The reason I ask, is that I'm considering a hardware upgrade, and when I do upgrade, I'm going to go all out. I would like some info from the experts as to what to look for, in terms of chips, graphics cards, ideal memory, and other features. I may order from Dell. I wish to create a movie, with most of it rendered in Lightwave, Poser 5, and Bryce, with ALL of the features turned on - so I need a more powerful computer. Since God has blessed me with a new, and WONDERFUL job, I have some cash inflow, so I'm going to go all out. I need to know what would be the DREAM COMPUTER, enhancements, etc., so please post your ideal hardware below, so I can have an idea of what to purchase. PS: When does the Pentium 5 come out? God bless, Ben

What is the Intel Xeon?

... a 'puter that ran 10 googolplex instructions per second and had at least 87.325 googolplexbytes of memory. ;=]

Mac G4 twin 1.25 gig processor lots of RAM and if you are going to create movies get Final Cut Pro. 2 large monitors and the extra thingy so that you can use 2 monitors :)

The one I'm using right now, dual athlon 2000+ mp's, 4 GIGS of Ram, GeForce 2 Ultra, build it Talmid you'll save money (not a lot...but hey s)

I'm with Tisa if you're talking computers that are on the market today. However, I'm really hoping for the G5 chip. Maybe at the January Macworld... BTW, the extra thingy isn't required. I'm pretty sure you can plug in 2 of the big Apple Cinema Displays right out of the box.

I just did a test, and maxxed out a computer over at Dell. I will only have to spend 18,000 dollars! And that's with a 250 dollar rebate! I'm going to try to stay under 5k

I had to get the extra thingy on mine, Bobasaur,I swiched from a PC and I hated the OS at first but It's definately the best move I've made.

Talmid...I've been kinda sniffing around 'Alienware'. You can probably get a killer machine for 4-6K. Theyre designed for bleeding edge gaming but anything that can do that can probably handle just about any graphics program.... Scarab<-(who,alas,has eyes bigger than his wallet) PS: how the hell can you come up with a Dell for $18,000?

Well, Scarab, for starters, you opt for a flatscreen plasma display ....

Y'all tell me if this would be good: Intel Xeon Processer 2Ghz, 512k Cache Intel Xeon 2nd Processer, 1.8 Ghz 1 GB of PC800 RDRAM DVD RW+R and 16xDVD 120GB 7200RPM IDE with DataBurst Cache nVidia Quadro4 900XGL, 128MB, VGA/DVI @ 5,545 dollars Whaddya think? Will it "do"? Ben

Ok, take away that second processor. Is Dual Processors recommended? Or will that one above do?

You all are going WAY out of my proce range! How about if I just wanted to get faster renders? I currently have a P3 800 MHz and 1.1 GB RAM running on WinXP and my renders still take longer than I'd like. 300 frame rendered movies take all night in Poser 4. I haven't tried any movies yet with Poser5.

Well, I'm either going to an amd 2.2 chip (over my 1.4), or I'll hold out till christmas for the 3g and the 533 bus. Yeah, build it yourself. That's what I've been doing for several years now. You can get a lot for the money and if you match the components correctly, you'll have a smooth system.

Black Cat, don't worry! It is WAY out of my price range too...although, I might be able to acheive it with a couple of years of saving/paying . . . hmmmm......

I am thinking of upgrading to a faster chip. Would that make a big difference in rendering times? I've heard some say its the processor and some say its the RAM.

I agree with EricofSD. Build your own. Today I upgraded to a brand new computer with an AMD 2.2 ghz chip and 512 meg of RAM. I spent some time this afternoon migrating over my 2 hard drives, Geforce 2 video card, CDRW and DVD drive from the previous computer. Total cost= under $500.00. By the way, I had no trouble re-certifying my Windows XP for the new computer. It took about ten minutes over the phone with no waiting. -jjsemp

Since we're talking dream systems here's mine - :-) Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz w/167MHz system bus 2.0GB PC2700 DDR SDRAM - 4 DIMMs 4x120GB Ultra ATA drive Optical 1 - Apple SuperDrive Optical 2 - Combo Drive (DVD/CD-RW) NVIDIA GeForce4 Titanium dual-display w/128MB DDR Apple Cinema Display (22" flat panel) Apple Pro Speakers . Ultra SCSI PCI card & cable adapter $8,627.00

You know....we all sit here and cry and sigh....but think about it...my first computer system, purchased about 12 years ago was about $3500 dollars (in 1990 cash) and was a 66Mz Gateway with 16Mb Ram and just over 500Mb harddrive. The speakers were a joke and forget about 3D acceleration, etc. Yet I once figured out that that unit had something like 146 times the computing power of the original Univac which cost oogooblies in goverment bucks and took up something the size of my house. My second computer, also costing about $3500 bucks is my current 400Mz with 10Gb hard and (with inexpensive upgrade) 256 Mb of Ram..... I can buy seven times the processor speed, 12 times the hard drive and twice the ram and spend less ($2600 in 2002 bucks) now. God bless America! And you know....the whole world could have this if they just played nice........ Scarab<-small tear in his eye......buy American!

lol. I owned the first Macintosh512K in high school and it cost me $3000.

my system costed me 2,900 a custom built machine. Intel P4 1.9 ghz 1 gig of RD ram, I just upgraded from 512 rd ram 2 maxtor 80 gig hard drives 72000 gforce 4 64 cdr and cdrom 48x surround sound salite speaker system. I forgot the name of it :S sound blaster live 5.1 for my sound card. 8 port hub switch "linksys". 21 inch nec monitor flat screen :). that's my computer... :)

Tisa, I had a dual 1 Ghz G4 till Tuesday. It was set up for dual monitors. It may be that one was the new monitor connections and one was for the old style monitor connections. I miss it.

Scarab mentioned that his first computer had something like 146 time the power of Univac, well let's go back a bit farther to to the grand ancestor of all computers ENIAC and was a huge beast! it was 1,900 cubic feet of black-enameled sheet metal and bakelite, 18,000 vacuum tubes, 6,000 switchs, 70,000 resistors, 5 million soldered joints and miles of wiring. it weighted 30 tons and used 174 kilowats of electricty. On the 50th aniversary of its creation two U Penn students duplicated the machine on a microchip the 1/4 the size of a postage stamp. the current $4 pocket calculator has more computing power than eniac had. We've clrarly come a LONG way since then :-)

Well Kirk and the boys had the original Big Screen T.V. tied in to the computer, But I'd Have to say The Andromeda as played by Lexa Doig. Talk about A dreamy computer, err spaceseship err girl err ok ok An atherton/mac/p12 blend with a genuine intel-apple chip 3000 terraword per millisecond 3billion terradword Hard drive and memory at least 100 times that, running 512 bit XP system version 9. the US National Defense Computer, bill gates home computer my computer. (in that order) - TJ

If you were to engage in certain types of activity with something like Andromeda, would it really be adultry?

Naw I'd marry her first.

First of all, get as much RAM as you can afford/spec. If you're planning on doing animations, I assume you're going to want to edit them together. Video will take as much RAM as you throw at it. (So will comping in After Effects.) If your serious about video editing, do yourself a huge favor an get a Canopus DV-Storm. Actually, the Storm-2 was just announced! Coupled with Premiere 6.5, it is hands down the best editing suite I have ever used in its price range. In fact, it is the best Realtime setup I have ever used period. -Tim

Ultimate Poser system: Dual System (Not Dual Processosr), that is 2 towers connected to one console via a KVM switch. The systems are FireWire networked. "A" System P4/1.8 512 Rambus 2 WD80GB 7200 RPM GeForce 3 TI "B" System P3/800 384 SDRAM 3 Drives Assorted sizes This system allows you to really do 2 things at once. Press the button on the KVM and your sitting infront of a differetn computer. With Poser 5's linked libraries it's perfect. You can open a scene created on one box to render on another. With FireFly's amazing speed this is going to become a requirement not a luxury. If I replaced B Which I use as a server and a render box this is what I'd build... Pentium 4-2.4 B Ghz 533Mhz 256MB RAMBUS (Kingston) PC1066 x 4 (1024 MB total) Asus P4T533-C Socket 478 533Mhz/Lan ATI All in Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB IBM 123GB 7200RPM LiteOn 40X12X48X VD-Rewritable Drive LiteOn 16X DVD Drive Retail Box Mitsumi floppy drive SoundBlaster Live Norton Anti-Virus 2002 Pro Window XP Professional (DSP OEM) ViewSonic G90F 19" .25 $2756.00 (USD)

Don't forget a second copy of Poser or a firewall to prevent it from seeing the other copy. But then your violating the EULA. Which is yet another reason I can't believe they didn't include network rendering.

CL says it's OK to install on two systems provided you are the only user. Just asked about this. They said it is OK.

True ... but they also said you can not use them at the same time. To "think of it as book." Sorry, wish it weren't so. And again, I wouldn't mind as much if it had network rendering. :(

Nerd, What makes the Asus P4T533C so appealing. I'm asking because right now I'm debating between buying a system with this motherboard or a system with Asus P4B533 P4. I'm inclining more to the Asus P4B533 P4 because memory is cheaper and I might be able to buy it with 2 Gigs of RAM, while for the P4T533C to get it to 2Gig RAM since it is Rambus it costs as much as the computer itself.

Oh, one more question, where can I find a KVM switch? I'm in Florida, would Best Buy or Circuit City carry those?

Attached Link: http://www.rendercube.com

Attached Link: http://www.shuttleonline.com

kupa mentioned in earlier threads that SMP support is out of the question for P5, but network rendering for FireFly might be addressed after CL gets a few other projects out of the way.

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=811199#3
http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=836673#10

Poser 5 Pro Pack, perhaps?

Thanks for that tidbit, Little_Dragon ... that is VERY good news for us animators. -Tim

In my opinion, computers are upgraded like every 6-18 months. If you fork over 5000 dollars it will become obsolete within a few years. Why not get a reasonable priced computer and upgrade as you go as new components come along. I do have to say that animators are doing far more then you think on less. If you haven't yet looked at Rustboy.com, you should. He used a Mac and a few other things to create this awesome animation, just to show you don't need a expensive machine to do "Oscar Award" like filming. I think if you know your way around the software and are extremely creative, this goes a long way then forking out hundreds and hundreds of dollars. You can get a great machine that can do all that you need it for, for far less. Many of the applications won't even take advantage of this speed anyway for awhile. So many applications will simply be playing catch-up.

Sorry, but when it comes to 3D animation and video editing ... there is NO SUCH THING as TOO FAST, or ... TOO MUCH MEMORY. BTW, even if computers could render quality 3D animation in real-time (which they can't even come close to doing), people would then want them to render faster-than realtime.