Hi,i'm not new to computer graphics,but I am fairly new to whats going on inside your computer.heh.

Right now I have:

Win7-64bit (recently upgraded)
Intel Core 2 duo
6 GB Ram (recently upgraded from 2gb)
Nvidia Gforce 8600 GT graphics card
ASUS P5W Deluxe motherboard.

I was wondering if this is enough to render millions of particles for short student tests ,15secs maybe (apprentice)

What should I look into for the future,I know I may need to get a whole new setup,if someone can point me in the right direction that would be great.

it depends on the scene scale. it may seem that memory is the firts issue, but in my case 160 res of fluid sims, peak mem usage is 11.5 for a second and on avarage it is 7. these are all writing to disc stuff. HDD is the bottleneck in my case. and this is the least priority item for most of the avarage users.

so your main hard disk drive should be a priority too,i haven't heard this mentioned so far.

Sounds worth looking into.

hdd is can be quite a bottleneck. I'm going to buy a ssd for caching, maybe it helps
martin

so a larger hard disk doesn't have to be your main (cdrive?,you can configure software to send information to another drive?

:roll: probably a stupid question,but maybe i AM stupid

also,what is the advantage of SSD?

speed

but whenever i check hardware sellers there are a lot of complains about ssd
stop working after some weeks.

I think you are better of having more ram. It's not that expensive any more so you can have lots of it. And you will need lots of it too, unless you optimize your scenes like crazy and chop everything up in delayed loads for rendering. But for simming you will reach a limit to the amount of objects/particles a lot quicker.

I just upgraded from 8 to 22 Gb and it allows you to have a bit more overhead in your scenes. Not necessarily the cleanest way, but brute force can work too . Or if you do optimize you can get a lot more particles simmed in one go.

In regards to speed for SSD I found it kinda works like this in the benchmarks.
If you consider the speed of a 7200RPM hard disk as your starting point, a 10000rpm drive will be about 25% faster. An SSD drive will be around 50% faster.

Right now, I'd recommend an Intel Core i7 970 6-core CPU (3.2GHz) which just recently dropped to $580, with as much memory as you can afford. I've seen 3x4GB kits for as low as $125 and two of those kits would give you 24GB. The new high-end Intel CPUs are not due out until later this year.

thanks for the help guys.very much appreciated.

well to be honest I won't have the money to afford a new system until later this year anyway (or mid-year)…but i'm guessing that new intel cpus will be hella expensive,and I will probably go for the (probably cheaper) i7 anyway.

I'm thinking

Win 7 64-bit (obviously)
Intel i7
16GB ram
3 HDD's (each raid 1TB)
NVidia Quadro graphics card
I also need to include a new larger monitor in there.

If I can find the cheaper kits mentioned I guess I could get more ram.

My current motherboard is incompatible with the latest CPU'S so thats y i need to build a whole new system.

anyone got any motherboard recommendations?

thanks again guys.

3 HDD's (each raid 1TB)

If you mean 3 1TB drives in RAID 0, you may want to rethink that. If one drive goes, so does all your data RAID5 would be ok, good combination of data redundancy and performance.

If you want a RAID 0 scratch drive, just pick up two small RAID drives in addition to a larger system drive (or drives).

yeh i was talking about raid 0 (it was recommended to me)

I was under the impression they all had to be the same size.

See,this is why I need forum help

(confused) i'll do more thorough research.

All the drives you put in a RAID array should be the same size, otherwise the larger drives capacity is wasted as the array makes them all the size of the smallest drive. However, you can create a RAID array of 2 drives, and have drives outside of that array. Only the drives in the array should be uniformly sized.

RAID0 is excellent for performance, but puts your data at greater risk. If one drive in the array dies, then all of your data on all drives in the array is unrecoverable. This is why people often use it for a “scratch drive” which contains temporary data (like cached sim files). All of your source material, programs and operating system should live on a drive that isn't in a RAID0 array.

In fact, you can use a RAID1 array for data you want to be very secure. RAID1 takes 2 drives and mirrors the data on both, providing read speed that's up there with RAID0, but halving the arrays capacity (ie, a RAID1 array of 2 1TB drives is 1TB). If one drive dies, you have an exact copy of all the data on the other drive. With the price of drives today, it's not a bad option.

If you do intend to use a RAID array and mix it with drives that are not in the array, make sure to by RAID-edition drives for the RAID array and non-RAID drives for ones that aren't in the array. RAID-edition drives do very little error recovery, as that is handled by the RAID controller. If you use a RAID drive outside of a RAID array, you may lose data because of the this. Conversely, if you use a non-RAID drive in a RAID array, the extra time it takes to do the more extensive error recovery that non-RAID drives have may cause the RAID controller to think the drive has stopped functioning and drop it out of the array. Not good either.

Good luck!

:shock:

oh wow thanks for the detailed response,I think I understand now.This has been very helpful.

Don't waste your money on a quadro… much better getting a geforce card.
Either a gtx 460 (1Gb) or a gtx 580 depending on your budget. Don't get Ati, too much driver problems (check the forums) especially under linux.

I managed to pick up an older HP workstation (xw8400) with two quad core 3.0Ghz xeon (X5365). It's good, but power hungry, towards the future you are better with the i7 I think.

Two 6-core xeons would be awesome, but they are really expensive. An overclocked 6-core i7 will probably give you the best value for money.

It's a good thing you are waiting a bit, wait until intel releases their fixed version of the sandy bridge platform. There was a problem with it and a lot of board were recalled.

hi pclaes

I was only going for a quadro because I read this in the houdini system requirments.. (quoted below) but I look on your website,and seem to know what you're talking about.

Graphics Card
Workstation-class OpenGL graphics card, such as NVidia Quadro and ATI Fire Pro, are required for professional use in production.
Non-workstation cards, such as GeForce and Radeon, can be used at your own risk. They may be used for learning and personal use but they are not supported as you may experience display problems, slow performance, and the software exiting unexpectedly.