Ouch!

Yep, those are nice boards as well. These ones will support two X2 processors with upgradeability to the quad cores when they come out. So the price should be much cheaper then a server board. At least from what I've read thus far.

Really? The ones I'm thinking of use ADM 64 X2 processors. It's the 4X4 platform. They're bring out three brandnew X2's for the motherboard as well, from what I've read.

Nvidia already has a application that is free for personal use to help with rendering on the nVidia GPU.

AMD is supposely coming out with their dual socket dual core motherboard setup sometime this month. It will also be upgradable to their quad cores when they come out.

Right now Dell is selling their 30" which has a res of 2560x1600 pixels for 1279.20. They have a extra 20% off. It uses the same panel as what Apple has in their 30" but they have theirs priced at $2000. Pretty good deal.

Here's my comp stats:

Windows XP Pro  (SP2)
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Processor 4800+
Mobo: ASUS Deluxe SLI
Memory: 3072MB DDR RAM, PC3200, 400Mhz (Corsair)
ATI X1900 XFX, 512 megs RAM

really no issues or crashes yet. Seem pretty solid so far.

I think you're making him sick :)

I'm getting 10:20 on a AMD 64 X2 4800+. Both cores are 2.4 ghz.

I know when I did some test a couple years back on Bryce 5, I think it was it was always slowing when you did the write to disk option it was always faster rendering to the screen only.

Daz is saying that the university binary is coming at the end of this year when 6.1 comes out I believe. That have a post about it in their forums.

I'm not sure I would consider rendering slow to disks a bug. Think about it. Speed to the hard drives is the slowest part of the system. This would naturally slow things down.

Looks like Photoshop CS 2 also lets you view .hdr files as well.

Hmm, the Carrara version also seems to have a yellow lighting cast to the whole render. The color on the Bryce is much more to the blue side. You see it especially in the grey colored areas or the midtones.

Hell, you could make a cheap render box out of a Mac-mini dual core or just make your own with a mini-atx board with a cheap AMD X2 for $150 and $80 for a board and if you had other spare parts that's some nice extra rendering power for very cheap.

They're worth every cent. Just had a thought. I havn't tested Lightning yet but if it's multithreaded as much as Bryce 6 is now you'll get a bit of speed increase off of using it on a dual core as well. Very nice. They are saying that further mutlithreading optimizations are coming in the free update 6.1. Looks like they're starting to make a new base if you will to build future things on. Very good to see.