Graphics Workstation

[tshontikidis]

My company is looking to purchase a graphics workstation. they will be doing alot of editing of stills and making short movies/commercials. they are looking for a semi-high end, nothing like a rendering farm, just a single high powered machine.


Here are the specs of a system they are looking at:
XPS 600
Date & Time: November 04,2005 12:39 PM CST
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
XPS 600 Qty 1
Pentium® D Processor 830 with Dual Core Technology
(3.0GHz, 800FSB), Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional Unit Price $3,078.00
Catalog Number: 4

Module Description Show Details
Processor Pentium® D Processor 830 with Dual Core
Technology (3.0GHz, 800FSB)
Operating System Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz-
4 DIMMs
Keyboard Dell USB Keyboard
Monitor SAVE $200! 20 inch Ultrasharp™ 2001FP
Digital Flat Panel
Video Card 256MB PCI Express™ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out)
nVidia GeForce 6800
Internal Hard Drives 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Floppy Drive and Media
Reader No Floppy Drive Included
Mouse Dell® 2-button USB mouse
Modem No Modem Requested
Document Management Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 6.0
CD or DVD Drives -- Read,
Write and Store Data
Dual Drives: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x
DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write capable
Sound Cards Sound Blaster Audigy™ 2 ZS (D) Card w/Dolby
5.1, IEEE 1394 capability
Speakers Dell 5650 5.1 100 Watt Surround Sound
Speaker System with Subwoofer
Productivity Software Pre-
Installed
Microsoft Office Professional- Small Business

I have never really had to buy this type of computer, so i do not know if I am going in the right direction. Should we be looking at the workstation computers?

thanks

 

[dirtydr]

The price seem a bit steep for the specs but that is to be expected as soon as you start looking for a "workstation". First thing to address would be what specific applications will this machine be running. If there is to be heavy video editing I would suggest a beefier disk subsystem (SCSI RAID 0).

Is the company opposed to building the hardware in house? For $3100 you can get a heck of a lot more machine if you byob.

<edit>

I did not notice that monitor in the middle of the specsheet. That does make it a bit less painful for the money I'd still be looking at upping the speed of the disk(s). Possibly a 4 drive sata raid 0 as opposed to a 2 drive scsi raid 0. Further, if the primary applications are SMP aware I would not hesitate to buy a dually.