I've come nto a bit of a windfall and I am wanting to upgrade my comuter. I currently run Win XP on a HP box with 8 GB RAM and a NVIDIA GEForce 8600 GT. A recent question to this forum informed me that this card won't work with Cycles. I am also quite concerned that support for XP will end in April. What I am looking at is a Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz, 32GB DDR3, 2TB HDD, DVDRW, 2x 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7750 CrossFireX, Fan Control, Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. It is a gaming PC but it should run fast enough for me to multi-task and run my various modeling apps. I can also get on that is running Windows 8, but I am not sure which way to go. I don't know the pros and cons of win 7 vs Win 8, but have read various opinions. I surely don't want some OS that is a PITA and hassles me when I try to install any programs, and that has been one of the things I have read about with these 2 operating systems. My modeling app of choice is Blender 2.69 and I have spent the past couple of years learning as much as I can about it. Blender, as you all know, has a pretty sharp learning curve, and I am an old man whose memory isn't quite so hot any more.  I am not really big on Poser or DAZ Studio but use them both to test my modeling efforts. Can anyone tell me if this is a good choice, or is there something else I should be looking at? And any comments on Win 7 vs Win 8 would be very much appreciated!

TIA

C~

Well the one thing I would point out is that to take advantage of Blender's Cycle rendering which favors the GPU and at this time only supported in NVidia graphics cards you might want to take that into consideration. Here is some info any NVidia GTX 4xx and above would be suitable here is a link to some more info on the subject.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/GPU_Rendering

As to OS well I am still using Windows 7 and in no rush to upgrade to 8 or 8.1 but that is a personal choice. I know Linux is also very Blender friendly and I know a few members here who I am sure will chime in praising one Linux Distro over another but I would go Linux before I seriously considered Windows 8 and again that is just a personal choice.

Good Luck

I run 64-bit Blender in 64-bit Linux Mint. Both OS and program are rock-solid stable and fast. I also have Win7 Home Edition for Poser Pro 2014 which I go into on occasion... so the desktop is dual-boot. The laptop boots exclusively to Mint, in which I run both XP and Windows7 in virtual machines.

(This IS an option for WindowsXP that most people don't know or care to explore, and it's really too bad, because it extends the life of a reasonably good Microsoft OS that really has no business becoming obsolete. Nice thing with running it in VirtualBox - also really easy to set up! - is that once you have your OS like you like it and all the drivers and printers and programs and WinXP updates installed, you create an "appliance" - really trivial, GUI-based process - which is like a backup, so if the system gets borked or whatever, you simply restore from appliance. Which takes about 1.75 mins for XP and 5 mins for Win7... how good is THAT!)

Both the Linux OS and Windows take advantage of the GPU, which for Blender's Cycles is phenomenal. Indeed, it blows everything else out of the water, including even my beloved Poser. I don't bother running Blender in Windows, since one can't invoke automatic updates to the latest-greatest via PPA like one can in Linux.

I'm not going to be categorical and say that Linux is for everyone. Initially, it's dead-easy to install, but the drivers for the graphics card and cuda toolkit and all that are a bit fiddly, but there's heaps of help online so you can't go wrong.

Windows8? Some people like it. I despise it. Change for change's sake. The whole "oh, it's HEAPS faster" or "it's so much more stable" etc-etc than previous versions has a familiar ring to it.
Keep that in mind when you decide.

You might really like Windows 8. No OS is without issues. I like the freedom aspect of Linux, the community-vs-corporation mindset. If that isn't going to be a factor, then Windows 8 might be a good choice.

Still, ask around.

@Lobo3433- If I'm understanding you correctly, and I am comprehending the link you provided right, then the AMD graphics card in the box I am looking at would not be supported. The are others with the NVIDIA Quadro K4000 vid card that is available at Tiger, although it is about $800 more than the box I mentioned. It also has only a 1TB HD, while the original has a 2 TB drive. I can pick up a 1TB drive from Tiger for about $70, and it would be what I would do, because my current box has 2 HD's and I really like it. I keep all applications and the OS on the C: drive and my content on the D: drive. It has been fairly trouble free since I bought the computer in 2008. I appreciate your input. I am in no real hurry to get the new computer because I want to ensure that I have all my little duckies in a row...

@RobynsVeil - I like the thoughts of a Linux box. I downloaded Mint today and also downloaded VirtualBox to use with it. I am thinking I will convert my present box over to Linux when I get the new computer. I have run Linux Ubuntu on a dual-boot setup and liked it, although it was a bit confusing to me. I run Blender because it is open source and would run Linux for the same reason. The price isn't an issue - I agree with your opinion on a community based application such as Blender. I feel that the community takes more pride and works harder to improve and upgrade any open source application versus something that is corporate driven. I think you would agree that the agenda of each entity is way different! I have liked Win XP better than any OS I have ever used. I started out on Win 3.1 a lot of years ago, and I have experienced a lot of the different upgrades and new releases. It is a shame that such a fine app like XP is falling by the wayside. I am not very happy with what I see and have read about Win 8. On top of that, I am an old coot that is much resistant to change! Thanks so much for your input - I may be bugging you in the future when I venture into the Land of Linux.

Peace,

Charlie~

Hello Charlie

If you are going with Tiger and I assume you mean Tiger Direct I do know that they do offer some custom configurations which you may want to check into where switching out the AMD card for a Nvidia card might be one option. I tend to build my own machines picking the parts and configurations that I want so when i need or want to do upgrades I am only upgrading parts instead of whole machines. Also Robyn makes many valid points her particular set up which she has shared information on numerous times is in my opinion an ideal way to go if you have the patient to set it up and put the effort into. The only thing I will say is that when support for XP ends in April so will support for XP mode in Windows 7 and the risk is that many AntiVirus providors will also drop support for it as well. That being the case that even with in a virtual enviorment your risk damaging that image. I personally am considering the Linux Mint and keeping Windows 7 with my next major PC upgrade that I hope to accomplish myself this summer. Windows 8 is no where under cosnderation at this time.

Good Luck

Feel free, Charlie... we've just completed a move - the distance wasn't a biggie, but we've downsized and the kitchen is half the size of our old one, so it'll take a while "settling in", particularly since both of us work - but I'll try to monitor these pages.

Linux is all about the community, as is Blender. I think you'll find that the most complex bit in setting up your new desktop for Blender is going to be CUDA/NVidia drivers.  They really do need to streamline that process a bit for Linux users.

If you use any Windows 3D software - besides Blender - that requires hardware acceleration, you'll need to run Windows7 on bare metal. As in: dual-boot configuration.VirtualBox is not quite there yet, so like Poser runs poorly in that evironment. Other stuff runs fine, like Office and like that.

Install Win7 first, resize the partition and then install Mint. Windows is "stupid", so it has no idea what EXT4 (I'd go with that file format for Linux) is and will try to overwrite the bootstrap. Linux is smart and will detect a Windows install and will set up GRUB so that when you boot, you're given a little menu to select going into Mint vs Win7. The Mint install will take all of a couple of hours (prior to the graphics driver stuff)... apps and other drivers are installed with the OS.