You have to wonder why people buy these dual intergraph systems when my $1300 (w/monitor) AMD system out performs (price to performance wise) a system that has dual p3's @ 866mhz. I have a 1gig T-bird chip, ibm drive and 512megs of cas3 memory.
so my question is why buy 1 $4000 computer when you could buy 3 for that much??
just curious on everyones thoughts (oh and I havent even began to think about how much money is wasted on SGI machines).
Oh and I'll give you the cost for a highend video card but still... come on how long will everyone be duped into thinking that one of these highend systems is actually worth the money???
does your single cpu system out put to tape beautifully
your not just paying for a dual PIII system your also getting a wildcat card or another highend 3d card that costs as much as your system
alot of the time those systems also have cards for out putting to tape they have scsi drives
plus you get a warranty on it sure its great to build your own i built my own out of my old gateway's parts but you knwo when i had the gateway if my cdrom died or something else they sent me a new one or would come out and fix it if you build your own and your cdrom dies you have to go out and replace it kinda a bitch if you bought a $250 12x sony cd burner
plus ive noticed alot of people who say they built a system for $1200 dont include price of software of a monitor or some other key things
plus if im a company that wants to make sure my animators always have amachine to work on well im not gonna build it myself id get an intergraph anything happens they come and fix it in no time
if i had 4 grand to spend on a computer i probably would buy an interraph or similar but i dont so i built it myself but if did well that would be another story
Intergraph also has a propreitary bus sytem that ( well, suppose to) speed up the machine. I have a similar configureation at home to an SGI intergrpah box at work( minus the WILDCAT) including the same drive speeds, I build mine myself , acually have a faster p3 chip at home, but for most everything , the Intergraph will smoke it. Rendering , opening files , play back on video especailly. That has to do with the ram and bus I would asume. So theya re worht the price , but If you;re a company , thats who they target, a few thousand extra is no problme for a name brand box. They would rather than peice meal it and save a few dollars.
In terms of 3D I don't know if the Integraph's (or similar boxes built on high-speed and UMA archticture) buy you that much, but in terms of 2D (non openGL accelerated) they buy you plenty. Benchmarks such as PS5 (suite of photoshop tests) will show them smoking identically configured machines. One reviewer really missed the boat because he compared the total suite completion time and came up with an 8% advantage for the higher speed buses. In fact a huge portion of the final # came from one test where there was neglible advantage. In most tests (non-SSE optimized) such as rotating an image, the faster bus was as much as 60% faster.
I prefer to have two HomeBuilt Dual 866 Machines instead of one "Highend". The Benefits: - more security, can immediatly switch to the second machine, if one fails. - nearly the double renderspeed compared to one zx10 - separate Renderslave - both machines togehter cost less than one Highend
I had Sgi's (O2, Indigo2 and 320) but I will never buy a "Highend" Machine anymore, it is just not worth the money. A few years ago the difference between Highend and Standard machines where big, but things have changed.
What I bought instead of one Highend? 2 Machines: Dual 866 PIII, 1Gb RAM, 30GB HD, GeForce 2, FireWire, 100Mbit Ethernet. As you can see in the MayaTestDatabase, several Homebuilts do outperform expensive Highend Machines. My conclusion is: Buy two "HomeBuilts" instead of one "Highend", you will get more flexibility and nearly the double power.
point is that the Intergraph is mroe freindly to a business becouse of the wareenties and support( well now tht they are with SGI) and again. saveing afewe thousand to a business and letting someone peice meal a computer is a risk that more executives in charge of money don;t want to take . And I think thats who these computers are for. But for rrender speed. I usally have a few computer who just render. I'd rather have this fast bus to push data thru if i can afford it, and let the rendering go to my older boxes, or boxes that are basaclly just a CPU and ram. But maybe thats jsut me . FOr my home ,I just built a computer . Saved the cash .
Agree with all your rationale for dual "low-ends". I myself owned an Onyx way back and am a recent convert to Wintel and am a-mazed at price performance. Coming from SGI land I don't find the 6K "high-end" boxes expensive for what they do.
I just recieved my first Wintel, an Athlon 1200 with 266 FSB and a Fire GL2. Plan on getting duals with a Wildcat when they come out.
That said, in terms of pushing 2D pixels around (which is what the marority of what I do is), the faster buses scream. I can't wait for motherboard manufacturer such as Tyan to include high-speed bus architecture, interleaved memory and 64-bit PCI buses along with SMP. A dual 1.5 Athlon 266 FSB would scream
yea those look neat . As long as the atholons don't catch on fire from the pure heat they give off all will be well Oh , if you got an atholon its not really a Wintel box any mroe is it? haha j/k the new DDR boards look promising , I think the first group of them to really use it will be the Atholon chip boards becosue from what I heard last intel is still screwing around with that horrid Rambus stuff and the p 4. Bus speeds make all the differencen daily performance . So its so worth the extra money and time investigating a horribly downplayed feature in the PC. Makes me laugh when some consumer goes and gets a BIG 1.5 giger chip with a crap motherboard and only 64 megs of slow ram from Gateway. Best thing you can do is weight your options and study your parts to get the best thing for your buck.
I still have warranties on everything I bought... just I have to go to the person I bought the peice of hw through not the manufacturer of the system... oh and tech support... have you ever called them before?? rofl... talk to 3 different people and get 3 different answers... they used to be effective but now i think they should just market themselvs as some sort of voodoo witch doctor that tells you to zap the PRAM anytime anything goes wrong...
anyway... I'd much rather build a system that I can support
oh yeah that 1300 system does have a monitor, 12x burner, cdrom drive (it isnt scsi but, couldnt justify the cost there either). 45 gb 7200rpm drive by ibm is fine by me...
also you can hack the GF2 cards into quadro's.... havent done it yet but, maybe if I work up the nerve...
anyhoo like the guy a couple of posts ago said, why have 1 machine when I can have 2 for less than the cost.
The Intergraphs of the world are for the companies to buy for their employees. 90% image, 10% performance.
The home builts are for people who have a limit to they spending abilities.
The LOWEST Sandra memory scores I've ever seen were on an SGI 320 dual 550 box with the LATEST of every driver... 184/205! YUCK! And they have some stupid expensive proprietary RAM bus in them as well...
