help in assembling a work station

[shobhit]

Hi,

I am new to this forum, need urgent advise. I am trying to assemble a work station to execute 3d graphic animation and non linear vedio editing. I am looking for advise for best possible configuration for this work station.
1. which mother board ?
2. which graphic card ?
3. which CPU ?
4. which sound card ?
etc
I have budget of around 1800 - 2000$. I want to run applications like Maya,3d max, photoshop, adobe after effect and adobe premear etc. Do gaming graphic cards work as well for executing 3 d animation. would i require a graphic card as well a video card? What about matrox parherlia NPVe ?

shobhit

 

[phisrow]

First and foremost, your application requires a very fast processor and gobs of RAM.

An Athlon X2 or higher speed A64 would probably be best, unless you can wait for Conroe, which is said to be nice; but not out yet.

You'll want at least two gigs of RAM, quite probably four.

Graphics card: Matters considerably less than you might expect. Maya, and(I think) 3d Max do use the video card to accelerate their user interfaces, so a decent card would help; but all the work of video editing, 3d rendering, and graphics manipulation is done by the CPU(or very, very, very expensive coprocessors).

Sound Card: Probably doesn't matter all that much, for the applications you listed. If you want to do hardcore audio editing, you'll need a proper board; but for standard use, making sure audio is synced with video, etc. any recent onboard will probably do.

 

[bob4432]

welcome to the boards. i would wait for intel conroe to come out and see what real benches say. if the tests we have seen are accurate, it will be the way to go. any chance you can hold off ~6mos?

 

[shobhit]

hi,

thanks for replying, could you give me specific insights into which CPU, motherboard, graphic card etc. Checking out the net i figured out that a dual core processor would be required but which one? two graphic cards that looked interesting and in my budget were Quadro fx 1100 and matrox parhelia do have any idea about them? also i would like to know whether firewire supports are part of the motherboards these days or you need to get an extra card for that.

shobhit

 

[spikespiegal]

Few motherboards come native with firewire, although there are a couple out there. Given firewire addon PCI cards cost like, $10 from Newegg and tend to work better anyways, it's no budget concern. Certainly don't base your motherboard decision on firewire.

Either of the graphics cards you mention should work fine - overkill if anything. Just make sure if you get a PCI-x motherboard you get PCI-x video cards.

2-gig of RAM.

Dual core processor, yes.

Best bang for the buck is probably a socket 939 board from a strong tier vendor like Asus or Gigabyte coupled with a dual core X2 in the 2.2ghz range.

I know Dell has a negative rep around here because it's blasphemy to consider buying a system vs building, but we have a couple dual core Dimension 9100s upstairs, and they 'rock' for multimedia.

 

[Megatomic]

Motherboard: Tyan Tiger K8WE - $269 shipped

CPU: 2x Opteron 270 - dual core for 4 processors! - $928 shipped

Memory: 2x 1GB Patriot Registered ECC DDR400 - $205 shipped

Video card: 1x PNY Quadro FX1300 - $351 shipped

Sound card: 1x M-Audio Delta 66 Professional 6-In/6-Out Audio Card w/Digital I/O - $180 shipped

Firewire: 1x Adaptec FireConnect 8300 - $62 shipped

Provided that's all you need for your new system (no case, power supply, monitor) that comes up to $1995 and it's a killer media professional box. I wish I had the bones to get that myself. I'm stuck with consumer parts (see link in sig).