Hi folks,

I'm setting up a new machine and I'm at the point where I need to decide between Vista 32 and Vista 64. I'm leaning towards 64, but of couse need to keep Carrara working. Anybody had any problems running Carrara under Vista 64?

Thanks,

Hi Eric, The biggest thing I've seen pop up from users is the codec and/or video driver issues. The drivers seem to be under control now but video codecs might still be a little funky. But as you know, I'm a Mac guy so this is all second hand. Mark

I dont know about Vista 64 but here in Vista 32 everything works fine.

Get a Mac, it will still run Windows if you need it. :)

Sorry, I should have read your post more carefully. You already have the hardware, got it.

Quote - Get a Mac, it will still run Windows if you need it. :)

That actually is the new machine. I finally retired the venerable dual 800 G4 desktop and I'm replacing it with one of the new Mac Pros. I'm currently running bootcamp/fusion on my laptop and want to do the same thing with the desktop. After googling around a bit, I got the answer I needed. Fusion supports x64, and you can get x64 to run on bootcamp, but fusion won't run the bootcamp of x64 so Vista 32 it is.

Thanks all for the feedback.

Regards,

Super cool. I am looking to upgrade my self to one of those. Is Carrara able to take advantage of all 8 cores? How much RAM are you installing on it?

Why Vista. Are you not better served using XP. In my shallow experience with Vista, it seems slow.

I don't have it yet (mid Feb since I ordered the upgraded video card) so can't really give feedback on Carrara and cores. I'd be happy to do some benchmarking when it arrives.

I'll probably pick up another 4gig after I get it, so 6 total. That should be enough to run a VM with 2 gig and still have plenty for the host OS. Right now I develop in a VM with 768meg, leaving 1.25 gig for OSX and find that have to keep nearly everything off for it to run well. RAM limits are really my biggest problem at the moment and the laptop is 2gig max.

Vista because I don't have it in house yet so don't really have that base covered in terms of testing and support.

Regards,

Eric: Yes I would be very interested in seeing how you fair with the 8 cores and Carrara, since I am looking at the same computer. My dilemma right now is that Hexagon is getting pretty long in the tooth concerning new hardware and Leopard. It's not a UB ported yet and even on a Power PC, it does not run very well in Leopard. I use Hexagon to model and Carrara for everything else. I can model in Carrara, but Hexagon is so much better and flexible. I would hate to have to learn new software, but if I don't hear something soon with Hexagon, I might be taking a closer look at Modo. But Carrara will be with me for the forceable future, Hex or no Hex. I just hope that it's sufficiently threaded for 8 cores. I have used network rendering using two dual Macs, so I would think it works fine with at least 4 cores.

in windows, it uses 8 cores fine...thats what my "big" machine has.  Not sure about mac tho..(should be the same)

BT

Wish I'd have waited, but in the fall of aught six as my PC was on its last leg, Apple still couldn't say when the Intel machines would be available. Soon was as close as they would say for months.

So in November of that year I did the next best thing and ordered a Alienware Area 51. The SOB weighs more than a server with four liquid cooled core duos; 3 terabytes of hard drive; and three gigs of ram... ...actually cost more than a top of the line Mac. 

I still hate it!

Carrara works fine with Windows Vista 64, but I think it is configured to take advantage of, at most, 4 GB of RAM, so all those cores at present don't really mean much for Carrara.  In Vista I have yet to encounter the memory allocation error that so often crops up in Windows 2000 and XP.

Quote - Wish I'd have waited, but in the fall of aught six as my PC was on its last leg, Apple still couldn't say when the Intel machines would be available. Soon was as close as they would say for months.

So in November of that year I did the next best thing and ordered a Alienware Area 51. The SOB weighs more than a server with four liquid cooled core duos; 3 terabytes of hard drive; and three gigs of ram... ...actually cost more than a top of the line Mac. 

I still hate it!

Ha! I have a 2 gig G5, a 2 gig standard G4 and a G3 750mb running OS9 and I love em all! My boys have Intel Macs and I've now refused to try to fix them. What's Bootcamp for? Doom. Or Halo.

Sorry Eric and Joe - completely off topic

Quote - Eric: Yes I would be very interested in seeing how you fair with the 8 cores and Carrara...

It came in yesterday and I have a few things to report. Under Carrara 6.03 OSX, it does suffer the core problem. Rendering is awful, but I understand that problem is corrected for the next patch.

Since Vista doesn't have the current multicore problem I did a few performance tests there. Rendering, it's 6.6 times faster than my 2ghz MacBook Pro and 7.8 times faster than my dual 3ghz Xeon.  I tried running the benchmark mentioned on this page forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php and it took 1 minute 24 seconds while there was something installing in the background. This thing is a beast.

Last night I was gaming with some friends on WoW (OSX) and the CPU was sitting at 9-10% utilization.

A few other observations:

it's wicked quiet. I can't hear the fans with it under my desk. Hard drive is pretty noisy (I got the default 320 gig) and it's much louder than the pair of seagates I have in a USB enclosure. The optical drive is horrendous, noisy and flimsy.

I'm not a Hexagon guy so really can't speak to it's performance there.