Advice on proposed workstation

[Fortinbras79]

The company I work for is interested in purchasing me a new work station. I went off the information posted in this thread, and the IT guys, who work with Dell, suggested this as an alternative. Can anyone make any suggestions or comments on ways to bring the price down some? Also if there is anything unnecessary or in fact lacking in this configuration?

 

Is it too much? Too little? Are there better options?

 

Thanks so much

[Camby1298]

I would say a lot depends on what kind of work you develop. My co worker and I run on T5500s, and I have little complaints. We work for a large architecture firm, where the revit models coming into Max are quite large and detailed, Our Max scenes get pretty large geometry wise. And were able to handle the majority on a T5500, I know of other Artists in the area who have T5500s and am enjoying it. The only thing I would upgrade immediatly on this machine is the graphics card. Other than that, we're running on 12 gb RAM, and Dual Quad Xeons. Looking at the specifications at the T7500, yeah it would be nice to have at my hands, but do I NEED so much in a machine...admitably no.

[AJLynn]

I don't like it - too expensive. Single Xeon configs rarely make sense, they're not more powerful than i7's but usually more expensive. This Xeon is a $1700 chip that's 8% faster than a $600 Core i7 970. Then the video card - there is no good reason to buy a Quadro NVS. The NVS 420 is two Geforce 8400 GS chips on one card with 256MB per GPU for $460 - that's slower than the laptop I bought 5 years ago this month.

 

My advice, take a look at 3datstech.com and the High End system there - if you double the RAM and add the monitors it's still less than half the cost of that Dell and it's faster (8% less CPU power but far more GPU power). Make your IT guys earn their paychecks by assembling it for you because so far they haven't pulled their weight.