Priorities for a workstation and the other things.

Hello.

For a month or so, I’ve tried to understand what sort of system I should get, now that I’ve decided to buy a new computer. Hardwear is a real jungle to me. I hope someone can point me in the right direction:). I’ve tried to talk to the sales people from various companys. Maybe it’s me maybe it’s them. But I still don’t get it.

I work as a 3d generalist and a compositing artist. Doing just about everything. I use Maya, Nuke and After Effects on WindowsXP. So I know that I need a pair of XEON processors to render. Then I understand that I need lots of memory since I always run out both when comping and doing 3d (I have 2GB right now). I now that I need a bunch of hard disk space. And I know that I need a graphics card wich is ggod. So far so good.

Now to what I don’t know. When it comes to graphics card. I have used both highend gaming cards and low end Professional cards. I don’t notice any difference. What is the difference. When would it be a good idea to get a Quadro FX 3700 instead of a Geforce GTX 285?

The speed of the Front Side Bus 1300 or 1600 and how does that connect with memmory speed and CPU speed?

Then there is the hard disk configuration. I was thinking 1 300GB Veloci Raptor and 3 to 4 1TB disks with raid 5. I have understood that a raid is what I need for playing HD and bigger (4k). Is there any difference between a raid in the computer and an extrenal besides that you can hook up more computers to an external. The external ones are a whole lot more expensive. I have seen that raids are mesured in mb/s. How fast a raid do I need for full HD and how fast do I need for 4k? I have tried to figure out the difference between SATA, SAS and SCSI. Would a raid with 4 SCSI drives be as fast as a raid with 8 SATA drives? What is the best cable to transfer the data, USB, FireWire 800, eSATA or fibre? Do I need a raid card either way I go with the raid in the computer or with the external one? And what’s the difference between different raid cards besides the huge price difference?

I now that I’ve asked alot of questions. But if you can answer one of them I will be a bit better prepared atleast:). And since I’m not the first one to have these wonderings (I think), others might find the thread interesting.

/Calle

Any chance to change process priority?

Hi,

I’m currently (non) busy transcoding footage files with Compressor on my Mac (10.4.11, 5GB RAM, 2 *2,66 GhZ Xeon) and was wondering if it is possible to force OS to use more computing power. I got around 3 GB of unused RAM, CPU work load is around 40 %.

Is this possible at all?
Any pointers welcome.

Need help with “Automatic spider in Maya with set driven keys”

Need help to get Automatic spider in Maya with set driven keys i have found a tutorial but it is not that the best. here is the link to what i have found if the is a better one out the please let me know. Thanks
http://www.pixero.com/tutorials_spider.html

3d/vfx software on WINDOWS7 Beta. Should i stay or should i go?

Has anyone tried Maya,Nuke,XSI,Fusion,CS4,Max…etc on WINDOWS 7 x64 (built7000+)?How are they behaving? Should i leave xp x64 behind already? I’m very anxious about WIN7 as i hear a lot of great things about it from the testers.

Vista and xp

Hi guys windows vista 64 edition business how many core can it aces? I have Intel quad core i7 will it be able to see all the cores and use them? is it same with xp professional how? Many core does it use?

One last question if i am running Maya on xp pro and Maya can use all 4 cores for rendering and xp pro can only aces 2 core does that mean that Maya will not be able to use all 4 cores since operating system cant access all 4 bust just 2 cores.

thanks

Network shared storage

Hi,

I need some with this question:
What is the best system to share footage for four comps workstation??

SAN, NAS, DAS? witch raid, and what connection?
Fiber? iSCSI? Gibabit cat6? or ePCI direct?

The four workstation usually do composition with HD or 2k footage on tiff sequences.
I need to know how delivery that data more faster has possible.

Anybody know and help me?

Thanks for advance!

Fusion IO, and other SSD-options for good playback?

I`ve been reading around about that new SSD-monster Fusion IO. The geeks are in ectasy over extremely fast read speeds. But all of these is from a "server"-perspective. Anyone got any clue if I could just smack this into my workstation and get 2-3k-playback from it?

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/168…ate/index.html