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When to build a Machine? (Good timing)

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bishop00s 2002-06-09 05:03:44 UTC #1

First of all, I'm a machead so I'm not fully up to speed on all the PC side technology which is why I'm asking.

I absolutely love my dual G4 500 and OS X, but Maya's current performance is still lackluster on the mac. I believe they are supposed to be bringing it up to par with the PC version for 4.5, but I still want a faster machine for it. I believe that Apple is working on high end machines that will blow away competition at some point in the future (ie. True G5's and Raytrace hardware etc.) but I want to wait a year for them to get their performance up to snuff.

SO for now I'd like to spend a little chunk of money and get me a powerful 3d PC. I'm aiming to spend about $2000. If I can get what I want for less, wonderful. I'll post later to get help with EXACTLY what to buy etc. But I wanted to know what time this summer is going to be a sweet time to buy. (Are there any things coming out soon that I would like to wait for.) Its not cricital that I have it soon, but would like to have it around september when I go back to college.

There are a few caveats to my purchase, but other than that I am fully open to suggestions:

1) I want AMD, not Intel. I dislike Intels chips.
2) I will use a linux, not windows. Edit: Ok you have me CONSIDERING win2k now

So when should I look to buy?

mistah_a 2002-06-09 17:29:13 UTC #2

well from my point of view Intel is not crap! you only got to spend alittle more cash on a Intel system if you compair it to the sheap AMD system.

i would go for a Dual AMD system,
a couple of nice Mp1900+ or a Mp2000+ doesnt really matter witch you choose.,
The new MPX motherboard from MSI-l(The red one), has gotten nice reviews.., alot of fixed stuff on it,
alot of RAM (1Gb) and a geforce3-4card, or a sheaper one like a ge2ti-64Mb if you could wait until the next-Generation card gets realeased, the new MatroX forexample, no one knows if it works properly in Maya or general Cg- apps?

You macHeads always waiting for the new wonder-mac, but where is it?
btw Win2000 works just great!

you should buy NOW! its Ok to Go:)

good luck

bishop00s 2002-06-09 17:45:59 UTC #3

Yea we are always waiting for the next wonder Mac. But maybe this time they really have one. Rumors put the G5 coming out in Jan, and supposedly Steve Jobs is taking it personally because he believes it will cause a big wave.

Enough Mac wish wash though.

I definitely think I'm going for a dual AMD. Are they going to come out with a new processor anytime soon? I'd like a pretty decent video card so maybe I will wait until the next ones come out. What cards am I waiting on? Course then I will have to wait to see if they work ok with Red Hat.

I agree win2000 is the most decent operating system MS has put out. (I hate winXP though.) But I'd rather not support Microsoft or have to rely on them. Its not going to be a cool tech world if Microsoft gets ahold of everything they are aiming for.

mnhan32 2002-06-09 19:01:42 UTC #4

So I take it you don't use Internet Explorer, Office or the Mac Operating System then right? Since MS owns and distributes IE and Office and owns so much percentage of Apple still. Sorry I just find it very amusing when I hear Mac users say that.

Dual AMD will suit you well but yes Intel is often the way to go even dispite the cheaper price AMD has. As far as waiting for Video Cards I guess the one to wait for now is the new Matrox card. Hard to believe after so many years of Matrox being silent almost they come roaring back with this card. After that would be the next ATI and next nVidia cards I assume. At a workstation level would be the new 3dlabs cards that have OpenGL 2 and DirectX 9 built into the cards fully (currently they only do OpenGL). Of course if you keep waiting for the next/best hardware then you will be waiting forever

bishop00s 2002-06-09 19:55:23 UTC #5

I don't use their products unless forced to. I use Mozilla 1.0 currently for my browser unless a site requires IE, and you are right I do use Word once and awhile, but rarely do I have the need. I assume that last part was 'office FOR the mac OS' not 'or the mac os' because that wouldn't make sense.

But then again, using MS products on a mac doesn't promote Windows itself which is my biggest problem. I'm not a complete anti-PC person though. I am more than familiar with the OS and will use it if necessary.

Anyway, sorry back to hardware. I don't want to be the mac preacher on this forum. Nobody ever likes them much.

What about AMD? Any new processors coming out soon? When is the new Matrox card coming out?

mistah_a 2002-06-09 20:57:07 UTC #6

well the AMD 'throughbred' is expected very soon!
The Matrox Parhelia should also be releast soon, dunnot know when exactly..

mnhan32 2002-06-10 00:40:42 UTC #7

Nope it does make sense. Back when Apple was in trouble Microsoft bought so many shares of Apple (something like 15 percent if memory serves) so even though MS didn't make the MacOS the sales of the OS still provide profit for MS. Hence the irony of anti-MS Mac people who use the MacOS. However you can also go into who makes the chips for each platform debate as well off the same token.

Oh I understand where you are coming from I've migrated between PC, SGI, and Mac for Graphics purposes and regardless of what I am trying to do I almost always end up back on the PC for overall performance (Maya, Photoshop, etc). I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat but aside from Maya and Shake (for another year at least) everything else I use runs on Windows so thats where I stay. So keep wishing that Adobe and all those folks start porting to Linux I guess....Just my personal 2 cents

Soon and Soon. The 3 head Matrox card comes out later this summer and the 4 head Matrox card comes out in later fall from what I read. The card has some awesome hardware but I'd most likely still lean towards a more popular card. If you got dough to spare 3dlabs cards are awesome (espically once they get DirectX on the cards). I've had my 3dlabs card for a few years and it works great. If you don't have money to save then the nVidia/ATI and maybe now Matrox card wars are probably what you should watch.

bishop00s 2002-06-10 06:20:39 UTC #8

Ah Yes, Bill Gates version of humor. Well I believe Apple has bought back those shares since Steve Jobs has returned it to profit, but I see what you mean. I guess I mainly refer to OS marketshare when I talk about not wanted to support MS.

Unfortunately everything revolves around money. While it would be great if Adobe would port their products to Linux, they would have to put so much work into supporting all the different linux flavors and hardware configurations, that they probably wouldn't profit much. Luckily so far everything I do works fantastic on a mac. (Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Flash, Director, etc...) Maya on my mac works well while modeling and such, but it just seems dog slow for rendering. It is 2 years old this summer though. (Dual G4 500 with a gig of Ram.) So maybe the new G4's are a lot speedier. Still doubt they match the PC's yet for 3D. Hopefully Maya 4.5 includes altivec optimizations for the G4. Here's hoping.

I'll probably wait until these come out, if nothing else than to lower the prices on the current crop. I don't want to spend too much, but I do want a powerful little 3D machine. Thanks for your help. I'll ask for someone to hold my hand through ordering and building the machine a little later in the summer.
~Peace

mnhan32 2002-06-10 13:53:25 UTC #9

Unless he did it in the last year MS still owns the stocks. No biggie though they have their fingers in a lot of things. At least they pay well if you work for MS.

Concerning the Athlon, AMD just released the Thoroughbred core in the Athlon XP 2200. There are several sites showing benchmarks; Tom's Hardware, HotHardware, Ace's Hardware. You might want to check those out.

bishop00s 2002-06-10 17:57:15 UTC #10

Looks like a nice chip. Doesn't out perform the 2.5 GHZ P4 apparently, but its a heck of a lot cheaper. Hopefully they refine it a little for when I buy a little later this summer. Thanks again!

tb582 2002-06-10 18:26:13 UTC #11

Technology will only get faster and better by the season. So whatever you buy now, will be obsolete in a year and a half. Which means to buy the most you can afford right now.

But if you have the cash, I'd say to get this... They just came out today.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~24415,00.html

1000101- 2002-06-10 18:43:41 UTC #12

Hating intel seems kind of odd. Since its partially their fault for speedy CPU development. Remember; Intel, though pricey as they may be; still make a very robust solid product; which is still the standard for building software.
HOWEVER, Getting a dual AMD box seems like a valid option. But running linux only does kind of limit some hardware choices as far as video performance.
If you choose to run linux; your video card options from what I can see currently will be limited to nvidia flavours. MesaGL; the opensourced openGL libs that come with linux are very sluggish. And the only people with solid driver support right now is nvidia. With nvidia's GL libs speed skyrockets up to be on par with win2k.
Of course your limiting software choices too; your stuck with the gimp for 2d edits unless you keep your mac around to use photoshop.
Forabout 2 grand you can get the following
dual athlonMP 2000+
MSI dual board (decent board fairly stable)
1gb PC2100 registered memory
a 40gb IDE drive
gf4 ti4600

Its beginning to get to quarter 3; so expect product releases from everyone including nvidia. I wouldn't plan on the new matrox card being a supersolid openGL system; from waht I understand its a directX part. The 3d labs card might be a good choice; though wether they'll support linux or not is a wonder.

sorry post is long
long day at work.
tired
must sleep

mnhan32 2002-06-10 19:03:17 UTC #13

From what I recall from a press release a year or two ago 3dlabs stated that all future cards would come with linux drivers. Now I'd love to use my Oxygen GMX2000 in Linux (since it can't do any direct x) but that was an older card and they never released a driver.

3dlabs are good cards and they do very well at what they are meant for, Animation. However once you go away from that there are much better manufactors in my opinion that are often cheaper.

bishop00s 2002-06-10 19:35:09 UTC #14

Fair enough. It just seems like Intel is always cutting corners. It was particularly funny when they release the P4 at 2 GHZ, and it was outperformed by the P3 at 1.5 GHZ on a lot of tasks. I have a buddy that studied chips at Cornell. He did say that the engineers at Intel were geniuses for pushing the x86 architecture as far as they have, but that the P4 was a pretty shotty design. (Too bad we haven't had the resource pool at Intel working on the PowerPC architecture, how far along would it be now.)

Understood. But can it really be that far behind with lots of 3d houses switching to Linux fully? ie. Dreamworks. I don't have a problem of going with Nvidia anyway though. I particularly like their cards. Not too fond of ATI, although I am running on two Radeons right now.

Actually I plan on doing all my other work on my mac. I would do everything on my Mac if Maya performed better. The PC will be mainly for 3d and possibly compositing, although it looks like Apple will release its new pro compositing app at MWNY in July and Combustion 2 runs great on OS X.

On a side note you should check out Apple's new Ad Campaign just for fun. It is aimed at switching PC folk over. However they seemed to be aimed at average consumers, not pros. I guess pros will mostly decide what they want based on facts and real world proof.

I will take win2k into serious consideration. Thanks for your advice. I've decided to wait on buying for about a month. I'm going to Macworld NY, so I'm going to talk to Alias Wavefront in person and get their advice as well. (And hopefully see demos of Maya 4.5's performance on the new Macs.) Though I still think I'll wait to buy a new mac in a year when I get to go to Grad School at NYU for my Masters in Digital Imaging!!! How exciting!

1000101- 2002-06-10 21:16:38 UTC #15

I'd like to see that. Right now I'm experimenting with an SGI 330L with the VPRO3 quadro card in it and linux. just an extra box laying around.
I have 2 17 gig ultra wide cssi disks in it; 1 with win2k and the other with linux so I can do an ALMOST side by side comparison.
so far nvidia's drivers for linux are pretty solid. Might slap a geforce 3 or 4 in heresee how it performs and if its as stable as the quadro.

But yeah; a month from now seems like a good time to buy a PC.
prices should drop on all the current hardware since everyones next gen product will be out.

bishop00s 2002-06-11 04:09:24 UTC #16

What would you like to see? The system I want to build? Sorry I'm tired and a little slow.

Just ran in to two interesting articles about Apple trying to bust into the 3D world. The articles sound pretty cool sighting a ridiculously powerful GPU that Apple may be co-developing with NVidia for their new systems. They want to really get serious about this market and put out workstations that compete with the best of the PC ones. I for one hope they do. Anyway, read article 1 and article 2 if you are interested.

mnhan32 2002-06-11 18:18:55 UTC #17

The fact that Apple is trying to break into 3d is definately true. In all honesty we (3d artists) really need a company that did what SGI did in taloring their systems to 3d artists and addressing our needs. Microsoft won't be doing this because while they have 95% of Home machines and workstations out there the graphics community is just a very small section of that (unlike how large of a section we were w/ SGI's users). I believe that Apple is just coming along too late at this point. People have already integrated PC or Linux into their workflows and with the high price and lower performance in moving to a Mac there isn't a likelyhood of many switching over. Their tatics with Shake (NothingReal) and Final Cut Pro (Macromedia) have already upset enough people on top of that already. I actually get a kick out of Apple when I hear from them now. They constantly state that "school A" (using these terms instead of the real names) is using Maya on Macs only and that us, "school B", should switch. Problem is I used to work for "school A" and there are no plans to use Macs for Maya. Now when I talk to former co-workers at "school A" they tell us that Apple said we, "school B", are using Maya on Mac only and that they should switch. I guess one of these days they will catch on that we all know each other, however until then we just laugh and say "yeah right"

Bottom Line or Wish would be to hope SGI could come back and take over things again.

bishop00s 2002-06-11 18:45:54 UTC #18

What other companies are positioned to do this? SGI seems pretty dead. Seems to me that if Apple really tried and showed its commitment it could get it done. Its pretty obvious that Apple isn't breaking into the home market or the enterprise market anytime soon. So what do they have left to focus on but the creative professionals? I agree that I wouldn't want to be working on 3D with Macs right now because of the performance factor and software availability. That would be the sole reason I'm looking at putting together a 3D PC machine. But I think they are poised to take a stab at regaining some of the 3D market if they come out with some seriously high performing hardware, specifically talored to the high end graphics users. They have already starting answering 3D users requests with their new 1U and 3U rackmountable xServe.

Mac OS X is already there. It has the benefits of Linux, with a nice user interface and probably the best OpenGL engine out there.

It may be annoying for them to buy software companies and then discontinue them on other platforms, but if they can come up with better hardware to run them and improve upon them, then that's something at least. I hope they do a good job with Shake. Like it or not, Final Cut Pro has been shaking up the video industry and its a very solid product.

Hey, at least if they start offering some very nice things to the 3D market, it'll create competition and maybe get others to offer even nicer things. (Not a graceful way to say it, but you know what I mean.)

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