Attached Link: ~ R

I am working toward getting a new PC system soon. I am looking at a Micro Center desktop with i7-2600, 8GB DDR3, 2 TB HDs , SSD boot drive, 2 Radeon crossfire 5750s and the usual misc. Any thoughts about what is the best hardware for Poser Pro 2012 / Vue Infinite? My system and software are, and will continue to be, all 64 bit.

My understanding is (could be wrong) that Poser does not offload chores to the GPU, so video card imay not be as important as it is in gaming where apps heavily rely on the GPU for processing. So maybe brute strength CPU power is best for Poser and DS4 Pro.

Is that true? If so, is there a better choice for graphics cards in the same price range? Any hardware advice greatly appreciated -- I cannot afford to make a mistake here.

Thank you.  ~ R

I think that system should kick some ass, mine is very simular but with Nvidia cards and I can do 3d modeling, Photoshop and Poser at the same time...you should be good to go.

Are you going to bridge the video cards?

Well, you are right that Poser won't utilize the GPU for rendering but it still takes care of the preview window using OpenGL, so just keep that in mind when considering cards and OpenGL support for large scenes.

DDR3 is still cheap as hell iirc so I'd go from 8 to 16GB not for Poser but for Vue since it's such a memory hog. Otherwise the specs look good and you'll probably get a lot of mileage out of that setup.

Max your ram

Looking at your specs list, I could comment that the video card does indeed make a difference when it comes to poser 2012 (and other versions?)..

I recently swapped out my AMD 6950 for an MSI GTX 560 Ti 2GB card and it made a huge difference, mostly because of nVidias drivers when it comes to OpenGL. I found the AMD version of it too glitchy (tried a 4800 series and the 6950 cards..) A 2gb memory video card will allow you to run a higher screen resolution without any lag. I ran a speed monitor on my video card while using Poser 2012 and found that barely 1% is used while rendering and lucky to reach 20% of the GPU's available resources while working in the preview screen with complicated scenes.. so there's a lot of head room there. 

I have my temp files directory pointed to a 10,000 rpm drive which makes loading and changing stuff a lot quicker than having it reside on my 7200 rpm boot drive. I also reduced my 'undoes' to 20 vice 100 which helps too..

What you have to remember as far as hardware and memory is that your CPU is what makes your renderings go faster, not the video card. But as JohnDoe said, the GPU handles the OpenGL in the preview screen and the bigger, faster and better card will make a huge difference in there. 

Your system memory comes into play (in 64bit version OS) when you wish to run several programs at the same time. I often have photoshop, yahoo voice chat, dreamweaver and a browser open at the same time while working in concert with  a buddy who lives across the country. The more memory you have, the better. 

So in short: Go with nVidia video cards, the bigger the better.., max out your system memory, and have fun.

i7 940 12 gigs memory, 4 x 1TB drives, 160G Cheetah, GTX 560 Ti 2GB video card on Vista64 Ultimate. 

I hope some of this helps, its what works for me though your milage may differ.

You did not mention what motherboard you are going with, and that makes a difference in what video setup you should go with. I would also not buy a video card with ddr3. DDR5 or don't bother, the difference is well worth it. One faster card is a better option than two slower ones.

What brand video is personal preference. Nvidia has the best opengl drivers right now, AMD has better directx support.

I would not max the motherboard out with memory if it can take more than 16gb. Many of the motherboards now can use the max the processor supports. (32gb)

And if you do max it to 32 gig, set up a ram drive for paging. SATA and SAS drives can't compete with a ram drive in speed, no where near close.

SSD drives are a personal choice. I stopped stocking them, you do the math on that.

The day the last free page gets written to on the SSD, plan on wiping it and erasing it with the utility to get the speed back. You will know when that happens, you will get strange one or two second system hangs when the drive has to erase pages. Page erases can take 2 seconds a page. If you do get an SSD, get one with a 5 year warranty, you will thank yourself later.

Never tried an SSD, i wasn't aware of the last free page deletion thing.. what's a free page? I'm not familiar with that one..

However I did try the Ram Drive and after some tweaking, its quite good but the one I tried only had a max of 4gigs useage. Before I changed my "undo" amounts, the folder file size grew to such a point that it would cause Poser to shut down.. once I figured what the problem was, super fast!

Here is a write up on SSDs that explains a lot of that.

It is a long article but well worth reading if you are interested in SSD's.

Pay attention to the part about formatting the drive smaller then it really is to leave swap pages on the drive. I dont remember if that article gets into non compressable data or not. That presents a huge problem as well.

SSD Explaination

Thanks for the link, much appreciated.. I noticed it was written in 2009.. three years ago.. you would think much has changed in the SSD technology to remedy or eleviate many of the issues brought up by now? I'll give the article a read..

Thanks again!

I would more worry about getting a machine that runs Vue without any hiccups. Any machine that can do that would be fine for lil old Poser ;).

Laurie

The biggest change to ssd's since 2009 is now there are ones that plug into a pcie slot.

The controllers are a lot smarter now, breaking the file into as many different pages on different banks as it can, so it can read it at blazing speed.

They are much wider inside as well, having far more than 40 controllers. (thats where the speed advantage comes from, one controller channel is slow. Think of it as raid on steroids.)

The pcie ones use compression for speed as well, and if you are saving something that can not be compressed, you loose most of the speed advantage right off the bat.

They suffer from the same page problems as the ones from 2009, there is no way around that on Nand flash. You can mask the problem, but it is still there by design.

They also get very hot and as you can imagine, heat is the enemy to electronics. Generating that much heat is a sure sign that they are not very efficient.

SSDs are nice when they work, great for speeding up a system, and a sure fire way to loose everything when they fail. When a hard drive goes bad, most of the time you can still recover the information. When an SSD goes bad, chances of recovering info are slim to none.

I used them in the past, and went back to ram drives. I can wait 15 more seconds for it to boot, knowing that it is going to boot. And a ram drive for temp/swap usage still outruns the fastest SSDs. You can also write to ram "billions and billions of times" borrowing Dr. Sagans famous line. You can write to an SSD Nand gate 10,000 times max. Chances are good that the Nand write limitation is not in the spec sheet for the SSD drive. But the limitation is there, and you will get to that limitation......

Quote - SSDs are nice when they work, great for speeding up a system, and a sure fire way to loose everything when they fail. When a hard drive goes bad, most of the time you can still recover the information. When an SSD goes bad, chances of recovering info are slim to none. I used them in the past, and went back to ram drives. I can wait 15 more seconds for it to boot, knowing that it is going to boot. And a ram drive for temp/swap usage still outruns the fastest SSDs. You can also write to ram "billions and billions of times" borrowing Dr. Sagans famous line. You can write to an SSD Nand gate 10,000 times max. Chances are good that the Nand write limitation is not in the spec sheet for the SSD drive. But the limitation is there, and you will get to that limitation......

And THAT, sir, says all one needs to know about SSD drives ;)  Ran drive is free and much much faster.. I'll have to revisit that one again..

Thanks for the great info, much appreciated!

From my long experience with computers I can assure you that a normal hard drive can fail as well. You will need a backup system anyway if you don't want data loss, no matter where you save your data.

A SSD costs more, but is faster. Yes, there is a write limit per cell, probably they won't work as long as a good HDD would. But a HDD can break too, even an expensive one.

My advice would be:

Use a SSD if you want to have a fast system. Use a HDD if you want to save money.

Use Backups in both cases, to prevent data loss.

Thanks to everybody for all the great comments. You've given me a lot to think about before I dive into the next system. I really appreciate it.  ~ R

Short of smashing a hard drive most of the data is recoverable, without disassembly over 90% of the time. If your info is that critical, it should be on a raid array that can recover from a bad drive. Can't say the same for an SSD when it comes to recovery, but you can raid them and get the same redundancy out of the raid array.

Using a SSD for the speed boost is nice, dealing with RMAs for failed units gets old fast, real fast. Trust me on that. Try explaining to a customer on the third or fourth failure in as many months, why it keeps going bad. You can't. Try getting paid to replace the failed units, good luck with that as well. You can't just stick the Windows DVD in the machine and install Windows on it either. You install a copy of an full install onto a SSD.

Backups should be done no matter what you use, and Uwe makes a very good point with that. Even if you have a raid array, you should back it up.

The PCIe SSDs can be murder to get to boot. Even on "approved" motherboards. Been there done that, and sent it back for credit.

The PCIe ones also have to initialize, which can make them take longer to boot than a system with a normal high speed hardrive does. Much longer... Read the forums on the PCIe SSDs and you will see what I mean.

The Nand gate will be a passing fad, and the sooner it passes the better.

Nand=planned and unavoidable failure by design.