Will P8 work reasonably well on an AMD 3200+ 1.5 gig ram system?
using IDL ?
in general????
I don't want 4+ hour renders.

Otherwise, I'm off to buy Vue7 Pro Studio for $99 + $40 for the wind machine. would buy the tree painter, but that/'s $100...can't afford that too. bummer.

I don't know AMD CPU's too well. I googled that one, and found a review from 2003! Six years old puts it at around 16 times slower than current machines.

If it's 2 GHz with a 400 Mhz front side bus, I'm guessing you will see simple IDL renders (boxes and balls) around 30 minutes, and complex ones (figure, clothes, transmapped hair, reflection) more than 20 hours.

If I had that and only around $100 to spend, I'd buy a used computer from 2007 that would be 5 times faster than what you have.

good point. its actually a speedy AMD64-3200+ from late 2003 :)
I built it with the intent of upgrading to that new 64bit OS that never materialized for quite some time after I built it.
I'll check craigs for a cheap system. Probably could get a free one that is 10 times faster than my current system. That would really be a win-win

Hey Dave-So, thought I'd let ya know, I finally made it to Vietnam back in March, awesome place, looked up some of the old war places too.
Loved those anecdotes you sent me from your time there!
Cheers.

I have it running on a AMD 4200 with XP 64 and works well. I also have it on an AMD 3200 with XP and it also runs well. Renders are slower than my main machine (an i7 with XP 64), but not much slower than the 4200 with XP 64.

You don't need a super pc to run P8.

It runs quite happily on a cheapy laptop with this spec...

CPU Mobile Intel Celeron-M 575 (2.0Ghz 667MHz FSB 1Mb cache)
HDD 160Gb:
Memory: 1024Mb DDR2 667FSB

edited to add runs XP

Quote - Will P8 work reasonably well on an AMD 3200+ 1.5 gig ram system?
using IDL ?
in general????
I don't want 4+ hour renders.

Otherwise, I'm off to buy Vue7 Pro Studio for $99 + $40 for the wind machine. would buy the tree painter, but that/'s $100...can't afford that too. bummer.

Where exactly are you seeing Vue7 Pro Studio for only $99?!? I'm seeing it at E-On for $199 and that's half off the original price. Is this an upgrade price?

yes..upgrade price. I have V6 Pro Studio now

Ahh. Lucky you. I only had Vue 5 Easel with no upgrade path to the Vue 7 Pro. Still. I couldn't pass up $199 so I just forked it over today! (Well, I forked over my credit card, I'll be paying for it eventually!) :tt2:

Quote - Hey Dave-So, thought I'd let ya know, I finally made it to Vietnam back in March, awesome place, looked up some of the old war places too.
Loved those anecdotes you sent me from your time there!
Cheers.

very cool..I was just looking at some travel stuff for there couple of weeks ago. The las tplace I was stationed is off limits unfortunately...run by the Army, so they don;t let anyone in.