mightcouldb1 Posted March 19, 2010 Share Posted March 19, 2010 I'm in the market for building a new rig and I was curious what some of you guys think I should allocate my money towards. How much ram? Quadro card? CPU? Any advice is appreciated as always! Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allegro Posted March 19, 2010 Share Posted March 19, 2010 I'm in the market for building a new rig and I was curious what some of you guys think I should allocate my money towards. How much ram? Quadro card? CPU? Any advice is appreciated as always! Jason I'd be tempted to wait for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulftown_(microprocessor) if there is no immediate rush for a new system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pclaes Posted March 19, 2010 Share Posted March 19, 2010 Next week the fermi cards are released... might want to get a gfx 480... http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/19/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480-and-470-specs-and-pricing-emerge/ Apart from that: 8 to 12 gig is enough for most things these days. dual quad core xeon (HP does them) Ubuntu 64 bit 24 inch screen is nice as you can split your interface in houdini nicely. Fast boot disk (300gig), big data disk 1.5TB, external backup (2Tb). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pclaes Posted March 19, 2010 Share Posted March 19, 2010 for 2000 usd you will have to build it yourself though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted March 20, 2010 Author Share Posted March 20, 2010 That gulftown is processor is $1139.99 on newegg... Looks cool, but might be outside my price range. Would it be better to go with a gaming card(gfx 480) than a quadro? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ratman Posted March 20, 2010 Share Posted March 20, 2010 Get an i7 920, a good mobo(I got a Gigabyte one), 6-12GB of ram, and a Geforce 260GTX or higher, and you're golden. Don't forget a nice array of HDs and a decent monitor, 24" or higher, Dell makes good ones. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Macha Posted March 20, 2010 Share Posted March 20, 2010 (edited) I work on two i7 920. One has a quadro and the other a 9600GT. There is no benefit from the quadro as far as I experience. The biggest difference is in the OS and memory. You really need 64 bit, and as much ram as you can afford. More cores don't mean better performance. Most of the sims you are likely to run use just one core most of the times, although rendering does of course improve. And, get a SSD for your main OS if you possibly can. It makes a big difference in my opinion. Good luck! Edited March 20, 2010 by Macha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allegro Posted March 20, 2010 Share Posted March 20, 2010 Get an i7 920, a good mobo(I got a Gigabyte one), 6-12GB of ram, and a Geforce 260GTX or higher, and you're golden. Don't forget a nice array of HDs and a decent monitor, 24" or higher, Dell makes good ones. I bought a Geforce GTX280 Man... it works good, but I bought an overclocked model, and it generates a lot of heat/sound. You might not want to go with overclocked, or be prepared to have to do something about the heat in your system Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mightcouldb1 Posted March 20, 2010 Author Share Posted March 20, 2010 Thanks for the advice guys. I think I'm ready to buy some parts now. Does anyone know if there going to be more support for multitreading/multi core processors in the 11th release? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted March 21, 2010 Share Posted March 21, 2010 More cores don't mean better performance. Most of the sims you are likely to run use just one core most of the times, although rendering does of course improve. As Macha says, it actually depends on what you're doing. For example if you're more into shading/rendering/lighting stuff, more cores will definitely be felt as Mantra does use them. But if you do character animation, they won't make much of a difference. The sims are a different beast, they are not that much multithreaded now, but this is improving. I can imagine future releases of Houdini will get more and more multithreaded. And as much RAM as you can afford, it helps with everything: raytracing, simulations, compositing. Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allegro Posted March 22, 2010 Share Posted March 22, 2010 This site seems to have decent products for cooling. Especially this particular link if you're going with a gtx 280 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pclaes Posted March 22, 2010 Share Posted March 22, 2010 Hi Stephen, what kind of power does that gtx 280 need? I've got a 800W at the moment powering my old geforce 8800 gtx, but planning to upgrade to a new gtx 480 when they come out. Do you think 800W is enough? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheAdmira1 Posted March 22, 2010 Share Posted March 22, 2010 (edited) core i7 920 (running 3.4ghz on air cooling without any problems at all ) 12 gb of ram asus rampage extreme II motherboard(god-like, overclocking made tooo easy?) quadrofx 1800 (like macha said dont really notice much difference from my old gt) and as pclaes said, a fast boot drive is always nice. i am running ubuntu 9.04 x64 on a 10k rpm velociraptor by wd and it fllyyysssss haha also if you're looking for a nice clean solid case w plenty of room, great cooling, awesome wire management, and wheeels!! the cooler master haf 932 is amazing... hope this helps just saw the $2000 max... im not sure if this rig falls under that category these days? i really hope not, i had to fork over a decent amount more than that... haha Edited March 22, 2010 by TheAdmira1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allegro Posted March 22, 2010 Share Posted March 22, 2010 (edited) Hi Stephen, what kind of power does that gtx 280 need? I've got a 800W at the moment powering my old geforce 8800 gtx, but planning to upgrade to a new gtx 480 when they come out. Do you think 800W is enough? Nvidia says 236w so depending on the rest of your set-up, it should be fine. I ended up having to buy a supplementary psu when I got mine because my old psu didn't have any 6 or 8 pin plugs to connect to the video card. For this card you need to: have lots of space to have the card (it's big) plug it into the pci-e port have a 6-pin connection from your psu have an 8-pin connection from your psu Edited March 22, 2010 by Allegro Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted March 22, 2010 Share Posted March 22, 2010 but planning to upgrade to a new gtx 480 when they come out. Do you think 800W is enough? From what I've read, you need a power supply that can supply 42A on the 12V rail. This also happened to be the spec for my GTX260. This information is usually listed in table form on the back of your power supply. I heard it gobbles up to 298W at load. Yikes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pclaes Posted March 23, 2010 Share Posted March 23, 2010 thanks for the info! I've heard it is indeed a bit power hungry, but I want to start developing some things in cuda and all those procs look mighty good . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.