Link to my favorite component store, PC Club HERE. opens in new window

I have not seen a thread lately about The Optimal Poser Development Rig. If I missed it, my apologies and would you direct me there please. I am hoping hardware fanatics will see this thread and be willing to chime in. I, for one, really want to learn.

If you wanted to build one single optimal screaming Poser platform, PC (with all due respect to Mac people, of whom I am also one) to be used for delevopment, animating, rendering single frames and short test animations, and running Poser-related tools, what would you buy? (I think renderfarm nodes are a different issue, although of course related)

1. Obviously it is single-processor. And from what I understand the CPU/FSB is the most critical factor, with "mating it with the proper excellent RAM" being second.

2. what is an excellent mating of motherboard, CPU and RAM type/speed/amount?

3. AMD has one CPU that costs hundreds more than the rest of it's line ($900.00) called the AMD Athlon 64 FX55. It has something called (lol) 3DNOW! on board. Is this chip something above and beyond even AMD's other 64 bit chips? Oh, and by the way, does Poser even utilize 64-bit??? Or this chip's power specifically? Link to a sales page about this chip here. Opens in new window.

4. What about the OS? I am not ashamed to admit I use lowly XP Home. I like it. It works. But if it is holding me back from Screamin' Poser, I will ditch it in a second on this rig.

5. are there any render cards that would be optimal for Poser? In otherwords a dedicated add-on card in a slot that would slam Poser Firefly rendering.

6. why is the Hard Drive important? On a five or ten minute render of a frame of animation (not to mention one of those 14-hour massive single frame scene some people build), you are possibly only actually writing 1.5 MB to disk for the TIFF file. That's NOTHING. Other than that short write, why does the system have to access the drive at all during the render? Is it to fetch WindowsXP resources, or to fetch Poser/Firefly resources? And shouldn't there be a way to force those resources into RAM, cache or even a RAM disk?

7. While the video card has no impact on rendering, this is a develpment rig, so, how to be smart about the card so that screen redraw is snappy. You want to move fast...grab/spin a dial, grab/spin a dial, switch from pose room to material room, change body parts, click open the shade tree, back to Pose Room, grab/spin a dial, grab/spin a dial, grab/rotate the camera, etc. etc. but fast with no hesitation. Is this RAM or CPU or VideoCard???

Budget? I want to build this myself, I think. We have "PC CLUB" here in Southern California and I have built two systems buying from them...prices good. Link to PC Club HERE. We also have the famous Fry's Electric here.

What about the wisdom of purchasing a complete system from Boxx or the like. Do they REALLY know something we don't?

I guess I don't have a budget! I want to see what the optimal would be, first. Inevitably there is a 'point of diminishing return' at the top where you can throw the system from, say, $1500 up to $2600, but only get a marginal increase in power. Or from $2200 to $3800!

Thank you,

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