I have just built myself a brand new MONSTER of a pc. It comes in a Shuttle case (about 6"x6"x12" ish) packing a Pentium 4 3000Mhz chip , 800mhz front system bus, 512Mb ram, dvd super drive thingy (burns all discs under the sun!), ATi Radeon 9600 AIW, (this next bit scares me...) a 200 gig harddrive. all that is topped off with wireless broadband and a 17" TFT monitor. it as a million and one doodahs on the front includeding firewire. yay! it does prod a rather large donkey! i think i will use this months challenge to test drive the raw POWER of it's cpu. i have tested the graphics card extensively! if you haven't got UT2004 yet, buy it NOW! mind you i can't seem to remember where i put my bryce 5 cd... John PS: i have finally consigned my floppy drive to the bin! who needs one when i have bootable USB 2! John leans back in his chair, chuffed to absolute bits! PPS: my budget didn't strech to a webcam so you can't see it yet!

hmmmmm......

LOL, fair point!

512mb of ram? pfft :P drac

i know but i had a budget!

Be a good idea to RAID up that lone drive...

i have the spave for a 2nd, i am waiting for the 400gb ones to become a bit more affordable....

So with all that clock at your disposal now - you're going to set up a VPN and make it available to us for lighting renders? ;)

Can you say volumetrics?

bah (that was my jaw falling off) Im building one off newegg right now, and now all I can do is hang my head in shame:( cant wait to see some renders!!

• Flak looks at his PIII 450 with its 320MB of pc100 and its 16MB riva tnt and three HDDs totalling 38GB and feels strangely inadequate *

When I became a Bryce Mod I was still using my PI 200Mhz, with 32mb of ram, 8 gigs of hard drives, and a 1 mb video card, lol. AS

You were still using that up till about 2 years ago, weren't you AS?

Flak - it ain't the Mhz it's the H.P. ... and the volumetric efficiency! Now you've done it - I feel a Beach Boys song coming on and the last time I tried to sing one of their songs my adenoids went south for the winter.

So now I know why my lights were dimming, stop rebooting that thing up! ;)

Hey Flak, if you can produce such awesome work on your box, IT CANNOT be inadequate! Kudo's dude!

Oh my god, you're right...I just checked. I passed my two years as a Mod about 5 weeks ago. (I didn't even know, lol) Time FLIES when you're having fun. AS

lol, apparently it seems I joined here about 2 years and 4 weeks ago - time does fly when you're having fun.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1657380

Dang burgi, that's one monster machine! Make sure you check out the this benchmark thread. Lets see what kinda time your new toy can muster.

Ohhhhh . . . my poor adenoids! ... not to mention my neighbors ears - after 2 hours of "Little Deuce Coupe". Speaking of computers lately hal2 hasn't wanted to open the cd door as much . . . maybe it is time for hal3 (or maybe he just doesn't like my singing either). BTW congratulations Agent Smith!

You Suck! Just kidding, just kidding...Yeah, I'm jealous, I'll have to limp on with my old desktop, a AMD 600, 448MB Ram, 32MV ATI All in Wonder Pro, 110GB Harddrive.. I can't wait to build a new computer... And get a new fast graphics card.. Congrats man, I bet it will be sweet.. kaom

No, I'm not jealous. I'm buying a new disk, 160GB. :-) OTOH, I have just tested a monster of a notebook: P IV 3.2 HT, 512 MB RAM (expandable to 2GB), 17" Wide TFT (16:10 at 1440x990), DVD-R burner, 64 MB GeForce FX Go graphics card... Only 80 GB of disk, but it's modular and can be changed. Rendered one pic on it. Took about a week. :-) Well, 1800x2700, transparency, reflections, yellow glass, soft shadows... you'll see it soon. Need to do the postwork.

Congrats on your new tincan. Shame it's so slow and has so little ram. Still, if u haven't got the cash you can't make a splash! Just kidding!

heck, I've got an 80g drive I haven't even broken in yet..still using Windows 2k, only 512m of memory, but it suffices..the work machines' a 366mhz with 128m of memory..even simple renders take a half-hour on that (which explains some of my 800x600 renders..;)
congrats..you're on the bleeding edge..sounds like it'd make a nice foot-warmer..have fun with it..

Love the graphics card, Burgi, but you should have went with an AMD chipset instead. Much more powerful for anyting graphics-related, period! Also, you can get a Terabyte drive for about $1,200 US these days. That would be 1,000 GB. I LOVE the features on the AIW cards. Did you get the one with the ridiculous remote, too? That thing RULES!

Attached Link: Aria Computers

i was thinking about the amd but was worried about cooling. i also wanted something that was actually 3ghz and didn't pretend it was. i will benchmark test it when i find my bryce 5 cd. i swear i had it a week ago... foot warmer? pakled, it is too good looking to hide away on the floor. it is small enough to sit comfily on my desk! talking of HALs.... my Pentium 100 is called HAL and I have NEVER EVER had a problem with it. it hammers along quite nicely on win95 and 48mb ram. SCSI cd drive and an old sound blaster pro. not sure what to do with a fundamentally ok computer. it works to well to consign to the skip. i has never done anything to hurt me so i am reluctant to inflict my sister on the poor thing... shadowdrag - the remote is stunning! i can lie in bed and play civilizations! not to mention the fact i can watch dvds in bed! did i mention i had a 17" TFT? only 250! dirt cheap! not a single dead pixel! John

Power to you and your machine Burgi, I look forward to seeing some outrageous images from you. 8) I guess you won't be needing me for horrendously difficult renders any more though. lol 8) Catlin

I'll be building a 64 bit system in a month or so... The prices of the 64 bit processors will be coming down in the next month or so.... I can't wait to see that processing power. Sounds like a nice system you have there Burgi! 8)

Aye, I'm not really TRYING to plug AMD or sell their stuff. Merely, at 2.2Ghz, an AMD will render faster than any Pentium PC or Mac. Go see our benchmark thread, I wish I had the link to it, but alas... Still, it's a great PC setup, and with that combination you should have way fewer if any limits on what you can do with CGI. Congratulations!

Yep AMD and huge amounts of the fastest possible RAM = best bang for buck, next gen of chips is even more telling that AMD chips are plain and simple more efficient clock for clock. I'd be tempted to stick in another 1/2 Gig of RAM, I quite often have renders that go up to the 750M+ mark Strange that AMD moved to the equivalent rating thing because they were losing the clock war, Intel are considering doing the same thing because people are realising clock speed isn't everything :)

when I started using Bryce (1st version) I had a Mac LC 475 25Mhz, boosted to 50Mhz with a PPC-extensio card. Was this is in 1995? I made a couple of crappy images, saved them on a floppy and sent them to a magazine called MacFormat in the UK. They got published as "Excellent 3D-graphics".

Lol, I started using Bryce with version 2 on a 486, but never had anything published from Bryce. I did have picture created using neopaint published in 'Amstrad User' though :-) those were the days, back when more then 16 colours was considered good.....

Actually, any tendency to be jealous is quenched by my economic situation and the knowledge that what's high tech
and expensive today will be commonplace and cheaper in six months or a year or so I tell myself.

Still 'faster is better' and 'time is money' or so "they" tell me. *** Long live the Hals! It seems to be good luck to name a computer Hal.

Message edited on: 05/19/2004 12:39

all that and having to suffer with a 17"monitor??? eeeKK!!

whats wrong with a 17 incher? i have limited desk space in my bedroom and this 17" is already too big! i nearly had a crazy moment and bought a 19" one. thank god i didn't! John

I have 19" flat tft-monitor. Take much less space than any 17" monitor and the image quality is way better.

I have a couple of monitors, but the one with the best color is still my old Shamrock 15", at 1024x768x32, woo hoo! One day I'll get a bigger screen, but I still play games on occasion, and LCD's just can't keep up for me, yet... (Well, the ones that can are kinda ridiculous for an under-budgeted pseudo-artist like me!)

250 for a tft, shadow. thats dirt cheap. I am playing the painkiller demo at the moment, my screen has virtually no lag. it is impossible to get rid of ALL lag, the technology doesn't allow it, plus there is this little thing call lightspeed that hampers performance.... bazze - i bet my monitor is smaller than yours! 1254x1024x32 @ 85Hz John