagine what it'd take to use that much ram effeciently!

 

I've got 1.5 gigs and never gone beyond that. But if you have huge scenes and are running a GI program that eats ram up, it may make a difference sometimes.

 

But I agree with Strat - you really gotta love a setup like that!! I am on a single 2.8 with 1 gig now and I'd love to just have a dual again (mine's at home). Go play with some crazy lighting effects! Try some particle stuff with GI!! Ah, the possibilities!!

[Tim Nelson]

Geez! Thats like saying "I love my Porsche, but the acceleration is just more than I need right now. Is there something I could do to make it go slower? Maybe stack some bricks in it or something?"

[Iain Denby]

I've got exactly the same set up. Woo Hoo!!!

[luckytohaveher]

Ram in rendering is like a gas tank in a car. If a gig is equal to 10 gallons, and your scenes are small it is like driving to the corner store and back. You will never need the 40 gallons you have with scene complexity you are using. I would recommend either moving the ram to another machine or waiting a couple of months for Supercache XP from superspeed software. I have used the Supercache for Win2K for years and have been VERY happy with the performance differential. It is a program that uses system cache to buffer your hard drive. I have routinely increase rendering times 30% or more. You could allocate a gig or more to this function and increase the speed of the rendering and overall system performance.

 

Good luck!

 

http://www.superspeed.com

[mhinks]

Hi guys,

 

Thanks for the replys. Im not complaining! The system is great. And got another coming nxt week. But I wondered why a max rendering is using only 500 meg of ram and taking x long, when it could use all 4 gig, and take a lot less x!!

 

Is there a way to get max to use more of the system resources?

[luckytohaveher]

ALL computers, whether rendering or not are complex machines based on a multitude of sub-parts. You have a fast processor (think horsepower), you have a great deal of ram (think large gas tank), and your hard-drive sub-system is probaby like donut tires -- your aren't getting any traction out of the screaming horsepower.

 

Do you have a Raid with striping (RAID-0) setup to help the loading and saving of the calculated data? You have to feed those killer processors!

 

Do you have gigabit network card, cat6 cabling, routers, etc? 100baseT Ethernet is ONLY around 12-24MB/sec. while gigabit is 120-240MB/sec. or so depending on duplexing. I just setup a system with bridged dual gigabit full-duplex connections. That is 4000 Gigabit or 500MB/sec. I don't think my system can feed that fast enough due to the PCI bus limitations. However, it is no longer a bottleneck.

 

I would recommend this -- http://www.superspeed.com/ramdisk.html . Set the ramdisk size to 2GB. Then use that as your swap-file location and/or 'renderjob' location so that it is loading the files out of ram (3.6 GB/sec.) and not the disk sub-system (30 MB/sec - 100 times slower).

 

Of course, you could over-clock the system -- but I'm not the gambling type.

 

Use 'Perfmon' under administration tools on the control panel. Then load up CPU%time for both Cpus, disk%time, and network traffic. That will tell you what sub-system is the bottleneck.

 

The key point is that ram is only useful up to the point at which no 'swapping' is required. Anything beyond that, unless used as I have described, is just a underutilized asset.

 

I hope that helps -- that'll be $19.95 please (rent money and all)...

 

Ted

[R.S]

Dual Xeon with 4 gigs of RAM eh! Ha I just spent 14hrs rendering a 9sec, 512x384 animation, involving a transparent ring, glass sphere and a chrome cube on a disk, lit with 3 photometric light and one omni light, with shadow mapping and rendered on VIZ 4 c/w brazil, and all done on a pII 300 with 256mb RAM and a Gforce 440MX card...........I am take donations for the "Support the render junky who’s computer is a piece of crap!". Please send all donations to mycomputersux@WhyGodDoseRadiosityTakeSoMuchPowerWhyGod.com

[bigcahunak]

Hi guys,

 

Thanks for the replys. Im not complaining! The system is great. And got another coming nxt week. But I wondered why a max rendering is using only 500 meg of ram and taking x long, when it could use all 4 gig, and take a lot less x!!

 

Is there a way to get max to use more of the system resources?

Here is a story:

100 meter in the olympics... the winner made it in a little less than 10 seconds and got the gold.

On the podium, he accidently got 2 gold medals and said: "if I knew I get two medals I'd have run twice as fast making those 100 meters in less than 5 seconds"