High Performance PC advice

[kieran]

Hi guys, im looking to buy a high performance PC. Been looking at the Dell XPS series and was wondering if this will give me decent results. At the moment im struggling, on a Dell Dual Core with a Radeon 1900XT, to get any decent render times.

Here is the spec:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Processor (2.66GHz, 1066MHz, 4MB)
Windows XP
4096MB Dual Channel DDR2 677MHz [4x1024] Memory
1TB Serial ATA RAID 0 Stripe (2x500GB 7200rpm drives with DataBurst™ cache)
SINGLE 768MB nVidia® GeForce® 8800 GTX graphics card
128MB Ageia™ PhysX™ physics accelerator PCI card

Do you reckon this would possibly be the best i could buy or do you think a custom build would give me better results?

[kieran]

Should explain this further:

Im struggling to get any decent render times with radiosity turned on, either standard or using a sky dome. Is the above machine going to actually give me better render times?

Example: Produced a single frame last night (640x480) using a sky dome and radiosity set at 6x8. Took me 1 hr 24 minsfor the single frame.

[avkills]

* cough * have you looked at a MacPro 8-core machine? You can run Windows on them with good results.

-mark

[Andyjaggy]

I built a new machine about a month ago. I specked out what I wanted on Newegg.com I then went to Dell and configured a machine to what I specked out on Newegg. My custom built machine was going to be 500 dollars cheaper then the Dell machine. Building your own is definately the way to go, unless of coarse you just don't want to fuss with it, but I have had zero problems with mine.

I would also suggest getting the quad core. If you do go with the core 2 duo I would get the 6600. It's a lot cheaper then the 6700 and you can easily overclock it to 6700 speeds. That's what I did anyway.

Oh and the physics card will do you no good unless you are a gamer.

[warrenwc]

I have a Dell & it's been a really reliable good machine for 3yrs.
BUT
EVERYTHING IS PROPRIETARY!
My case fan failed the other day(The only thing that has) & the plug for the fan is Dell only.
I got a Thermaltake that uses a drive power plug, but now I have to hit F1 every time I boot because the motherboard can't see my fan & thinks it is still dead.
If you want to upgrade at any point , Don't go with a Dell.
Otherwise they're great.

[Andyjaggy]

Sounds like Dell is as bad as Sony when it comes to propietary crap. My Sony laptop has been great but I wouldn't have bought Sony except for the fact that I stumbled across a great deal.

[Andyjaggy]

Is the 8800 still having issues with Lightwave? That's why I went with the 7900.

[warrenwc]

I think the 8800 is having problems with a lot of things, but it seems to be that the drivers are still in development.
I'm using ATI.

[avkills]

But everything except the processors is crap. Memory architecture sucks compared to a modern PC chipset, the standard 7300GT graphics card that Apple supplies is a joke (you can upgrade to a fairly good ATI card, but it's still lousy in todays market). It's going to be seriously expensive if you want it to do anything else than processing tasks (pure render box). For that money I could build a Xeon based PC that would wipe it out in a flash. And if I wanted only the processing, I could build a scalable 1U system much cheaper.

Apple = bad - unless you absolutely must have OSX to live your life as a happy, content person. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to buy an Apple box to run Windows on.

Fair enough; I am disappointed in the memory for sure; I would have rather had the choice between the ECC FB-DIMM or cheap DDR2. But I am going to doubt that you could build/or buy with the same processing muscle for cheaper.

The GPUs are not all that bad; but definitely not ideal.

-mark

[Andyjaggy]

You were right Neverko I just checked on Newegg and the quad core chip is now 550 bucks. Kind of makes me mad that for 200 more dollars I could have gotten twice the processing power if I had waited a month. Thats the way it rolls with computer though, and I am happy with my duo.

[ShawnStovall]

Dell... what a nightmare!:devil: Well we first got(well I don't know if I can even call it the same computer)this computer in 2001, and everything worked fine, for a while. When I first started getting into things 3D was about two years ago and until that point I knew nothing of computers, AT ALL. So after a while I knew some about graphics cards and I decided to get a new one(at this point I still knew next to nothing about the inside of a computer) and got the GeForce FX 5500 that I had for almost one and a half years. After about 6 months with the card it started acting up, the blue screen. We took it into the a local repair shop and we found out that for some reason, I don't remember, that the mother board from Dell was not compatible with the card even though every spec screamed that it was, we got a new motherboard and a new case which put us out about $250(which is a whole lot in this house). That is exactly why I will never buy from Dell.

[avkills]

Regarding my earlier posts; I guess if money is no object and 3D is your life then a BOXX system would probably be my choice if you had to operate on Windows.

If it is a hobby then buy the cheapest/most powerful system you can afford.

-mark

[Andyjaggy]

Money is always an object :) Usually consisting of one polygon.