If you want to upgrade your computer, you would have to puchase an i7 motherboard as well.
Yes, and by the look of the motherboard prices I wont be upgrading myself as soon as Id like, they are like double the price of any motherboard iv seen.
Average top end LG 775 is about £100, these are over £230 
To replace my system will all the water cooling e.c.t it would cost £1400, thats UK pounds.
Yeah, I think the problem is that i7 is still too new a technology and they’re ~ 30% bigger die size than core 2 doesn’t help either. Of course, if AMD’s Phenom II was actually competitive with Nehalem, we would see the i7 920 drop down to $200 in a matter of days.
So much for competition…
I just built a new system, specs below…
No overclocking or tweaking as of yet. I was able to easily go to over 8 million polys on the soldier model, smooth as silk rotation, editing, etc. I was able to divide it to over 34 million, and with only 1 undo and no excessive number of IE tabs open, I was able to edit this repeatedly, but the ‘reading virtual memory’ and ‘compacting memory’ cycles are time consuming, even with compact memory set to 4096. I’m not sure what Ready-boost might do to help this, or what ZBrush’s effective software limit is. Since it can only use 4 GB max, I’m not sure if I can improve the performance much more, however, there might be some tweak I could make to guarantee that ZB truly has a full 4 GB of RAM available, i.e. restricing Vista to 2GB. FYI, after some edits and compaction cycles, my title bar reads Mem>48+6681 Free>3897. Also, I haven’t enabled Ready-boost yet, and with some extra RAM, there might be a RAM disk trick that could be used to speed up virtual memory reads. Any tweak guides out there for ZB on a Vista x64 system?
I was able to take the superaverage man to 14+ million, also very smooth editing, scaling, rotation. Did many edits, and the default undo levels did not cause a problem. No time-consuming virtual mem reads/memory compaction at this level.
That is a insain score for a quad core pc not even overclocked. Id be taking mine to 3.5ghz and up. Cant even imagine the speed of that.
That spec is spot on what I was looking to get. Now I didnt think Zbrush 3.1 was 64 bit, it dont use no more than 4gb, but does say in product specs its fully 64 bit?
Need to try this on my machine. I have a new i7 setup.
Don’t think ZB is 64 bit. I think it is a 32 bit application that can somewho utilise some of the 64 bit OS features, like addressing up to 4 gig of memory.
I dont think so either but quoted from the feature list “ZBrush takes full advantage of your 64-bit system.” This sounds to me it uses more than 4gb.
Hmm. I thought that even a 64 system could only use 4 gig per application. Is this a wrong assumption?
There was a 64 bit build of Zbrush 2 that was for Win Xp 64 but it was only able to address up to 4 gb of ram with pixologic’s implementation. I think theoretically a 64 bit system can address up to 18.45 exabytes of ram. But in practice Vista 64 will support up to 128 gigs, which you would currently be hard pressed to build a system with that much ram. I know 32 gigs is quite achieaveble but the apps aren’t there yet.
On OSX and Vista I believe you can currently address 4 gigs of ram to ZB 3.12 and 3.1. I’m hoping Zb 3.5 is 64 bit an can address 8 gigs.
I’d like to confirm for everyone that ZB uses 4GB max. When I got Vista Ultimate x64 loaded, and saw that my old ZB downloaded setup was going to install in the Program Files x32 folder, indicating a 32-bit program, I contacted Pixologic tech support to double-check whether there was a different or updated download required for Vista x64. They said no, just install my original ZB3 setup, and the 3.1 upgrade. “The 32-bit Program Files directory is the correct directory.” And they stated that “ZB uses up to a max of 4GB.”
FYI, a 64-bit system will effectively double the RAM ZB can use, since 32-bit XP only allows a MAX of 2GB to any one application, reserving 2GB for itself. And I’ve read that video RAM counts towards the max RAM limit addressable by XP x32, therefore, if you have a 512MB video card, and 4GB of RAM, ZB might not see anywhere near a full 2GB RAM available for itself. Especially since all those extra services, IE or Firefox, anti-virus software, music player, etc. running along side of it are all taking up tens to hundreds of MB each. Another point is that you should double check what your virtual memory page file is actually doing. With a default install of XP x32 SP3, I noticed that my VM pagefile was set to ‘auto’, but that it never really increased above the minimum limit of 2GB even though I had 4GB of RAM!! All apps and services in XP always address the VM addresses, and XP handles the behind-the-scenes swaping of these VM address to and from RAM and HDD. I was trying to do large assemblies in SolidWorks on 32-bit XP on my work PC, and it would throw ‘out of mem’ errors at only about 730MB, according to task manager. Forcing my VM pagefile to 4GB has allowed me to successfully go above 800MB without the crashes, and I haven’t hit a hard limit yet, though I suspect I’ll be lucky to break 1GB. The point of this is that in a true 64-bit system with 6 to 8 GB, even if a program is still only 32-bit, that program could actually see and utilize 2-times, possibly as much as 4-times the RAM it every really was able to use under 32-bit Windows, even if you had 4GB of RAM installed. (Depends on how your VM is set, whether you have SEP on, how many RAM-hogging apps and services you have running, etc.)
Now that I’m on Vista x64 with 6GB of RAM, I’m wondering what tweaks I need to make to it, since it probably does several things differently from XP.
PS: FYI, I had to, at least initially, set ZB to ‘run as administrator’, even though I was already logged in as admin. Otherwise, the initial license setup app that runs for a fresh install would throw an error, and ZB would hang or crash.
I have been reading a bit more about 64 bit implementatrion on a few OS’s lately. OSX has a definate adavantage at the moment in how it addresses memory. The impact of 32 bit is more felt on the windows side. I have 9 gigs of ram in my home system and can put a full 4gigs to work with Zb 3.12. There is a performace advantage in WIN in how caches are used, OSX flushes everything anytime a system call is made. But this will no longer be the case when OSX 10.6 appears, possibly in just a few months. The problem with 64 bit is that the hardware, operating system, and software all have to be on par with each other.
OK ran the test on my machine.
Its a Dell i7 940 with 8Gig of ram. Not overclocked.
Is this a good score?
A tad better than the 920, no by much to notice. Anythink thats in the range of 0.xx is dam good.
Maybe this will give you an idea of just how good that score is:
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The test was done on my school’s newest workstation, the HP xw 6600:
(These workstations cost ~ $5,000)
well but i guess the i7 940 coming from dell was dearer than ur schools workstations.
im pretty happy ive found this thread as i ordered my i7 920 rig yesterday.
Hi everyone. I need a little bit of help to buy a new workstation for modeling and texturing.
Currently at work i’m using a 3D BOXX machine which is fast and i can sculpt about 15 milion polygons.
I need to buy a workstation for myself and i want to buy hp workstation. But the thing is i don’t know which one i should go for!
dual xeon quad core 3.0 ghz
8gb ram
500gb hard drive
vga nvidia quadro fx 3700
this one is about 5500$ which is very expensive for me.the other one is:
1 cpu quad core 3.ghz
8gb ram
500gb hard drive
vga quadro fx 1700
this one is about 2500$!
I just need an ideal computer to be able to sculpt smoothly in zbrush without dropping frame rate. So please someone give me a good advice because i don’t want to waste my money!
what is really important for sculpting and texturing in zbrush, modeling in maya and also texturing in photoshop? cpu? ram? or VGA?
I’d heard that vga is not very important in zbrush and zbrush can only use 4 gigs of rams! do i really need to get quadro fx or i can get latest nvidia gforce ?
Hello siamak,
Have you ever considered building your own rig? Based on the information I’ve obtained recently about zbrush performance, Intel’s new i7 core is much faster than the current Xeons. We have HP workstations at our school with dual 3.0 Ghz Xeons. I did some tests and one 4-core 2.66 Ghz Nehalem outperforms the dual 3.0 GHz Xeons in zbrush! Having multiple processors will definitely give you a boost of performance, but you’re only really going to notice it in applications and tasks that scale perfectly (rendering and such). Considering that 4 cores of Nehalem beats 8 cores of Xeon in Zbrush, I think it’s safe to say you’d throwing away some money on that $5,500 HP workstation.
With that in mind, you could build (or purchase) a Nehalem (core i7) rig for about $1,500-2,000 and it would perform better in Zbrush than the dual Xeon @ $5,500.
As for the graphics card, Quadro’s are basically Geforce cards with higher quality parts and different firmware. From my understanding, they really only offer a performance boost when working with Open GL enabled applications in wire-frame mode (Auto CAD, Maya, etc.). Although I have not had the facilities to test Quadros in Zbrush, I would be highly surprised if the standard Geforce did not perform as well - if not better - than the highly priced Quadro.
So, my advice: save yourself some money and build or buy a Nehalem rig with a Geforce card, 6 gigs of DDR3 should be plenty.
The graphics card… as of Zbrush 3.1 is not a factor in performance. Only Ram and Processor speed is. Zbrush does not use open GL except in zmapper which is possibly being phased out.
As for Quadro vs. Geforce… the difference is in how they render the screen. A geforce card refreshes the the entire screen continually so it excells at things likes games. A Quadro/Fire GL card brakes up the screen into layers. In a modelling environment one veiwport could be one layer, so it is only working to refresh that section of the screen so u get increased performance. The Quadro however gets bogged down with games because there is so many random and full screen elements to track and therefore usually is slower than it geforce equivalant.
Also as of the latest versions of Zbrush, Zbrush itself is only able to address up to 4 gigs of memory. Hopefully that changes.
thank Allminoxy. Can you telll me what exactly should i buy?
CPU, Ram, Mainboard, VGA ?
I’m using zbrush, maya, photoshop.
If I where to build one now, If I could afford to, should I say. The i7 920 cpu would be my choice on a x58 motherboard with 1600mhz DDR3 triple kit of 6gb ram.
I would bulid it with overclocking in mind so we are talking about 3.6ghz here. I would water cool it and perchase a normal mid range graphics card like a 8800gt to keep the cost down.
PSU Enermax range would be my choice, I have one now, they are solid and reliable. Case fans I would stil with my current Noctua NF-P12.