buying new hardware - need suggestions

[southparx]

i'm planning to buy a new hardware, so please give me suggestions on which i should get:

Xeon 2.4 or Athlon MP 2800 or Athlon XP or Pentium4 2.8 FSB800?

Geforce FX 5600 Ultra 256MB or ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB?

i read somewhere that Maya renders faster on AMD, so how about Lightwave?

thanx for the reply, appreciate it.
take care

[garg]

Hehehe this is the tipical question that will wake up wild discuttions... But without giving you a direct answer about the CPU look a this website:

http://www.blanos.com/benchmark/

For radiosity and raytrace:
Select the scene "Rad. Ref. Things"

For hypervoxel (and only for that :-)
Select the scene "Variation"

Put the number of CPU to 1 and press the search button.

For the graphical card. Beside the fact I'm not sure 256Mb will be helpfull to you (unless you work with a lot of hires textures) I will go to NVIDIA as it seams ATI have some problems with LW... But be carfoul those FX card make a lot of noise and a lot of heat !

Alain Bertrand

[Beamtracer]

The Apple G5. Faster than all the above.