An ultimate system for 3Ds max

S

Socrilles17

Gawd
Joined
Jan 12, 2001
Messages
857
One of my friends needs an amazing system for 3ds max, money is not a big issue I'm wondering what the best components are (have been out of the loop for too long)

the plan so far is

fx51 athlon 64
asus board with raid
2 gb ram
ati fire gl x2
and dual 80 gb hd


i need to know what the advantage of raid 0+1 compared 0/1 would be and also quiet hsfs cases and HDs help is much appreciated.

dan
 
dual opterons

aren't the files pretty large, i would go with larger drives then the 80gb
 
I think 3d studio max might work better on an intel platform just because of the way the software is written.

also, raid 0+1 is the way to go, since you want speed and mirroring. takes a ton of hdd's though

and yeah, definitely get more than 80gb/160gb
 
Come on, at least HyperThreading and/or dual processors. Dual Opteron Model 248s or Xeon DP 3.2 GHzes would be at the top of my list. The RAM complement should be ample, but an 'ultimate' system always demands more.

I would also consider adding a drive or two of SCSI 15,000 RPM drives to complement the additional ATA drives needed for storage. The 15k RPM drives have great read service times and transfer rates when needed, but the additional drives can store more permanent data for less than an all-SCSI setup.

Definitely consider a true RAID array like 1 or 0+1. Your friend will appreciate the extra level of redundancy which could be crucial if he is a serious modeler.

Of course, I wouldn't rule out a premade system either, like the Xi 488 MTower 2P64, which recently scored very well in CADALYST magazine.
 
Ditto on the dually Opterons and if money is not an object, get a professional SCSI Ultra 320 RAID Card that supports two channels.

One Raid 1 array for OS. SCSI 10K or better.

One Raid 5, 5 disk array for data. SCSI 15K.

I know serious 3dMax users don’t want to be losing renderings that took them a week to accomplish so I think redundancy is as important as IO speed. In fact, if he is serious, you might consider a second dually Opteron machine on a gigabit network to do the rendering on, so he can work on one and render on the other. 3DSMax also supports some clustering if you want to go all out. :D
 
I know Maya takes full advantage of SSE2, I'm not sure if that's the case on 3DsMax. If you are going A-FX, it would be more beneficial to go Dual Xeons. You can easily get two Xeons for the price of one AthlonFX. Also, the SSE2 on the Athlons (all levels) dont perform as well as the SSE2 on Intel. That is why Intel constantly beats AMD on rendering times...and with Intel Xeons, you will have two real processors, then two logical ones...







EDIT: Also, I would get two SCSI hdds, and partition them as two seperate drives. Use one as a scratch disk, and render onto the other. Then, use IDE to store the final product.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top