hi there, looking to buy a new computer and wondered what I should be looking at to get the best performance. I'd mainly want it for fast renders and dynamic cloth animations?

CPU, GPU, RAM, HDD? What's most important?

Is it better/ faster to run SSD as the OS/ Poser drive?

Say I get an AMD 1050 (6 core), 8GB RAM, 1GB 450GTS Nvidia, 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD... is that a good setup, which area could be improved?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I just recently got a new PC from www.magicmicro.com THis is my second system from them. They are in Ohio, USA. The prices and service is excellent. You get a 3 year warranty. I got a i7 950, 12 gigs of triple channel RAM, Windows 7 pro 64 bit, and an Nvidia Geforce 9800GT graphics card with 1 gig of RAM. I have two 1 terrabyte hard drives in it.  It flys. Poser 10 is so fast I can't believe it. The whole system cost just under $1500. US, but it's a lot cheaper than Dell or Bestbuy. You can also get cheaper systems there. I highly recommend them if you live in the US.

I'm in Australia, so...

But you seem to have gotten a good deal there, what kind of monitor did you get?

The only component which seems a little outdated is your Geforce 9800, otherwise pretty heavy duty machine you got there.... does 64bit vs 32bit make a big difference?

12gig of RAME nice :) that's going to speed things up a little, wonder how big a role RAM plays for 3D rendering though or is it mostly CPU?

Be sure to get USB 3, it is even faster then e(xternal)SATA, and never worry about not having enough storage.

Rendering itself is CPU intensive, but if you load up a scene with multiple figures, objects and their associated textures, it certainly cuts down the thrashing back and forth to the hard drive.

I use a similar setup but with the 980 CPU and an Nvidia 450 (I have had so many problems with ATI drivers over the years that I only use Nvidia now), running Windows7 Professional.  With regard to a 64 bit OS, that was a primary reason for upgrading my rendering machine.  I'm not sure about Poser (I only have Poser 7 and Poser Pro 32 bit), but in Carrara Pro8 64 bit you get 12 threads working on the render simultaneously with the hex core i7.  I believe Poser Pro 2010 has a 64 bit version, so you should see similar speed increases.

Klebnor

I got the Geforce 9800 because people in the forums were saying Vue crashes with the 460. I was nervous about what to order. I know the Geforce is older, but it works with everything. Including my games. I can always upgrade later. Poser 2010 goes really fast with this machine. I was amazed, because I was used to long render times.

My monitor is a 24 inch Samsung flat screen.

Factors in order of importance:

1. 64-bit machine. Unless you do only single figures, you need this.

2. Multiple-core processer. I'm really impressed with the i7 series, especially the 970 on. If you can hold out until the introduction of the i7 990 in 1Q 2011 I'm sure that the price of the 970 and 980 will go down. (The 970 onward have six processors each.)

3. Lots of memory. I maxed out my system (which was probably overkill), but I would recommend at least 8 GB, preferably 12 GB. So far I haven't seen Poser use more than about nine, but as I build bigger and bigger scenes I suppose that I will.

4. Dual disks. I recommend not fooling around with RAID and just scheduling weekly backups from one disk to the other.

1. yes I almost forgot about win 7 64bit... but then I remembered reading how it improves things for 2010

2. yes.... I've been checking out i7s vs AMDs 1000s and it seems to specifically for rendering i7s do quite a bit better... which is however also reflected in the price tag.... hmm might spend the extra couple of hundred... don't think I can hold out till next year... I want it during the xmas holidays... hopefully some specials before xmas as well!

3. I'm going for 8GB, if I see any sort of bottle neck I'll propably upgrade to 12GB

4. I really want to take the plunge and go for SSD as the OS drive... I don't want to spend the extra on a RAID though, but rather an additional drive and back-up to that... doesn't raid auto copy everything and basically leave you with the capacity of one drive, but data loss prevention?

5. 3D card not important? ... I suppose only the privew right? but do you get better/ faster previews?

I heard SSD is 2 - 10 faster for reads anyway... but then I've read elsewhere that they're only marginally faster... who's right? Anyone here got experience with them? I'll have to do more research there...

What RAID does depends on what version of RAID you use. Quickly; RAID 0: Data striping. Two drives in parallel, with the data spanned across both. Pluses: almost double the read/write bandwidth, so much faster read/write actions. Minuses: Exactly -no- fault tolerance. You lose a drive, all the data it gone, as it spans both drives and is synched. RAID 1: Drive mirroring. Just that. Two matching drives that are written to simutaneously. Pluses: Data safety. One drive blows, the other takes over automatically. Minuses: No improvement in access speeds. RAID 0+1: Combines the two. Striped drives for speed increase, with mirroring so that if one array goes, you have another. Pluses: Best of both basic types. Minuses: Expensive; you need 4 drives minimum for -each- array. Plus you have power costs and head issues to contend with. You also need to keep a spare set of drives handy, as you need to replace the failed array and recreate is as soon as possible. Too many figure they have time, and if you build the array with all new drives, then they are all equally old. When one goes, the other 3 won't be far behind. Many other types of RAID. Google it. SSD's are the new thing. There is some speed improvement, but you have to see just what size hard drive they are testing it against. A sata 40 gig drive will smoke an SSD, where and SSD will stomp all over a terabyte HDD in benchmark tests. But the one thing you do =NOT= want to do is trust perishable data to an SSD. It is nothing more than flash memory, the same thing that is in every thumb drive out there. And there are physical limitations to the number of times you can write to a NAND gate before it fails. It's physics....writing to a NAND gate and changing it's state causes atomic level damage to the actual substrate structure. Currently, you have around 1 million writes to a NAND before failure to hold state occurs. And with SSD's structuring, if a bit gate fails, the associative byte is gone. SSD's just aren't old enough yet to know how the failure pattern is going to be; steady erosion of space, or large clumps suddenly dying (and a million writes sounds impressive, but consider how many times a second Windows hits the swap file....). As long as you have the OS disc, putting the OS on an SSD could be a good thing....but I would put -only- the OS, and any codecs and code snips that =had= to be with the OS with it. All other apps and certainly your perishable data should be kept on proven hard drives....at least until SSD technology has been real world proven regarding durablility and lifespan...

Quote - I just recently got a new PC from www.magicmicro.com THis is my second system from them. They are in Ohio, USA. The prices and service is excellent. You get a 3 year warranty. I got a i7 950, 12 gigs of triple channel RAM, Windows 7 pro 64 bit, and an Nvidia Geforce 9800GT graphics card with 1 gig of RAM. I have two 1 terrabyte hard drives in it.  It flys. Poser 10 is so fast I can't believe it. The whole system cost just under $1500. US, but it's a lot cheaper than Dell or Bestbuy. You can also get cheaper systems there. I highly recommend them if you live in the US.

MagicMicro prices are good, but I recently bought a machine off the shelf from Best Buy.

I just configured an identical system at magic micro just to compare.

I7 860

8 GB RAM

1 TB disk

5770 video card

20" monitor

What I paid Best Buy: $1199

Magic Micro price: $1218

In addition to saving $19, I had my new computer home, up and rendering, less than 40 minutes after deciding to buy a computer.

The official price at Best Buy was $1299, but I found the identical machine on a web store for $1199 and Best Buy will match any advertised price if you show them the ad online. I did that and they knocked off $100 instantly. No hassle. (They do not make this policy public knowledge for obvious reasons. But I had no trouble getting them to match it.)

Best Buy computers only come with 8 megs of RAM, from the ads I've seen. Also,you have to buy an extended warranty if you are smart and that adds several hundred to the price. I had a Gateway from Bestbuy and bought an extended warranty, thank God! It was a lemon. Then lighting struck next to our house and took out the whole machine. Luckily the warranty covered it. Also, I only saw older cheaper graphics cards in the advertisements for desktops. They seemed to only have Radeon, which does not work well with Vue. Magicmicro gives you a three year warranty included. I ordered rush for $29.00 and got the PC the next day, but then I'm in Michigan and Magic Micro is just five hours away from me.

Quote - 2. yes.... I've been checking out i7s vs AMDs 1000s and it seems to specifically for rendering i7s do quite a bit better... which is however also reflected in the price tag.... hmm might spend the extra couple of hundred... don't think I can hold out till next year... I want it during the xmas holidays... hopefully some specials before xmas as well!

As far as I can tell, Intel gives you better performance on the high end for a high end price, where in the low and mid price segment, AMD will give you more cores for the same money.

When I built a machine earlier this year, I went for an Athlon II X4 600e, which is one of their energy saving CPUs. Yes, it's slower than a Phenom II or i7, but I love energy saving computers (considering the price of electricity here) and I enjoy silence.

Quote - 3. I'm going for 8GB, if I see any sort of bottle neck I'll propably upgrade to 12GB

Make sure you have the extra slots free. My system has 2x 4GB sticks with room for another 2x 4GB for a total of 16GB (which I don't need right now, so far 8GB are sufficient).

Quote - 5. 3D card not important? ... I suppose only the privew right? but do you get better/ faster previews

I put a GTX 460 in my computer that previously had just ATI HD 4200 onboard - a world of a difference for preview speed.

I ordered my system with 12 gigs of triple channel RAM in three slots so I can add more later.

I found something I thought was very amazing, but I am not an old hand in intensive computing, so I will ask, and you can tell me what you think of it.

The first thing I found was Octane Render ... which lets you adjust in real time in the render engine.  Buy in at the Beta level and then upgrade to a liscense:

This uses CUDA technology from Nvidia ... and there is complementary hardware to go with it: ..

Namely CUBIX .. it comes with a PCI-e card which connects it to your machine and it absorbs all the CUDA rendering work of the applications which are leveraging this (i.e. Octane -- or others).

Here are the links, and I would very much like some informed opinions, if you would:

Octane  --- http://www.refractivesoftware.com/index.php  ($134 US, to begin@beta)

Cubix -- https://www.cubixgpu.com/Solutions/Accleware  --- this is the very fast one!

Other CUDA leveraging software:

http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-ray.html

http://www.randomcontrol.com/arion

http://www.bunkspeed.com/move/index.html --- originally for automotive sales.

Tia!

Since deciding to cut my cinema 4d XL bundle down to the core because of their changes to the bundling structure (another story),  I have been looking round for a renderer that will give a good price/performance tradeoff, to offset the loss of the Advanced Render module. As I am also an avid Poser user, and currently looking to upgrade my PC, the Octane render package looks like a good bet. Has anyone gone down the workflow path of Poser to Octane (via C4D) ?

One of the nice features of this renderer is that it uses the graphic card to do the rendering, and if you use more than one card, it will split the work between them, so it might be cost effective to get 2 (or 3?) less expensive cards rather than a single state of the art GPU.

The results on the Octane site look amazing.

Any experience of this setup out there?

That was my take on it!! ... I was dancing the happy dance for days!~!~;-)

Then I actually sent mail to the CUBIX people ... who are very friendly (esp. to a little timer like me).

... and I have decided no matter which software (of the 4 .. probably not the one for automotive) ... I go with; ---- the CUBIX box is on my list to buy!!

...
At slightly more than a good basic PC in an electronics store .. it will give so much more (albeit specialized) bang for the buck .. that it is definintely on my wishlist of the first order. 

Mental Ray looks equally awesome .. but I did not check the price .. (my wishlist staggereth already) ...

Octane has been in beta for some time .. but maybe -- that is the buy-in tactic? ... I have not checked their after beta prices either.

Happy Days for Renderers who find this stuff ... is what I am thinking ... but I am newbie, so what do I know?

Anyone else with contacts in the industry who may have more info? ...very keen to know more about this ...