So, at long last it's time for me to buy a new PC. My current one is a 4-or-5-year-old Dell, which was smokin' at the time that I bought it, but now is wheezy and tired. The good thing is that it's encouraged me to write more, because writing doesn't require huge gobs of memory or a zippy processor. The bad thing is that I have several 3d modelling projects that could be earning me actual money if I could finish them without pulling my hair out. When it takes 30 minutes to render each product display image, problems like "gee, her head's at a funny angle in that one" become nightmares of Ropsian proportions.
See, I work in a variety of 3d apps. Right now the only one that will render images efficiently is CINEMA 4D. That's the one I use for my modelling and for most of the images I make for fun, including the bubbling bowl up at the top of this page. (See my main site for more of that sort of thing) But the products I sell are mostly designed to be used in Poser or Daz Studio. So to give an accurate idea of what they really look like to customers, I have to use the tool that the customer's going to use to render them. Sigh. Poser & Daz Studio render much, much, much slower than CINEMA 4D (They also cost much, much, less...you get what you pay for). On a newish computer, you'd like them just fine. They'd seem zippy. You wouldn't sit and say "for the love of GOD how long can it take you to render a single figure with a WHITE BACKGROUND! I could render a big leafy TREE in C4D in that time! AND MODEL IT!
So, I've decided it's finally time for a new workhorse. I've got some money saved up, so I can (within reason) buy as good of a PC as I need. I figured I'd get the Dell XPS 400, because it's fast, designed for gaming, and I can get it with 4 gb of memory. Buying a prebuilt system from an OEM vendor has advantages like 1. you can get support 2. you get a deep discount on your OS and other bundled software 3. you typically can also get a discount on your monitor. And folks, I want the Dell 20-inch widescreen ultrasharp flat panel. Oh yes I do. I'm going to keep my super-sharp, beloved little dell 17-inch trinitron CRT, and hook it up to the second video port, and be in pallette heaven. With 2 monitors you can work your main image on one and put all your pop-up palletes and crap on the other, and never have to go to a menu to get a tool. Mmm, I can already imagine it, what a wonderful world it will be. Plus, the widescreen can rotate into portrait mode for reading blogs or what have you, so that's nifty too.
Hub did a very nice job of convincing me that I was going down the wrong path with the actual system, though. Darn him. He suggested that before I spend my money mostly on memory and just accept Dell's idea of a good processor (Pentium E), I open "perfmon" and try rendering some things and performing other tasks in my art apps.
Well, what I discovered surprised me. I've thought, for all these years, that rendering takes place mostly in memory. As it turns out, nuh-uh. It's mostly on the processor. Photoshop is the real memory hog in my toolbox; Poser and Cinema4d want more processor. So we googled around a bit to see if C4D can make use of a Dual Core processor, and found a benchmark test comparison of Athlons and Pentiums that used C4D as its benchmark app. The Athlons won in both the really-expensive category (the 4800+ vs the Pentium EE) and the less-expensive category (3800+ vs the Pentium D). So that means I want my system to start with a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+. I don't think I'm going to want to bother upgrading to a 64-bit os anytime soon but Hub recommends having the option, and since I didn't think to check my processor utilization in the first place, I guess I should listen to him. I'm actually pretty miffed with myself because I'm a professional engineer, and I should use the same decision-making methodology at home that I do at work, and I didn't.
My punishment or reward for this is to build my own PC, although I will probably wimp out and let Hub do the tricky bit of seating the processor onto the motherboard. (When I'm working on a $10,000 system at the office, I insist on doing all of this stuff myself, but when it's my own money, I go all girly and let the man do it! Sigh.) I considered getting a prebuilt from HP, because they have Athlon processors and those cool Lightscribe DVD writers, but their video card selection is garbage. And it's cheaper to build it ourselves--even with buying a genuine legal copy of the OS and all that.
So we're going to Fry's Electronics tomorrow to fondle components, and with luck we'll find a case on the shelf that I'll like, since I do insist on having a cute case for the thing. In the event that we don't, I poked around on Newegg to see what's cool.
First, though, I googled "cute pc case" and found this:
I have to admit I'm tempted!
