I was thinking to buy a new PC because I have no heart to torture my poor laptop anymore:) But I'm not sure especially what kind of things I should take on consideration when buying a new one... the main use will be making 3D art in Bryce and Studio Max. I would need some help like should I buy more memory or maybe a quad processor and things like that... Mu budget is around 1000 euros so below is maybe the best I can get but do you guys see that something isn't enough or wrong? I want it to be like the ultimate render machine one could buy with 1000 euros and hopefully long lasting one:) Thanks for any opinions! -Antti- Motherboard -P5K SE, S775 IP35 DDR2 SATA2 GBLAN HD 8CH 115.00€ Memory -2GB Dual Kit DDR2-800 F2-6400CL5D-2GBNQ 5-5-5-15 79.00€ OS -WINDOWS VISTA HOME BASIC 64-BIT, FI, OEM 92.00€ Display -LG 22'' L222WS-SN 1000:1 5MS TCO03 260.00€ Processor -Core Duo 2 E4500 2.2GHz, 2MB, FSB800 Boxed 135.40€ Graphics card -GeForce 8600GT PCIE 512MB HDCP HEATPIPE 136.00€ Hard disk -320GB Spinpoint T166, 3.5", SATA II/300, 16MB, 7200RPM 81.00€

Important factors for rendering and 3D work, as much memory as you can get and the quadcore would be an asset.
The E4500 is a decent enough CPU, but apparently the E4300 has a 9x multiplier and is capable of being overclocked up to 3Ghz... Worth looking into.

IMHO max out the ram to 4gig and forget vista. XP works very nicely with a dual-core.

Thanks for replies!

Is Vista so heavy that I should choose good old XP... even if you don't use any extra graphical elements? Could be true.. haven't heard any good feedback about Vista:)

And 4gigs memory.. so be it!!

Yes Vista will take away a lot of your ram, so XP is my choice too. I think it has to be XP professional though with dualcore support, I don't think XP home has that support, but check on that.
I heard somewhere that XP can only take up to 3gigs, better check on that too.

I would go with XP or Linux over Vista.

If you're sure you want to go Vista then get Home Premium - Home Basic is rubbish (many bits missing).

I would say go with a pentium dual core e2160 (about £40 at the moment) and over clock it. on a p35 board you can over clock these babies to 3 GHz  awesome for the price. If you're not that techy, see this article to see how easy this is http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/12/pentium_dual_core/

Put all the spare cash into RAM and more RAM.

dhama is right. I use XP Pro. I should have mentioned it in my earlier post, but I have 4gigs ram and that works just fine.

If you can, buy your stuff from the US, the exchange rate is good for you. The dollar is worth half. unless its changed. Maybe your 1000 euros could be $2000.

Don't forget to put the os on its own partition and to use multiple partitions.

Thanks for advices... btw one handy thing with Vista is some sort of usb flash memory stick which Vista will use as a cache memory and thus working much much quicker. Costs like 30 euros... Damn this is a difficult task.. and goes even more difficult when I should choose the display:)

I hope this Bryce person appreciates your hard work.

If you want vista and still want to render, you could setup the machine to dual boot Vista and XP.
This way you can get the Vista goodies and not slow your renders down. Think this month's issue of PC gamer has an article on dual booting vista and xp.

If you are a gamer, you might want to get a video card that supports direct x 10.

using a usb stick to speed up memory performance?? that sounds... strange.. to say the least...

No not strange at all.. it's this new feature Ready Boost. The usb stick has to be a compatible of course but you can choose how much Vista will use of it as a cache memory. So it reduces the need of getting info from much slower hard disk all the time... it works something like that:)

Quote - Windows ReadyBoost can use storage space on some removable media devices, such as USB flash drives, to speed up your computer. When you insert a device with this capability, the AutoPlay dialog will offer you the option to speed up your system using Windows ReadyBoost. If you select this option, you can then choose how much memory to use for this purpose. However, there are some situations where you may not be able to use all of the memory on your storage device to speed up your computer. Some universal serial bus (USB) storage devices contain both slow and fast flash memory, and Windows can only use fast flash memory to speed up your computer. So if your device contains both slow and fast memory, keep in mind that you can only use the fast memory portion for this purpose.

The recommended amount of memory to use for ReadyBoost acceleration is one to three times the amount of random access memory (RAM) installed in your computer. For instance, if your computer has 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM and you plug in a 4 gigabyte (GB) USB flash drive, setting aside from 512MB to 1.5GB of that drive will offer the best performance boost.

Odd that they use 512MB RAM as an example, since Vista uses over a GB.:tongue1:

Why did I read that as

Quote -
We could have spent time making Windows memory handling better, but when memory is so cheap why bother......

:b_grin:

If possible, go with two physically separate drives - a hdd failure takes ALL partitions! Back up all your important data.

Good pointer that I missed Incarnadine, might be nice to go as far as a RAID if the money will stretch that far

Is this a personal machine or just a render machine?
In other words will you be doing other stuff than bryceing on this machine or just renders?

Dual booting could give you a clean render environment and you can go back to doing your regular stuff in the other OS. Have to maintain 2 OSes though.

Incarnadine is right but if you are going to be having problems with running out of disk space, RAID might be too expensive. You might be better off by making a disk image once everything is installed and a disk image of a windows install. If things go south, you can use the disk image and return. Can also back up your work. Have to do that anyway Raid or not.
Later on you could buy an external drive and use that for backup.

Sometimes when hard drives fail and the first partition is just OS, you can still get the data off ot the other partitions and sometimes the drive is a new paperweight.

Quote - No not strange at all.. it's this new feature Ready Boost. The usb stick has to be a compatible of course but you can choose how much Vista will use of it as a cache memory. So it reduces the need of getting info from much slower hard disk all the time... it works something like that:)

hmm i thought it'd get latency problems and such.. does this stuff boost rendering performance too?

The chance of a hard disk, specially a new one, going wrong, is highly unlikely. And whos to say that it's wouldn't be your backupdrive anyway.......

I have had a disk head crash before actually. Cartesius over in the C4D forum just had a disk failure, one of my co-workers had one about 2 months ago. You hear of a couple a year in these forums and I have seen a couple outside as well. If your back up HDD dies, no prob, you still have everything on the main disk. If the main dies, you still have your backup files.

My backup contains a clean install image for windows and all main progs, a compressed archive of all my essential downloads (patches/updates and other things that I may not be able to find again easily), my model files and my archival (lossless) full res images. In a way, I am doing a very simple RAID type of setup.

I would go with ram with better timing than you listed.  And definitely get a second physical drive. They are sooo cheap now! Also check out the Quadro FX or FireGL cards if you can afford it. If you're not into gaming that is.

I just build a new machine (all from newegg) last week around on the Asus P5N32E SLI PLUS board (1333mhz FSB) with the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Kentsfield 3.0GHz. 3gb of Crucial Ballistix DDR800 (4-4-4-12 2t) RAM. 2 WD Caviar SE16's @ 16mb cache 7200rpm sATA.  8800gts 640mb pcie card. XP pro of course. ;)

This beast renders like mad and chews up all games at max settings.

I haven't installed Bryce yet but I am not sure it would actually take advantage of a multi-threaded environment. I know the RAM will help but that's about it.

Stay away from Vista!

I've heard rumours vista is one of the three horseman of the apocalypse...

I've lost a hard disk before but as it was in a 4 disk Raid 10 array, the array software told me it needed replacing - no data loss :).

I've never had a HDD failure. In fact I still have an 80gig 7200rpm drive that I bought in 1999 which is still the primary drive in one of my deskstops.

Out of all the machines I have had, all but the first with dual physical drives, I have had only the one. It is not common but if you don't plan for it, it can be catastropphic!

Quote - Thanks for replies!

Is Vista so heavy that I should choose good old XP... even if you don't use any extra graphical elements? Could be true.. haven't heard any good feedback about Vista:)

And 4gigs memory.. so be it!!

From my experience and two formats vista is unstable at the moment, don't think about getting it unless you have a fast download speed and SP1 for it is out...by the way SP 1 for vista is around 9gB when it gets released to the public.

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