Dream Machine...finally

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1

Hi all,

Long time viewer (lumis) first time poster.

We finally have a large chunk of money to purchase graphics machines, and I was looking for advice from you experts. We will likely need to go with a Dell Precision Workstation though we would consider HP, and need to run Maya, plus Adobe CS3 (all), maybe Combustion, possibly Digital Fusion etc. Do you recommend going 64bit so we can get more than 4G ram? Is there a tradeoff, problems with CS3 compatibility, concerns? If we went 64, is Vista64 ready for primetime yet, or is it XP64 still? Graphics card recomendations welcome as well. We are talking $7000 to $9000 total for each machine, including hopefully a 30" monitor, and ideally an HD video air-check card/monitor.

Thanks
G

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with that high of a budget. go with dual Quad-core Xeon CPU. 16GB RAM, 64-bit XP. Vista is not prime time yet, at least for this industry.

I would also recommend going with SAS drive, it really is very fast. price has come down a lot lately.

you should consider FX3700 on the low end to FX4700x2 for the high-end video.

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Thanks Bw, I'll look at those suggestions closely

G