What is "fast?"

[edswoods.1]

Ever since I got involved with computers (1997) or at least up to a few
years ago, I've wanted
to keep up with the latest equipment as far as budget would allow. Now
though I feel
fairly satisfied with what I've got - a 4 year old Pentium 4 2400 with
a gig of ram, a decent
128 mb video card, a pair of SATA Raptor hard drives set up for speed
and an IDE drive
for backing up. I saw a dramatic improvement in speed when I built
this computer over
the Pentium 833 which came before, especially with the installation of
the 10,000 rpm SATA drives. I realize that what you use your computer
for
determines how fast you need it to run - I use some 3-D graphics
programs and Photoshop.
It's hard to see how Photoshop 7 could benefit from more speed, a
better graphics card,
etc., but what about 3DStudio Max? Would a new Pentium D or Athlon 64
dual core and
maybe a new graphics card make a noticeable difference?

 

[Paul]

Ever since I got involved with computers (1997) or at least up to a few
years ago, I've wanted
to keep up with the latest equipment as far as budget would allow. Now
though I feel
fairly satisfied with what I've got - a 4 year old Pentium 4 2400 with
a gig of ram, a decent
128 mb video card, a pair of SATA Raptor hard drives set up for speed
and an IDE drive
for backing up. I saw a dramatic improvement in speed when I built
this computer over
the Pentium 833 which came before, especially with the installation of
the 10,000 rpm SATA drives. I realize that what you use your computer
for
determines how fast you need it to run - I use some 3-D graphics
programs and Photoshop.
It's hard to see how Photoshop 7 could benefit from more speed, a
better graphics card,
etc., but what about 3DStudio Max? Would a new Pentium D or Athlon 64
dual core and
maybe a new graphics card make a noticeable difference?

Find some benchmarks. Not all benchmarks are done with the
exact same test, or with the same version of software, so
you frequently cannot compare results from one web page with
another.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2091&p=8 (some single cores)
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2397&p=19 (dual rendering times)

It does seem to use the two cores, because the duals are
a bit faster. Check the software maker's own website, to see
if they have any words of wisdom to offer on the subject.

There are some business users who would pay money for a 5% improvement
in Photoshop, while a hobby user with occasional need for Photoshop
can stand to wait a few extra minutes. If you are doing a job where
all you do is wait, then a faster machine makes sense. If the
work you do is not compute intensive (everything finishes in a
fraction of a second), an upgrade makes no sense.

Paul

 

[edswoods.1]

Paul wrote:
If thework you do is not compute intensive (everything finishes in a
fraction of a second), an upgrade makes no sense.

In 3DStudio, the more complicated a "scene" you are building, the more
difficult it becomes to manuver around in it. That's where the eentsy
bit
of speed might be worthwhile.

 

[John Weiss]

It's hard to see how Photoshop 7 could benefit from more speed, a better
graphics card, etc., but what about 3DStudio Max? Would a new Pentium D or
Athlon 64 dual core and maybe a new graphics card make a noticeable
difference?

Since Photoshop is SMP aware, a dual-core CPU will definitely give you better
performance!

 

[jpsga]

Ever since I got involved with computers (1997) or at least up to a few
years ago, I've wanted
to keep up with the latest equipment as far as budget would allow. Now
though I feel
fairly satisfied with what I've got - a 4 year old Pentium 4 2400 with
a gig of ram, a decent
128 mb video card, a pair of SATA Raptor hard drives set up for speed
and an IDE drive
for backing up. I saw a dramatic improvement in speed when I built
this computer over
the Pentium 833 which came before, especially with the installation of
the 10,000 rpm SATA drives. I realize that what you use your computer
for
determines how fast you need it to run - I use some 3-D graphics
programs and Photoshop.
It's hard to see how Photoshop 7 could benefit from more speed, a
better graphics card,
etc., but what about 3DStudio Max? Would a new Pentium D or Athlon 64
dual core and
maybe a new graphics card make a noticeable difference?

Looks like a good rig.
Using the RAPTORS in RAID 0 improved the time it took to load in pictures
into Coral Draw as I like to use .TIF files.
JPS

 

[Marcel Overweel]

Ever since I got involved with computers (1997) or at least up to a few
years ago, I've wanted
to keep up with the latest equipment as far as budget would allow. Now
though I feel
fairly satisfied with what I've got - a 4 year old Pentium 4 2400 with
a gig of ram, a decent
128 mb video card, a pair of SATA Raptor hard drives set up for speed
and an IDE drive
for backing up. I saw a dramatic improvement in speed when I built
this computer over
the Pentium 833 which came before, especially with the installation of
the 10,000 rpm SATA drives. I realize that what you use your computer
for
determines how fast you need it to run - I use some 3-D graphics
programs and Photoshop.
It's hard to see how Photoshop 7 could benefit from more speed, a
better graphics card,
etc., but what about 3DStudio Max? Would a new Pentium D or Athlon 64
dual core and
maybe a new graphics card make a noticeable difference?

Hi,

For 3d studio you need raw processor power. The more the better.

And as far as I know, 3d studio can use all cpu's in a multi-processor
systems so dual core (pentium D) should give it a nice speed boost.

As with photoshop, I don't think you will notice much improvement. If it's
fast now, it won't be *noticably* faster.

Specialized graphics cards like FireGL can speed up editing with 3d max but
it won't speed up rendering. And they don't come cheap.

I would wait for the release of Intel's new "Core 2 Duo" processor
(codename: Conroe) or AMD's answer to the conroe what and whenever that may
be.
Everyone is talking about the Conroe being a killer cpu. It will be released
somewhere in July this year, probably.

regards
Marcel