Hi I want to upgrade my machine to speed up my renders, but I don't know whether its worth doing so. I have an Athlon XP 3000+, 2 gig mem, 120 spare hd and a X800 pro graphics card. I am considering ungrading to an Athlon 64 3500, but do not know what performance increase this gives. I have also considered going Pci E with SLi twin geforce 6600, but do not know if poser5 will benefit from this as appears to be dependent on how much processing is done by the cards or the processors. I've been generally confused by the shop assistants and need help!
Cheers chris

Message edited on: 01/24/2005 14:38

Chris, did you look into my thread currently running in the Poser Technical Formum "Optimal Poser Development Rig?"

I will be posting in there agin in the next 24 hours with results. I got my great new AMD Athlon 3500 Rig yesterday, and will be doing some benchmarks.

It would be well for you to find the Jim Burton benchmanrk and perform it on your sys, because I will be reporting the results of that benchmark on a sys very similar to the upgrade you are contemplating.

By the way, video card is not the place to put your 'bang' on an upgrade. Read the other thread, but: CPU, RAM, HD.

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Message edited on: 01/24/2005 15:11

Thanks, I've just read the thread and it's most illuminating. I look forward to the benchmarks and feel that i can save some money on sticking with agp for now. Where is this jim burton benchmark? What is this "seat for poser" and can i us a network to help with rendering? as I have basic 2 computer network thro' an adsl router and with spare parts of my upgrade can add another one!

There is no official "render farm" feature in Poser, where you pay once for a certain number of nodes and network the computers, and they work on an image or animation in an organized way. Instead you can do a RenderCondo. This means, you have several computers, each with a "seat of poser" ($99.00) and you give each computer it's own 'job'. Suprisingly, this works quite well for many reasons. I'll let you find the burton benchmark on your own. In this tech forum or the general Poser Forum, just search on "Burton", any thread with him in it is valuable, but you will soon find the benchmark threads he started. ::::: Opera :::::

Cheers! Thanks for the help.

You've got a pretty decent system there. The only thing that's really worth upgrading is the drive, that's the main bottleneck. I work on an Athlon64 3500+ system similar to Operaguy, on a P4 2.8 FSB800 with 1.5 Gb DDR400 Dual Channel (Radeon9600Pro) and an AthlonXP 2700+ (1 Gb DDR333, Ti4200). You'd expect the P4 to perform better with Poser 5 than the AthlonXP, but it doesn't. The AthlonXP has two drives in hardware Raid 0, while the Pentium has a single drive. Result: the AthlonXP outperforms the Pentium. Of course, the Athlon64 is significantly faster than the other two, mainly due to the two WD Raptors in Raid 0. If your system has a RAID controller, then buy two identical drives (Hitachi Deskstars are big, fast and affordable) and configure them as RAID 0. You'll definitely see a performance increase for all your apps, not only Poser. Shelling out for a complete new system may be a bit overdone. Unless you don't have a RAID controller. Upgrading the video card is absolutely useless for Poser. That x800 is a good card, Poser only uses the graphics cards capabilities for drawing in the document window. My lowly Ti4200 has no problem keeping up. The final render is pure CPU. Hope this helps, Steven.

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