What things would you do to increase performance?

[Stiganator]

Currently, I am running this rig:

Asus P5L2-VM
Pentium D 910 2.8GHz Presler
2GB PC5300 DDR2 RAM
120GB DiamondMax 10 16MB buffer
Nvidia Quadro FX560 PCIe
Windows XP SP2 32bit

Main things I'm thinking of is render time and complex scene manipulation.

What would you do to increase performance? And if you had to choose one thing to increase what would it be?

I should also note, I'm not a pro. Do you think I could even notice the change you might recommend?

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

C2 Duo and a raptor or scsi hdd. The single biggest change you will notice by going to Conroe is a 20% plus decrease in render time.

 

[Markbnj]

Ooh, amateur 3D content. Do you send away for the glasses, or what?

 

[Frangelina]

Your sys seems well balance but I agree with MTB. If you add a fast sata or 15k., keep your other drive for saving your work. Use the fast one to boot + software.

 

[Ayah]

Upgrade processor to a Conroe.

 

[zephyrprime]

Your video card is very old. That would be the first thing to replace. That will help a lot with scene manipulation but not rendering.

If you really want to get that a lot faster, you need to get a dual socket solution but that's serious money of course.

The first thing you should do is overclock. A 910 should be able to do 3.6 easily without even raising the voltage if you have decent aircooling. You can go higher with some voltage and a good cooler. This option is the first thing I would do since it's essentially free.

 

[Stiganator]

That video card is actually one of the newest they have released, it came out the Quadro FX 5500 and the Plex series. I have a Ninja Scythe, you think that can handle the increased temps on the CPU?

 

[myocardia]

Your video card is fine. And a Scythe Ninja will get you up to at least 3.8 Ghz, assuming your processor and RAM will go that high. You might possibly need to put a higher output fan on it, but the heatsink will definitely handle it.

 

[pkme2]

I run Quadro cards too. Your card is just fine. I would consider getting the C2D for faster rendering speeds.
I just upped my CPU to a 4800+ and my rendering speeds increased as expected.
You do better with a C2D for rendering speed.

If you're on a budget, then upgrade IMO.
Intel

 

[Stiganator]

Has anybody seen benchmarks for the physics card when used with 3dsmax. I see there is a plug in from Ageia, but I have been unable to find any performance analysis.

 

[Bill Brasky]

Originally posted by: pkme2
I run Quadro cards too. Your card is just fine. I would consider getting the C2D for faster rendering speeds.
I just upped my CPU to a 4800+ and my rendering speeds increased as expected.
You do better with a C2D for rendering speed.

If you're on a budget, then upgrade IMO.
Intel

Is 400Mhz really worth 200 bucks? It seems that saving about $120 more for a motherboard and going with conroe would be a much better investment.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Stiganator
That video card is actually one of the newest they have released, it came out the Quadro FX 5500 and the Plex series. I have a Ninja Scythe, you think that can handle the increased temps on the CPU?

Oh you're right. The fx560 is a new card in that series. I'm just not used to their fx numbering scheme. I saw that the top of the line is the fx5500 so I assumed the 560 must be really old.

 

[Stiganator]

I can just pop C2D into my current board. The latest bios supports C2D.

 

[krotchy]

Core 2 Duo = Much Faster rendering over an 805. Your video card is fine, a 15K drive wont help much with rendering.

Also, for sequential transfers, a Raptor isn't that much better than the 7200.10 Seagate's. So a 320GB 7200.10 might be useful, but I don't see the HDD being a bottleneck for Rendering images, it is for video though.

If Aegia can boost rendering too, that will be a drastic improvement I suspect, but I assume it can only help you add more objects, not necessarily render them faster, but I would look into it.

Overall the only guaranteed improvement is to jump to a Core 2 Duo over the Pentium D.

 

[EBH]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
If you really want to get that a lot faster, you need to get a dual socket solution but that's serious money of course.

Why the hell would he want a server board? Or did you mean dual core?

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: EBH

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
If you really want to get that a lot faster, you need to get a dual socket solution but that's serious money of course.

Why the hell would he want a server board? Or did you mean dual core?

Why wouldn't he want a server board? If you want serious speed and have the money for it, have 2 dual cores would be a lot faster than a single dual.

 

[Stiganator]

A dual socket Tyan is mighty tempting but to expensive for now I think. The new Xeons do rock my face off though.

 

[Stiganator]

My chipset is 945G, do you think that's a problem or will I still get great performance from a Conroe. I hope they don't need the 965 or 975 to get the great performance.

 

[Rubycon]

Raytracing on C2D is quite good. The difference between a 3.0G FX60 and 3.6G C2D (4MB) is very noticeable. Add ram too. If your apps work with Win64 I'd recommend that along with 4GB or more RAM if your board supports it.