Ok geeks, help me build a 3D monster PC :D

[SS8_Gohan]

howdy y'all

well i somehow managed to scrape by my motion graphics and 3d subjects with this piece of shit PC. Someone should have explained to me the full extent of the word "RENDER", fark me, that shit takes forever!!

anyways, i need a new PC and i figure there are enough IT people here who can point me in the right direction. I need the following..

* Dual 17" Flat Panels

* Really good sound card, one with AISO drivers or something?? (Needed for Guitar rig/music recording)

* DVD Burner

* Other CD drive

* Have firewire somehow

* Dual monitor graphics card

* Some other thing that can take a TV aerial input? TV Card?

That's pretty much it as i don't know what CPU i should get and how much RAM or what type, or what setup for HDD's i need. 1 large, 2 large'ish ones?? etc.

Looking to spend about $2000, maybe a few hundred more. I'm fairly confident i can build the thing, but i don't know what parts tho. Keep in mind this is for mainly 3D purposes, which i think means more emphasis on CPU rather than RAM?? Or more emphasis on graphics card? i dunno.

cheers,

chinny.

[predator]

oh gawd..

2 x Samsung 710N's or BenQ 737's - $500-600 each

Pioneer A108 16x DVD writer - ~$130

screw the other CD/DVD (why?) - $0

Winfast 2000XP expert - ~$85

AMD 64 3400+ 754 socket - ~$300

Gigabyte K8NSpro nforce3 mboard - $270

Sapphire VIVO X800pro - ~$700 (flash to X800XT)

Audigy ZS Platinum Pro - ~$350

1gb Corsair C2 PC3200 - ~$350

2 x WD 74gb Raptors (RAID em) - ~$280 each

Oh there goes your budget.. oh well .. it would kick ass

[GTRgeoff]

Buy PC powerplay and check their Beast and Mutant system specs, then go to a computer fair www.comtrader.com.au and save a motza.

Geez Gordo, you are a true Computer freak. I bet you didn't even have to look

[Guest RedLineGTR]

the main cost is the monitors for both you will be spending about $1000-$1100 bucks.

[(B1) MR_fanny]

yeah rendering....tell me about it...LOL i remember in uni doin alias on the 10yr old unix comps it would take a whole day to render and it was lucky dip, either it turned out good or it was shit!! now with my recent comp it now only takes 10-20mins for a decent hi res render.

i would think a dual processor would be the choice for 3d stuff?? then again everythings double the price cause of the dual thing...just like a gtr when you come to think of it:D:D

i think you can get a good comp for 2k, just forget about the dual monitor thingy or just buy one and link it up with ur old monitor till u can afford another one.

[foznice]

you need the second monitor for the recording right?... i use a similar setup at school but it's all for recording so there's only a shitty sound card. all i can say is save yourself some money by not getting flat panels... get like 2 19" monitors will be lots cheaper... but if your serious about the recording then you'd be WAY better off getting a proffesional standard soundcard (more dollars).. audigy's good i have one myself but it would definatly pay off. Try looking in the trading post for second hand ones.

[Blade]

GFX card...

Wait a couple of weeks for the Nvidia 6600GT the best low price range gfx card to hit the market.. at $200

Its equal if not better then the X800 radeon which is priced around $600 to 700...that could save you alot of money

And go to www.msy.com.au

They are cheap and good

[ferni]

If your using MAYA and stuff for your 3D, make sure they suppor the graphics card you buy or you will regret it, it will crash all over the shop...

as for rendering, you want the specs in a powerful CPU and at least 1GB of quick DDR ram, if you can afford it then 2GB would be good, run it in dual channel...

Rendering hard drive speed won't matter so much, but video editing it will, if your going to be capturing and editing video, buy some good 10,000rpm hard drives, or pick up some 2nd hand 15,000rpm scsi drives and just have a normal 7200rpm ide drive for storage...

raid i wouldn't bother with, it will be more trouble than its worth to someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of it...

not sure why you want dual monitors... i'd just get a big single, 21" flat screen CRT's are nice, or if you prefer LCD then a 19" one of those... personal preference....

[predator]

Geez Gordo, you are a true Computer freak. I bet you didn't even have to look  

yes, scary you'd even think I worked with computers or something

Like a few said - you're still best of with 2x 19" CRT's. From a design perspective, the colours are much "fuller" and lifelike to my eyes. Whilst I find the LCD's very crisp and bright, I don't find the colour representation as good for realistic graphic design work. LCD's are only 12bit colour or so, and have to use dithering to achieve the 24bit colour that CRT's have naturally. Also when it comes to running outside the "native resolution" on an LCD it also up or downsamples, resulting in poorer quality picture. They are not all roses.

Also I'd say in 12 months with things going the way they are 19" LCD will become more around the 17" LCD price at the moment.

The Pioneer A108 also supports dual layer at 4x - which allows you to pi...backup your movies in one hit without shrinking them and losing quality in about 25-30mins. All other current burners are only 2.4x at DL... not so important now 'cause dual layer discs are ~$12 and hard to come by but in 6 months when they're $1 you'll be using that feature a bit

[Horus]

haha

Gordo is 500 1337

[inark]

GFX card...

Wait a couple of weeks for the Nvidia 6600GT the best low price range gfx card to hit the market.. at $200

Its equal if not better then the X800 radeon which is priced around $600 to 700...that could save you alot of money

And go to www.msy.com.au

They are cheap and good

i dont shop anywhere else for PC parts... just be prepared to wait a long time in the queue in a very cramped space chinny

best thing to do if u dont know any gold members is to go buy 200 worth of shit u need... then become a member cause u get even better prices.

im about to start building a new gaming box which is going to cost around the $4k mark and thats just with a CRT not a Panel monitor.... LCDs suck are for gaming.

[inark]

yes, scary you'd even think I worked with computers or something

Like a few said - you're still best of with 2x 19" CRT's. From a design perspective, the colours are much "fuller" and lifelike to my eyes. Whilst I find the LCD's very crisp and bright, I don't find the colour representation as good for realistic graphic design work. LCD's are only 12bit colour or so, and have to use dithering to achieve the 24bit colour that CRT's have naturally. Also when it comes to running outside the "native resolution" on an LCD it also up or downsamples, resulting in poorer quality picture. They are not all roses.  

Also I'd say in 12 months with things going the way they are 19" LCD will become more around the 17" LCD price at the moment.

The Pioneer A108 also supports dual layer at 4x - which allows you to pi...backup your movies in one hit without shrinking them and losing quality in about 25-30mins. All other current burners are only 2.4x at DL... not so important now 'cause dual layer discs are ~$12 and hard to come by but in 6 months when they're $1 you'll be using that feature a bit

i would only agree to that if we were talking PCs... which we are... LCDs are far better for design purposes when using a proper computer for design... ie a MAC.

Everyone i know in design... 20+ people.. most of them my family all use LCDs and MACs, its an industry std. They only use PCs for rips to queue up jobs.

[SS8_Gohan]

wow, ok, a few things to look into.

First off, how much are we talking for 2 X 19" CRT's? It's about $1000 - $1100 for 2 X 17" Flat Panels. I wanted dual for tutorials and for stuff like Photoshop, just dump all your tools and shit on one monitor, and then have your workspace clean and uncluttered on the other. And no, i don't like running 1600 x 1200 or whatever that hubble space telescope sized resolution is.

I do want to stick as close to the $2000 as much as possible. So i guess we could try and chop some things a bit. And i don't need software! Is that what Winfast XP is??

Ok, i do know some gold members, so i'll check the msy.com.au stuff.

* 2 X 19" CRT's - $?

* Pioneer A108 16x DVD Writer (mate told me about this as well) - $130

* AMD 64 3400+ 754 socket - $300

* Gigabyte K8NSpro nforce3 mboard - $270 (msy seems to have a K8NSpro for $185, don't know if it's nforce3 or whatever)

* Sapphire VIVO X800pro - $700<- What's this??? Graphics Card? What's flash to X800XT?

* Audigy ZS Platinum Pro - $350

* 1gb Corsair C2 PC3200 - $350

* 2 x WD 74gb Raptors - $560 - (seems expensive for 2 Hard Drives?? Are these special jobbies?)

TOTAL (estimating $800 for 2 CRT's) = $3460

Ok, where can we cut this biatch down? If the Sapphire is the graphics card, it seems pretty expensive, so do the HD's. I've already got a 19' CRT, but i want matching monitors

So yeah, now we gotta cut this monster down a bit

thanks for all your help guys!

[SS8_Gohan]

MSY.com.au prices

* 2 x 19" Viewsonic G90F+(Flat) - $630

* Pioneer A108 16x DVD Writer - $130

* AMD 64 3400+ 754 socket - $358

* Gigabyte K8NSpro nforce3 mboard - $175

* Gigabyte K8NSNXP nforce3 1294b, SATA, Raid - $270

* Sapphire VIVO X800 pro (closest i could find...)

256M ASUS AX800PRO/TVD/P ATI 800pro - TVD - $705

* Audigy ZS Platinum Pro - $350 (Couldn't find it)

There was an Audigy 2 for $165

* 1gb Corsair C2 PC3200 - $350 (Couldn't find Corsair)

There were listings for DDR Memory and DDR 2 Memory

1gb of DDR 1 memory, around $260

* 2 X WD 74gb Raptors (couldn't find it)

These raptor drives must be speical cos i could get 2 X 250gb drives for less!

ok, these AREN'T at member prices. Looks like money can be save at...

* Monitors

* Graphics card

* Hard Drives

* Sound card?

* Motherboard.

msy.com.au TOTAL = $2900 - there abouts. NOT member price.

what sorta discount to members get? 5%?

As cool as it would be gordy to have the above stuff, do i really need it all??? Just something i can run like After Effects, 3D Studio, Photoshop, all at the same time without chugging like a biatch.

Interested in this 10,000 rpm and 15,000 rpm hard drives, care to explain further ferni??

cheers guys.

[SS8_Gohan]

oh yeah, my friend has had a lot of problems with this RAID stuff - should i bother setting it up? If it's setup right in the first place, will it not be a problem?

[Downforce]

Ok first of all - The biggest performance bottleneck in your system will still be your hard drives. If you want faster performance, go for Ultra320 SCSI drives. They cost a fair bit more (probably out of your budget) but you cant really compare them to IDE/ATA/SATA drives. SCSI drives still own them all, as they communicate independantly of the CPU over the SCSI bus.

Follow that up with the fastest 775pin P4 processor you can afford and minimum 1Gb+ DDR RAM and it should do just fine for what you want to use the system for.. If you use alot of multi-threaded 3D applications that will take advantage of multiple CPU performance, consider a dual-CPU system. You will notice the difference in apps like Lightwave 7.5 and 3D Studio Max 5.1. P4 processors generally score higher benchmarks in 3D rendering performance than 32bit AMD CPU's - this is mainly due to the hyperthreading capabilities in P4 processors.

Regardless if you decide to go with AMD or Intel, just make sure you setup your swap files, virtual memory and scratch disks properly to make the most of your new hardware. Fine tuning and tweaking your operating system will enhance performance alot. Also, dont bother with overclocking it will shorten the life of your hardware, and if it's set up properly in the first place - why bother?

For your graphics card, unless you need VERY fast gaming performance, you dont need the newest fastest card there is. For example if you bought an ATI Radeon X800 XT/Pro, you would need a very fast CPU to make the most of the graphics card performance (slower CPU will be your bottleneck). On a PC platform, most of your 3D application rendering work will be done by the CPU, not the graphics card. I'd only spend up to $300 on graphics card for your purposes - go for an ATI Radeon chipset-based AGP card with 128Mb or 256Mb RAM on-board. If you're buying LCD's get a card with DVI output (if your LCD's support DVI). I'd also recommend buying a card with a 256-bit memory interface such as the ATI 9800 series cards (which also have DVI-I and TV-out). They will out-perform other 128-bit cards, even if the other cards have more on-board memory.

Oh and go here for the direct price list - http://www.msy.com.au/Parts/PARTS_W.HTM

Hope this helps. Good hunting.

[SS8_Gohan]

how much are looking at for these SCSI drives? Maybe i'll get 1 smallish SCSI drive my system drive, with XP, programs etc, and then like 1, 10,000rpm storage drive??

It seems like i can cut money from the graphics card, maybe i can use it to get SCSI drives??

cheers

[ferni]

10,000rpm, 15,000rpm are spin speeds of the drives, the faster generally the better, scsi doesn't use your cpu where ide does, but like i said, unless your doing lots of video capture stuff then the fast hard drive isn't worth it... and yes stay away from raid in your sitch...

with 3d, cpu and ram is more important than hard drive since its all calculations not huge files....

as said above, LCD's aren't that good outside thier native resolution, where CRT's are fine as long as they support it

why are you going for dual monitors?

[NS2500]

Throw as much as you can at CPU/RAM for what you're doing. I don't believe the HD speeds are going to make a cost effective difference, and today's IDE/SATA drives are pretty good with a decent CPU behind them. I would definitely set up RAID, not sure which way would be best for you though - fault tolerance or throughput, or both if you don't mind using 4 disks (minimum for 0+1).

Once you've worked out your parts list send me a PM as I reckon I can compete with MSY, and my firm sponsored the SAU team at Autosalon...keep it in the family!

[adznight]

Dont bother with SCSI, it's over kill for a desktop system. Just use Serial ATA. Look at around a 3.2ghz LGA P4 as they are the best value for money. RAM depending on what mainboard you use would be Dual Channel DRR 400, there is the option of 533mhz but at double the price is a speed increase I couldn't justify for the cost. If you want a quote let me know and I'll see what I can do for you once you know what you want.

Hehe just read the post above Wise geek words.