Hi,

A friend of mine is thinking of getting Vue 5 Esprite.  Her PC's CPU is an AMD Sempron 2200+.  On paper this looks to be a suitable processor.  Does anyone have any experience of running Vue on a Sempron 2200+?

I ran VUE4PRO and VUE5I on an Athlon 2000+ for a few years and it ran well, but I also had 1Gb of RAM.

 Since her Sempron is actually an Athlon XP CPU, it should run well as long as she has enough RAM.  I would reccomend at least 1GB, but not more than 2Gb, as Windows can only allocate 2Gb max per application.

Thanks I'll pass that along.  Need to check on the RAM and possible video card issues too.

Mark,

"IF" she will need to upgrade the the video card and RAM,  I would recommend updating the whole system because I feel that she'll be throwing out good money for outdated equipment.

I've just gone through this scenario with my wife.  Her 1800+ Athlon XP mobo packed it in (the keyboard connector fried - and not just the PS2 one, the USB went as well).  The only new socket A mobo I could locate was a MicroATX board, and that will not work for her as she has too many PCI cards.  I did not want to upgrade her to the latest equipment as that would cost too much money, and with major AMD CPU price cuts on the way, I thought it would be prudent to wait.

I needed to replace her mobo while re-using as many components as she had in her old system.  The latest motherboards were not an option, as they require PCI-E video cards and well as RAM matched in pairs.

I finally settled on a socket 754 motherboard w/ a Sempron 3100+ CPU - a $200 upgrade.  We were able to re-use everything else in her system - RAM, video, SCSI hard drives & PCI cards.  The reason I did not go for the socket 939 boards or the new AM2 boards was because she would then need new RAM - 3Gb of it as well as a PCI-E video card. Her current AGP card was quite expensive when it was bought and it still kicks A**.

By the end of September, AMD CPUs may be at 1/2 of their current price as AMD will re-price their CPUs to be competitive with the just released Intel Conroe CPUs, which appearently outperform the Athlon64s.  If your friend can add 1Gb to her system which should be under $100, then she might be OK until late fall when she might think about upgrading at a much cheaper cost.

I ran Sisoft Sandra benchmarks on my wife's old system and her new system, and the upgrade from an 1800+ XP to a 3100+ Sempron basicaly increased the integer performance by 50% and the floating point benchmark by 100%.  As my wife is a Photoshop junkie, the performance increase on her system is noticable.  It also allows us to forestall a major upgrade  to a twin-core system once the prices drop and stabilise.  (Then the Sempron system will be added to my renderfarm...ACE.)

Hope the above helps.  Drop me a line if you need info.

Cheers...JoeK

Thanks for the extra info Joe it really helps. 

I suspect if she needs to do an upgrade on her system that Vue may not happen at all but I'd rather avoid her discovering that it doesn't work and that she needs to do an upgrade after she has spent the money buying Vue.  I'd feel bad because my pictures got her interested in Vue.

You should just have your friend download the trial demo and see how it runs on their system. :)

I suggested that to her myself but her computer isn't on the Internet so I'm afraid it isn't an option.

Mark,

Try downloading the demo and saving it onto your hard drive as a file, then transfering it to a CD for installation on her system.  That may not work IF the DEMO requires constant access to the internet.  Might have to drop E-ON a note asking for suggestions if it doesn't work.

IF you have an OLD copy of VUE4, you could try to install that and see how it runs.  You'd have to uninstall it afer testing to stay legal, but it should give you an idea if VUE will run or not.

She's probably thinking of VUE Easel, which should have a pretty light footprint (so I thinks).

Cheers...

I think she will try the demo now on the machine that she'd be running it on if she buys it.  She'd been trying it on an underpowered machine that was connected to the Internet.  She wants to get esprite not easel as ultimately she wants to use it for producing archaelogical reconstruction images as well as landscapes for fun  (she'd really like to get V5I but its a bit pricy for her at the moment) and there were some features esprite has that she'd need.

Thanks for all the help.