mbr Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 Where I am currently working we are getting a new workstation for the 3D. Here's how I've spec'd it out, let me know if anyone has opinions how to improve, etc. It's a Dell. Dual 3.06's (I recall reading somewhere that they were much better than the 2.8's, and the 3.2's are too expensive) 2 gigs ram (but room to add more later) FX 1000 128mb Graphics card (will this be good enough? I am modeling in FormZ and *hopefully* rendering in Max/Viz with Final Render) 74 gig hard drive 10k rpm (not sure about this, but I'll be saving most on the server and 10k seemed nicer than 7.2 rpm) 250 gig 7.2k rpm back up (for animations) 20" LCD (or maybe 2 18" LCDs - ??) That's the important stuff, the rest is standard. Thanks for the thoughts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 I am not a hardware guru at all (has anyone seen Greg lately by the way?) but I can comment on the FX 1000 since I have one. I love it! I am frequently working with very large scenes and I rarely get any slow down. I'm not too concerned about haveing fancy effects in my viewports so I won't talk about any of that kind of stuff but as far as framerate goes its great. Just make sure when in max you use the maxtreme drivers. It makes all the difference in the world. One other note. In my machines I've used dual sata 150 hard drives that are striped. They are only 7200 but setup like that the speed is far superior to a single 10,000 which is nice when editing animations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 28, 2004 Author Share Posted April 28, 2004 Thanks. Would you mind explaining (briefly) how RAID speeds things up? I always thought it was just a precautionary measure, not a speed issue. If it does make it faster, then I'll head that way too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 There are several ways of configuring RAID. What I am about to say is clearly beyond me though so only take this as general info. The most common are RAID-0 and RAID-1, also called mirroring and striping. I just don't know which is which. Mirroring is precautionary just like you said. Baisically is maintains a constant backup of everything you write on the second drive. So if you have 2 72 gig harddrives you only have 72 gigs of harddrive space because of the "redundancy" kept on the second hard drive. Stripping splits up the data onto the second drive. That means that when you load a file half is loaded from one drive and half from the other but loading all at once so it comes up twice as fast. You also have use of both drives space since there is no redunduncy (there's that word again) kept. There is also RAID-0+1 which requires 4 hard drives and is a combination of the 2. It increases performance and keeps redundancy. I'm sure that when Greg Hess or someone else that knows what they are talking about looks at this I will get a big LMAO for how I've explained this but I'm pretty sure this is the jist of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 28, 2004 Author Share Posted April 28, 2004 Brain - thanks! I never realized it actually made things faster - that's a big deal! I won't need the redundancy as we will have mirrored servers. Dual SATA's it is, unless anyone else thinks differently? Seems a safe bet, performance/price wise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
graphix Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 The system you have speced looks pretty darn good. I would however HIGHLY suggest going with the dual monitors. It is much more useful IMO then one slightly larger one. As for RAID-1 or RAID-0 I can never remember the difference either, however when you strip a drive you DO NOT get double the performance. I have run several versions from old school ATA 33 - SCSI 320 - SATA 150. On average you get about a 25%-33% gain in speed. Not much but a gain. Draw back is you have twice the chance for data corruption or loosing your data completely due to a failing drive becuse you have 2 drives instead of one that will fail. On my primary workstation I do run a stripping setup as my "work" drive and always always back up everything to a fatty 200GB drive everyday, just incase...I am parinoid. CPU, Graphics, RAM all seem good to me. I would suggest a DVD burner for backups and such. graphix Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 Ditto on the monitors. I didn't think I would use both much but now I even have my wife (who never works in 3D) likeing it so that she hates using the "other" computer becuase it only has one monitor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 28, 2004 Author Share Posted April 28, 2004 I did spec a DVD drive. My personal systems at home I back up with DVDs and an external 200 gb. Backing up (where I am working now) should not be a huge deal, because it will be done automatically via the servers - I never have to worry (or at least it won't be my fault!). Ok, 20-30% faster with a 7200 rpm drive puts the speed at about the 10k mark. So what would it be better to get the RAID (I think it's RAID-0 that is stipped, of course, I always thought it was 'striped' :-/ ). Any thoughts about my other post :-) - about using resources across a network to render with. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 I think it is striped...I just got a dell workstation 650, and I have 3 recommendations for you: 1st. Get dual screens. You will never go back to a single monitor. 2nd. If you get a DVD player/burner/whatever, go third party. I got an 8x/8x/40x speed lite-on burner combo for like $100 something dollars. I think the dell equivalent is much more. 3rd. Buy third party RAM. I paid $250 something for 2 GBs of RAM on 2 1-GB chips. The most important thing here is that you HAVE to get Kingston RAM that is compatible with the Dells. There is only one kind that will work. (Found this out after a 15% restocking fee). Then you get the minimum RAM from Dell, and you end up with 2 1/4 Gbs of RAM for much cheaper than you would get from Dell. -Chad Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 28, 2004 Author Share Posted April 28, 2004 I'll look into that, but the problem is support. I know from my systems they HATE giving any support just because I put another hard drive in! I lie to them about it now (this is the home division, the business side is much better). I did do that with ram before. But this is not my money and I do not want to be responsible for compatibility or support. Better to just pay it up front and never have to worry about it later. It's $200 for the 8x DVD writer spec'd with the workstation - not cheap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kainoa Posted April 28, 2004 Share Posted April 28, 2004 Mark, Sorry to get off topic, but are you working at a firm now? I thought you were an independant? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
graphix Posted April 29, 2004 Share Posted April 29, 2004 Any thoughts about my other post :-) - about using resources across a network to render with. I don't see where you asked this but I can take a stab at what you are asking. You are using a 3D rendering like viz, 3dmax, lightwave, whatever to render with I assume. Most if not all of the major 3d programs come with a rendering client that you can install on other machines, render farming. So you slap the software on all the machines at work and then at night log on to all of them run the app and let it roll overnight. Or at our office, who knows how the IT did it but all of our machines (150 in all at 3 offices in 3 different states 3.06ghz upgraded a month ago) will dedicate the "regular" computer users, about 125 of them, to use 50% of their CPU to render for us graphics folk. And all machines when not logged on render at 100%. Very slick....... Long and short of it...... graphix Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 29, 2004 Author Share Posted April 29, 2004 That is pretty slick, I should look into that. That's a great point that I completely forgot about - can't render on multiple computers if the files are local (well, I guess I could set it up as a render server...). I am independent....for now. I got an offer to work for a firm for a current project, to help them design and eventually do the final renderings and animations. An offer I could not refuse, you could say, but I am still doing my own thing (all work and no play kinda deal). I also enjoy contributing to the design side of architecture, it's been a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
voltaire_ira Posted April 29, 2004 Share Posted April 29, 2004 hi I'm using a raid 0 (stripping) using 2 80 gig 7200 rpm SATA and have a total of 160 hdd space. It is very fast and very reliable but make sure you disable the OS standy by modes (s1 & s3), make sure turn off hard disks are disabled and are always on because whenever your OS switches to standby mode the data on your HDD are corrupted because SATA drives are not built for standby modes. SATAs are usually used for servers, logically, servers do not go on stanby! I had turned on my standby modes and all my data got corrupted, sata drives crashed and months of work lost! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 29, 2004 Author Share Posted April 29, 2004 Thanks, good to know. It's going to be a Dell workstation and they spec them with SATA drives (or others), so I assume that they will have it set up to work correctly from the getgo. If not, the tech guys will be able to take care of it. It's really nice not to be responsible for the backup as well as the deadlines! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
salf Posted April 29, 2004 Share Posted April 29, 2004 OFFTOPIC: i can only dream to have the money to buy that kinda machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luckytohaveher Posted April 29, 2004 Share Posted April 29, 2004 Get a Raid-0 or Raid-5 setup. The key point is to get the 30% boost in overall performance with a 100% increase in disk speed. DON'T STARVE THE DUAL CPUS... Don't forget the network speed issues also. I would recommend a full-duplex Dual-Gigabit (2 ports) setup. The access speed of the cpus to memory is 6GB/sec each or so. The speeed to Raid-0 is about 60-80MB/sec. The speed to Dual-Gigabit full-duplex is about 400MB/sec. The speed of single gigabit full-duplex is 200MB/sec. Gig half duplex is 100MB/sec. 100baseT full is about 24MB/sec and half is about 12MB/sec. maximum. Think of the system as an assemblage of codependent pieces. Anyone single bottleneck will constrain the whole. I would HIGHLY recommend dual monitors. I went to dual monitors for VIZ/MAX in '98 and haven't looked back... Good luck... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
visual3d Posted April 29, 2004 Share Posted April 29, 2004 i wouldnt consider my self to be a guru or anything....but i think the best solution for a system drive(c: your windows/pagefile/installed programs) is that you use stripe sata but with raptor hdd, they come in 32gb with 8mb cache., so what you need is 2 raptor and simply stripe....0 it will outperform any othe sata combination...how do i know...because ive been using it. All this is not achieveable if youre not using the right motherboard...the best so far is the asus p4c800 deluxe...it outperforms any other p4 motherboard and the xeon pc-dl model out performs most server and workstation available.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
graphix Posted April 29, 2004 Share Posted April 29, 2004 Get a Raid-0 or Raid-5 setup. The key point is to get the 30% boost in overall performance with a 100% increase in disk speed. DON'T STARVE THE DUAL CPUS... Don't forget the network speed issues also. I would recommend a full-duplex Dual-Gigabit (2 ports) setup. The access speed of the cpus to memory is 6GB/sec each or so. The speeed to Raid-0 is about 60-80MB/sec. The speed to Dual-Gigabit full-duplex is about 400MB/sec. The speed of single gigabit full-duplex is 200MB/sec. Gig half duplex is 100MB/sec. 100baseT full is about 24MB/sec and half is about 12MB/sec. maximum. Think of the system as an assemblage of codependent pieces. Anyone single bottleneck will constrain the whole. I would HIGHLY recommend dual monitors. I went to dual monitors for VIZ/MAX in '98 and haven't looked back... First off you do NOT get a 100% disk speed increase. You only end up with maybe 30% Second off the network specs you speak of are very theoretical and you never end up with those "top speeds" Third the network stuff you speak of inorder to setup a workstation, cables, servers, switchs, and etc are EXTREAMLY expensive. graphix Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted April 29, 2004 Author Share Posted April 29, 2004 All sounds great, but the budget is limited. I am not doing photo real renderings all day, so I don't need access to a thousand maps often (so far I've textured two signs in the last 6 weeks!). The dual monitor scenario sounds really good. I'll be looking into that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vince Paske Posted April 30, 2004 Share Posted April 30, 2004 I actually prefer one BIG monitor to two, but hey, that's just me. If you go with LCD's, make sure the response time is in the 16 ms range or else they may not be able to keep up with your graphics card and result in ghosting as you move your model around and watch animations. I can honestly tell you that three 15,000 rpm Cheetah's in RAID 5 with a single gigabit lan just screams. You might to check out the Sony DRU-530a for a burner, it does everything, it's fast and is reasonably priced. Have fun! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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