Opinion on Workstation

[Calaf]

After much debating and snooping around, I've devised the following system:

Case
Antec SX1040BII w/ 400W SmartPower and 2 Antec 80mm SmartFans - $125
CD/RW-ROM
Lite On Black 52x24x52 - $53
DVD-ROM
Lite On Black 16x - $40
Floppy Drive
Samsung Black 1.44MB - $10
Hard Drives
Seagate 80GB 7200rpm Serial ATA (x2) - $282
Keyboard
Microsoft Natural Multimedia - $26
Memory
Corsair XMS 1GB(2 x 512MB) PC-3200LL TwinX - $338
Monitor
KDS 19" Rad-9 LCD - $600
Motherboard
Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard - $152
Processor
AMD Athlon XP "Barton" 2500 - $172
Speakers
Altec Lansing AVS 300W Multimedia - $25
Tablet
Wacom Intuos2 4x5 w/ 2D Mouse - $180
Video Card
ATI Fire GL 8800 128MB DDR - $236
Other
Cooler Master Thermal Kit - $5
Round 16" Floppy Cable - $10
Round 24" IDE Cable - $8
Zalman CNPS6000-Cu Pure Copper CPU Cooler - $38

Total
$2300 w/out Tax and S&H

How do you think this fares as a mid-level workstation that is going to be used for level design and mapping (using Maya and Adobe Photoshop as key applications)? I'll do a bit of gaming on the side but thats secondary to the systems main function. Anything I'm missing?

Calaf

 

[mooojojojo]

excellent choice on the tablet.
dunno about the others.. why would you need a FireGL?

 

[Calaf]

The reason for the FireGL is both cost and performance. I need a graphics card that will work more with polygons, rendering and lots of layer usage. I'm not needing a GPU that gives me 300 FPS in Quake 3, I need something that be stable when I'm rendering a 100MB model of a landscape. Plus it costs about $150 less than the top of the line gaming GPUs 🙂

Calaf

 

[mooojojojo]

oh, didn't notice the price.. nevermind then 🙂

what will you be working on it?

 

[Calaf]

I'm mainly going to be working on level/world design for RPG's like Morrowind and adventure games like the Thief series. I've always loved the landscapes and cities in those games and hope to make a career out of designing them. I'll be needing to run Maya and/or 3D Studio Max to creating the actual landscapes, buildings and other structures and Adobe Photoshop to create the textures for the objects. I figured the first place to start when embarking on that sort of career would be to get a good computer. 🙂

Calaf

 

[mooojojojo]

do you have a site with samples of your work?
edit: work so far I mean 🙂

 

[Gibson12345]

Might want to consider dual processors if you can spare the extra cash, but it looks fine the way it is.

 

[mboy]

Very nice, the only things I would change are:

SLK-800 for the cooler with a TT smart fan II adjustable fan. This combo is just unbelievable, especially if you ever venture into OC territory. With the adjustable fan, u can make it silent and still have just unreal cooling.

I would aslo reco going with twinmos/winbond pc3200. It is a little less then the corsair but is just AWESOME ram for the nforce 2 boards.
I am running mine at 200fsb @ 5-2-2-2 SUPER stable.
Even if u dont overclock, this may be a way to save a few $$ and still get superb performance!!!