Very late to this thread, but I wanna throw in a couple cents, as I have just finished building a new PC for myself, and need to share my shell-shock.**

1. what platform and why?** Windows. They get their software updates first (usually). And, PC's are always less expensive to do hardware upgrades to. (but, I am biased, as I build my own computers)

2. Macs have better graphics handling and are more stable? False nowadays, in my experience. My work in the film industry has shown me entire buildings that run on PC's and Windows, and co-workers that at first bring their Mac laptops in with them, then later they lease a PC laptop (after they can't get their internet or email to work)

3. "Better graphics machine". Just means beefier, faster parts. Don't fall into the (PC) trap of "you have to have THE fastest everything" though. There is ALWAYS a sweet spot for buying components, and it is not worth spending double your budget to make a render finish only 10% faster.

4. Faster render times will always be the result of faster cpu's, and in the case of multiple core's, more cores.

5. Mac quad cores are double the cost of a PC quad core. Is it worth it? No, it is not worth it, unless you love spending more of your money. if you do, I'll provide you an address in which to start mailing me blank checks.

6 Will Daz allow me to reset my downloads? Ask Daz, I'm not sure.
**

7. Should you buy a ready to go tower, or build your own?** I HAVE JUST RECENTLY DID BOTH OF THESE....and I am here to give my extremely biased opinion of.....%$#!-ing pre-built towers, and especially %@#! the %$#!-ing Vista Operating System. Now, I am SURE there are some of you have had perfect experiences with Vista on a ready to go tower from Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. I have NOT.

Lemme expand on that rage a little . I could go on and on how much Vista sucks, I mean...I could literally make you uncomfortable and fear for your own safety if I were to express to you my true passion of hatred for Vista face to face.

But, here is my (calm) performance opinion of Vista; THE best environment to run Bryce (or really any program) is a where you have the most memory free and the least amount of processes using the cpu. Vista simply is the worst OS I have seen at this. Vista is a cpu/memory whore. And, I used EVERY optimization trick in the book. (have for years, with all my OS's)

Anyway, the quick story is; I had bought an HP tower with Vista and spent a few days trying to optimize the OS to play nice and give me the most amount of memory and cpu to use my various programs with (Bryce, ZBrush, Photoshop, etc) After getting it as lean as possible it was still unacceptably using far too much cpu and ram, but I was about to settle with this unfortunate fact and just accept it when something went "snap crackle pop" and the whole PC just died...I performed a system recovery, which did work, but put me back at square one with trying to wrangle Vista and re-install all my programs...

I immediately returned it, got my money back and did what I should have done before, ordered all the parts I would need from Newegg and 2 days layer was building my new PC with my prior XP Pro license.

I could NOT be happier!

For under $700 I had a quad core AMD 9850 with 4gb of ram on an upgradable Gigabyte Mobo, all with an extremely quiet Antec Case, Fans and Power Supply.

I was happy to save money over a Mac or even an Intel Quad Core, which can be faster...but, Like I said I'm not worried about finishing a render 5% -10% faster than what I am now, for myself I would rather have extra money on hand for when the next, next-gen video card comes out, lol.

-------end of rant.   ;o)

AgentSmith

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