dual core or dual xeon?

[acgraham]

Hey guys I'm looking at getting a serious new workstation for rendering. I use 3DS max for animation and rendering which as far as i know isn't available on a 64bit platform yet. im trying to find the best solution to give me the biggest bang for my buck.

i've heard that the pentium d see's as much as a 50% improvement with animation and rendering because of their dual core which makes it a great contender up against a dual xeon, since they aren't available with dual core's yet. and with a dual xeon machine you will probably get only another 80-90% out of the second processor.

I'm not sure how a single xeon compares up against a pentium D of the same speed (say 3.0ghz with 2mb cache), but im guessing the price performance ratio of the pentium d would kick it. im not sure if im correct, but im guessing if i bought 2 pentium D 3ghz machines it would be cheaper and much faster than 1 dual xeon box.

[fearless joe]

hay, im a max user, im on duley amd 2800s, i find it more powerfull then quick, as in i can have max open 3 times all rendering at normal speed.

max maya and photoshop all support smp, so i think thats probly best but

to be honist do you want a workstation, or a renderfarm, cos if the computer you have is good enough to work on, it might be worth just building a load of allright pcs and link um up, if you got the space, pluss that means you can render and work at the same time, alwase usefull

ps, you gots any max work to show off??

[acgraham]

thanks for the reply! well it will begin as a part of a farm, but i will probably drop in a high end pci-e card later on.

heres a link to a piece i did which I just won one of the GSAA awards for-
http://www.spinifexinteractive.com.a...oreveal-03.mov

The amds i have found to be a good choice in terms of price performance in pretty much everything except 3d rendering. the pentiums for quite a while have been quite a bit ahead of them if you checkout the benchmarks on tomshardware.com.

to be honist do you want a workstation, or a renderfarm, cos if the computer you have is good enough to work on, it might be worth just building a load of allright pcs and link um up, if you got the space, pluss that means you can render and work at the same time, alwase usefull

i guess thats what im trying to determine. but after a bit of research it currently looks like it is a far better option cost/performance wise to just buy the single dual core. later on in the year the dual core xeons wil be out and that will be very exciting. 4-5K should get you a machine capable of about 9ghz equivalent processing power for rendering applications. thats like a small current farm in a box.

[fearless joe]

Originally Posted by acgraham

The amds i have found to be a good choice in terms of price performance in pretty much everything except 3d rendering. the pentiums for quite a while have been quite a bit ahead of them if you checkout the benchmarks on tomshardware.com.

granted, mines two years old now, also, if your on a budget, 1 gig of cheapish ram is better then 512 of stupidly fast, depends how big your anamaion files are, also, some smp mother bordes can only take ram upto a cirtan speed, mine can only take 233 mhz ddr, havent looked at any new bordes for a wile though

[fearless joe]

o this may come in usefull to anyone that wants a graphics card

http://www.alias.com/eng/about/event...&v=na&x=17&y=8

if you get a chance go to the maya 7 tour,(or any maya show) i went to the an evning with ILM seminar in london a few days ago, they were selling one of the latest ATI cards, i forget which one, but it normally costs £420, and they were selling it for £220