i was wondering if some of the PC users out there would share some of their experiences with their machines. specifically, rendering speed vs. processor & or components.

i'm going to be chucking my mac in favor of a more render efficient pc in the next month or two, and i have no clue which chip will suit me best. so i'd love to get your input.

thanks,
scott

I have a three month old 2.4 intel, a crucial 128mb graphics card, 1024mb ram and an Epox motherboard/works wonderful for image rendering, still takes a long time for high-resolution animation (w/Carrara). My last machine was a AMD 1600/512mb ram and a high end graphics card...The AMD worked fine also but was very noisy compared to the Intel. also go with Windows XP its a lot more stable than ME or 98.. I think Windows 2000 is very stable but has limits on graphics/graphic cards (I have not done 3D on 2000). I have used Gateway, Dell and I put together my current PC piece by piece. Its alot more expensive than buying from a Dell, but you get what you want. Hope this was some help

This is a really tough question. I would also consider asking this in the hardware forum. I'm now running an AMD 2700+ on a pretty hot ASUS board and I've gotten about a 70% boost in performance over my older AMD 1.4. Geforce 4 Video, and always a Gig of RAM (too cheap not too basically). My advice would be to spend as much money on a CPU and a mothboard that will hold it plus a reasonably recent video card and fill in the rest as your budget allows. Very tough question. -Kix

Scott,

Check out this thread from a few months back. It's a little out of date, but it compares relatively recent Athlon XPs and P4s on the same Carrara render.

Spooky Render

From the responses it looks like the Athlon XPs are pretty snappy in Carrara so they would certainly be a good choice. On the Intel side, my brother-in-law just bought a Dell 8250, P4 1066RDram memory, really fast, and almost completely quiet.

I'm actually curious if anyone who knows pokes their head in here, does the hyperthreading on the new P4s and Xeons make a difference in Carrara? Can someone render that same spooky final.car off the content CD with and without hyperthreading turned on?

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

I have a p4 1.8 w/512m 64m video card on old machine and limited harddrive for paging mem - so bought a new machine with tons of harddrive [P4 2.8 intel] w/1g mem 128m video card and the difference in High Detail Rendering is night and day - the difference in standard default rendering is just seconds.

Lots of memory and free harddisk is imperative on any 3d program so far as I can tell. I have purchased many machines from http://www.cyberpowerpc.com and other than being greedy and NOT getting an intel motherboard (wanted to overclock - switched to intel mb!) to go with intel chip - have not had any problem and their prices are pretty darn good....

Good luck moving to pc - I know my best friend finally made the move and the first few months were continual headache for her ('specially when she found her mac software wouldnt work on pc) but now she wont move from pc and she is a college prof in liberal arts arena [artist]- so being pc bound isn't 2 bad ;-)

"Dell and I put together my current PC piece by piece. Its alot more expensive than buying from a Dell, but you get what you want." A lot more expensive!?! Where are you buying from? It should be inexpensive, you can build what dell gives you, most of the time for about $400-500 less! Brian

Brian,

I'm not so sure that's true anymore. The last couple of boxes I bought from Dell, I couldn't have built for the same price. On top of that I got a machine with a single warrenty point of contact and a lot quieter and more stable machine than the homegrown ones I had done before. I think if you go for a bunch of the upgrades (tons of memory, fastest video card, biggest harddrive, etc., DVD burner) you end up paying a premium, but for a basic machine it's hard to beat the package deals unless you've already got parts or you're stealing your OS.

The 8250 mentioned above, I purchased back in November. It was 2.4 ghz, 256meg of 1066 RDram, 30gig, Geforce 4MX, DVD, XP Home for $1032 shipped. Not a particularly good deal, until you count the $510 in rebates!! :) I still can't beat that price with parts 4 months later.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Scott: What Mac are you dumping, I just got a dual 1.25 GHz G-4 with a 20" Apple Cinama Display and it runs Carrara like a dream. For spot rendering it is almost instantaneous. Although I do understand that for what I paid, you could get a top of the line PC with a faster Chip and Bus. It came with a Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card. I use Adobe y Macromedia stuff heavily and relay on ColorSync work flow so to me a PC was out of the question. Besides, I really dig OS X. I just got it last week so I haven't tried it on any thing to complex with C. But from my initial test it runs more than adequate. It dose seem to take advantage of the symmetric multiprocessing, in C and OS X.
I my self have been thinking to get a PC, but the ones at work really discourage me, since they seem so hard to trouble shoot and unstable. But I've heard good thing about XP.

We just received DELL laptops: Precision M50 (2GHz Mobile P4, 512 MB RAM, Quadro4 500 GoGL, 1600x1200 display, windows 2000 professional) at work. I just brought it home to demo a remote connection. I am amazed. I have a Mac g4 867 MHz, 768 Mb RAM, ATI 8500. I installed Carrara 2.1 just to see how it compared on a number of models. The renders were twice as quick with the DELL and the OpenGL responsiveness was quite amazing. I am now totally smitten. I want one. To top it off, I have a Linksys router connected to my cable modem. Plugged in the laptop, the network settings were already set to "Obtain an IP address automatically" so I was on the net straight away. Shared a disk on the laptop and I was able to mount it from my Mac straight away with out any trouble and copied files across. So, i learned that the underlying PC hardware is quite amazing (and would love to hear from someone who is using a new Mac Laptop) and could quite easily replace my PC workstation at work. I also learned the the MACOS 10.2.4 has come a long way when I can effortly mount a PC disk. The laptop cost about CA$5000, which was about the same I bought my MAC for less than 2 years ago. I love the portability, my next computer will probably be a laptop. I choose the PC workstations at work and am looking to replace our ageing ones. DELL does have some very good deals and are backed up with very good support, which I always stress when I recommend co-workers buy there own (make sure you can take it back and get a full refund if you don't like it!). I've never really stressed Carrara to push it to the limits interms of polygons. Most of the CAD models I've imported have not totalled to much more than 250,000 polygons when all is modelled. It would be nice to get some feedback from people who have done models with 1,000,000+ polygons to see if the hardware is stressed and to see how well Carrara copes. I don't think you'll be disappointed with whatever PC you buy. Just make sure you get a full refund if you don't like it (and have it in writing). A

Scott If you go to a PC I wouldnt touch any thing less then a 2 KHz P4 box for running Carrara Poser 5 or programs like Max. 512 + memory (As much as you can for animation) is a must for PC graphics and animation usage<<. I have tested a lot of the programs running on lesser boxes with a lot of frustration and they have all demonstrated very sluggish response times or lock up when rendering or adding heavy detail and textures. If you go with a name brand, make sure you know whats inside and pay close attention to the graphics card they are offering. I tried 3 top name brands and all of them displayed different colors on rendering and play back of animations. (Try and stick with whom you have used before or see if they can change the card). If you are up to it, also check out what it would take to building a box your self. You will get exactly what you want and what you need. I hope this helps. :) George

I built my own windows pc (and one for my partner) using parts from a local www.pcclub.com store. The machines have been working great overall and it was nice to be able to hand select the components (I got a roomy enermax case for mine that makes tinkering with the machine a breeze). Installation was rather straightforward and really the only tough part was setting the front side bus speed properly in the BIOS (but a quick call to pcclub resolved that) and installing the drivers for the onboard sound module. I got a lesser case for my partner's machine but the power supply blew out after only a month or so (but fortunately pcclub replaced it at no charge and the new one has been working fine) so I would definitely recommend getting a beefy power supply. Carrara is a bit finicky when it comes to video cards (especially those from ATI even though they are my personal favorite); sometimes you have to get just the right set of drivers (and not necessarily the latest ones) and I don't think I've ever been able to get opengl support working on an ATI card. I run dual boot with win98se and win2k server and many apps (especially adobe apps like after effects and premiere) are much more stable on win2k but that hasn't really been the case with Carrara (somewhat to my surprise). It's too bad really that render times on the mac are so slow by comparison since there are a lot of things to like about the new macs and OSX. I've certainly been getting a lot of use out of my eMac (among other things, it makes a great office stereo!) but I try to avoid using it for anything that needs to render (except final cut pro which I love). If Apple could just get faster cpus I think they'd really be on to something.

Just read that a guy named Ken Northern has built and is selling the world's fastest uni-processor pc at 480-705-4844 (no web site given). Supposedly the machine was four times faster than the fastest mac (at least on photoshop tests). Also, one of my clients has a Dell and I think it seems a bit flimsy and not that well put together. The enermax case I chose myself at pcclub could open a big can of whoop-ass on the Dell case :-) A final thought is that some of the time you save rendering on the PC will be lost because you'll have to constantly reboot (although maybe XP is more stable than win98se). On all of my pcs so far I've had to reboot (or sometimes even cold boot) on an hourly basis in order to keep things running smoothly. By comparison, I've only managed to completely lock up my eMac once so far. If Apple could just get some decent iron I swear I'd lay down some shock and awe on my pc and then throw it out the window.

hartcons,

Maybe the comment "The machines have been working great overall" and "On all of my pcs so far I've had to reboot (or sometimes even cold boot) on an hourly basis in order to keep things running smoothly" don't say the same story? If you are really having that much trouble with your PC, something is wrong. Bad hardware, more likely bad driver. Of the six boxes I move between, they never get rebooted unless windows update tells me I need to reboot to finish installation of the update. Maybe the difference is, all are running win2k or XP, and all but one are a major brand PC (IBM or Dell). They might get rebooted once a week if there is an update. The homegrown PC, a dual 800 PIII, used to be a little twitchy (though not the reboot hourly variety) under win2k, but runs great under XP. All the boxes are used for Carrara and coding, some games, some video work in Premier.

Best regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

I've had branded PCs (my HP exhibited all sorts of bizarre behavior and the Gateway wasn't very reliable either including one time when the motherboard went down and I couldn't even get win98se to install on a compaq I tried out recently because they use a non-standard motherboard) that were seriously unstable as well. I think a lot of the problem might be win98 (with its severe USER and GDI resource constraints) although I haven't seen that Carrara is any more stable under win2k (surprisingly) or maybe it's the fact that I'm running a netbeui network. Or maybe Athlon chips suck contrary to popular belief (we've been running Athlon chips for years in our pcs instead of pentiums because of the cost savings and hoping that they are 100% compatible). I can't use XP just yet because it won't work properly with my existing netbeui network (it can't see the win2k fileserver for some reason even after I install netbeui by hand off the install cd). I also don't like the way XP appears to force you to use one machine as the bottleneck (er, gateway) to the internet; I don't want each machine dependent on the gateway machine's availability in order to reach the internet. I've had lots of other problems with pcs over the years like incompatibilities with various firewire cards (with one card my pc wouldn't shut down it would just keep on rebooting forever until I pulled the power plug!) and video cards (it seems like I can either get Lightwave behaving properly or Carrara but never both at the same time using the same video card and drivers!) and on and on and on and I just don't recall ever having problems like that with a Mac. I can hardly recall a weekend in the last 9 years that I haven't spent at least a little time working on the PCs (meanwhile the eMac keeps chugging along unattended). If macs weren't so darn slow and expensive and our fileserver wasn't pc-based (and my partner was willing to switch) I'd seriously consider going mostly mac for our little shop. Are you XP users (and especially the Athlon ones) out there able to run all day and do lots of work with lots of different apps without rebooting? That would be a nice change although at least the newer machines reboot fairly quickly!

I can't speak to the reliability of the Athlons, my last foray into the non-intel cpu was a Cyrix 166 (please don't laugh, I was poor, it was cheap). It was so bad I've been pure Intel ever since. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild 3D extensions for Carrara http://digitalcarversguild.com

I use both Macs and PC's My main everyday system: Apple PowerMac G4 DP450, 1GB RAM, ATI 8500 AGP, 120GB 7200 HD. Mac OSX 10.2.4, Apple 17" Studio Display (CRT). This is the main system I use C2 on, and is very speedy even as compared to the other PC's on my desktop: A 2.54 GHZ P4 with 512MB RAM, Geforce 4 Ti 4400 with 128mb VRAM and Windows XP Pro. This is a very quick system, but for everyday use, the Mac is more then fine and is allot less trouble not too mention more fun to use. The PC does excell for games and Mojoworld though. I also have a Cube type PC with a P4 1.8Ghz and 512MB RAM I use as a domain controller and a server. It is a shuttleX pc, and for its size (about 5" high X 11" deep X 7" wide) is complete, even sporting an AGP slot and a Heat Pipe cooling system that is quieter then any PC in my studio. This would be an awesome system for 3D rendering, they also make a AMD compatiable version as well. The caveat of these systems is you have to buy them custom built from a local dealer. They don't offer pre-configured units. If you are interested, though, contact me off list as I have sources and the ability to custom configure a system up to a P4 3.06 Ghz.... All in all, I choose the Mac because of its elegence, trouble free operation and it's UNIX underpinnings. But I could totally understand why you would want to jump ship to a PC. The current macs are not as fast as the current PC's. However I have heard, from reliable sources, that Apple will be releasing a completly new system architechture utilizing a new CPU that will once again leapfrog the Wintel world... Stay tuned, I hear that a July to early fall rollout is likely

thanks for all the comments.

a note to PAGzone, I couldn't agree with you more about macs being a more elegant solution. and I have dual 1.25 right now that is pretty fast at rendering, but my needs in computing have changed, and I find myself needing portability.

so I'm getting a powerbook, selling the dual 1.25, and grabbing a reasonably priced pc to do the rendering on.

this way i can still have desktop power when i absolutely need it, but most of the time i will be still using a mac.

about new macs -- i can't wait. but i'm really excited about the machines that will eventually be coming out with IBM powerpc chips. that won't be for a couple years. sigh.

anyway thanks for all the advice.

-scott