Attached Link: Low price dual cores

Before you decide, have a look at the features for Hexagon 2 which will be a free upgrade to Heaxagon 1.2 (if bought before 31 March). The texture painting and micro surfacing tools look excellent.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12377&Form.ShowMessage=2610235

"Andytw suggested the new Intel "Core" chips which replace Centrino will give similar performance to an AMD64. Actually using AMD chips will run hotter and battery life will be shorter."

The comparison I made was to give an idea of the performance that could be expected from a "laptop" cpu compared to a "desktop" cpu.
If you read my original post it already says that a desktop cpu in a laptop (i.e. a desktop replacement) will (usually) be hot/heavy with a short battery life.

Your problem sounds like the "real" and "virtual" CPUs (which make up the two processors in an HT system) are competing for system cache. With a dual cpu (or dual core) each processor has its own cache, but with Hyper-Threading the "real" and "virtual" CPU's have to share the same cache. If the real and virtual CPUs need different data then the HT processor can spend a lot of time moving data in and out of cache (depending on cache size) rather than doing any actual work, which results in longer render times or apparant lock ups. This is one of the reasons why turning off HT can sometimes improve performance.

Attached Link: http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/tgd/tgd.shtml

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

What you need to get really depends on what you want to do.
If your interest is landscapes then Terragen/Bryce/Vue are all good.
If it's the human figure then Daz or Poser.
If its 3D modelling then there are lots of options from Blender (free) to 3DS Max/Maya/XSI (lots of money).

Probably the only essential is a good "photo editing" program i.e. Gimp/Paint Shop Pro/Photoshop.

I'd suggest looking at the galleries here, if there something similar to what you want to do then try the demo for that program, though it's worth remembering that the talent of the artist is as important as the program used in most cases. Edited to add: Some programs (i.e. Terragen) have free versions for non comercial use or are free open source (i.e. Blender). There are also often older (full) versions of programs on magazine cover disks which are a good route into graphic art.

Message edited on: 09/17/2005 16:01

The demo is now available for download from e-on's site.

The demo is on the cover disc of 3D World magazine Issue 67 which came out on 21 June. It should be available for download from e-on soon.

They all look fine to me. Are you using AOL? If so then make sure Image compression is turned off in the internet settings.

The question of which CPU to use for 3D is very dependant on the application being used and whether the app uses SSE2 instructions or is multi-threaded. For instance Lightwave is multi-threaded and uses SSE2 so it usually runs best on a P4. Apps which use SSE2 will generally run faster on P4 or AMD64 processors. Apps which don't use SSE instructions (i.e. Terragen) will generally run fastest on an AMD athlon with the highest clock speed. I'd suggest asking about CPU's on the fora for the applications you use to see what people recommend. More RAM is a good investment as not having enough will cause the system to use virtual RAM (the page/swap file)on the hard disk which will slow any application more than a slightly slower CPU.

Each judge could give a maximum of 40 points to any one entry and a max of 10 points in any one category. However if there are 5 judges and each gives 9 points for originality (for example) then that would give a total of 45 points for this category.

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