I am actually looking comparative information and experience for choosing new hardwar, for modeling and animating task on Maya, a bit on Max. (no rendering) First about cpu. I have saw, for my budget, the AMD athlon/xp 1.7 Gh at the same price that the P4 423pins 1.5 Gh. I had read in other post that the AMD is much better. Is it for rendering, or also for viewport editing (modeling and animating) ? Also, the high number of operation per clock don't make crash the system ? Is atlon based computer less stable ? Other question on the AMD :Is there software that can't run on AMD ? I have read that someone had problem to setup Max 4. So, is AMD really the best choice ?
Also about graphic card. I have see that around my budget (approximely 200 $, maybe 300 $) I can choice between geforce 2 with 64 MB, oxygen VX1 32 MB, Elsa synergy 2000 32 MB. The "pro" graphic cards are really pro (at this price range), or better to go on graphic card with 64 MB and geforce 2 chip set ? Also If you could advice other grafic cards at the same price range, or send me url with comparaison between those different hardware ?
Just a note about graphic cards: the nVidia GeForce2 and 3 are not qualified to run Maya 4. That doesn't mean that you can't it just means that there will be problems. The Oxygen cards are qualified. Check ou the qualified list on the AliasWavefront site (www.aliaswavefront.com).
I have rumors about the Athalon as well. But never anything proven.
Check here if you want to see some performance numbers in Maya: http://www.highend3d.com/tests/maya/testce...ter/database.3d You'll see that the Athlon is very strong in Maya. I've run DesignStudio which is based on the same foundation as Maya on a 750 Athlon and it ran great, no troubles at all. And a 750 is pretty slow compared to an AthlonXP. On a budget it looks like a GF2 or GF3 with SoftQuadro is your best bet.
That's not what it means at all -- just because they aren't "officially" qualified doesn't mean they won't work perfectly well with Maya4. Based on my own experiences as well as reading forums such as this one, the GF2/3 family cards work terrific with Maya4 -- use the Softquadro patch and they work even better.
I know of people having more problems with Oxygen cards than I ever have with GF cards.
Yep, you can run Maya with even a GeForce TNT - just was working with it today. Did you get problems with the Hardware Overlay panes as is noted in the AW site? I didn't. It did give me problems with Commotion however. So the nice thing is that the card has troubleshooting controls that allows you turn off things like DirectX. (which was affecting Commotion for some reason). Don't know anything about the Oxygen card except that it is qualified.