If you will not be running multiple apps then you can get a dual core.
If I am running just one 3D app at a time, then wouldn’t a single core 3.06 MHz be better than a dual core 2.13 MHz?
Thing is, that when you start rendering, you will probably have more than one processor intensive program running at the same time. It always helps to have more than one processor.
2shokan
I had AMD Athlon 3200+ - 1 processor, now i have Intel Quad core Q6600 - 4 processors 
so when i render somthing, in mental ray for example - i see 4 quads that running on image instead of 1. So it’s better to have as many cores as you can get )
Built the following for my digital crack habits (aka ZB and the occasional gaming)…
- Lian Li PC-65B Black Tower Computer Case
- Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000W Power Supply
- Asus P5E LGA 775 Intel X38 ATX Intel Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz CPU
- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler
- Mushkin 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) RAM
- 1 Raptor 150GB SATA Hard Drive (OS Only)
- 2 Samsung SpinPoint 500GB SATA Hard Drive (Apps & Storage)
- 1 BFG Tech GeForce 8800GTX 768MB PCIE Video Card
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro 7.1 Sound Card
- Atech 11-in-1 USB 2.0 Internal card reader
- 1 Lite-On 20X DVD±R DVD Burner
- Razer Copperhead Tempest Mouse
- Win 64-bit Vista Ultimate (OEM)
Everything above was ~$2,300 at NewEgg.com but that was back in November…should be cheaper now.
Already had a Wacom Intuous tablet and dual 22" FS monitors. Running ZB3.1 on 64bit Vista Ultimate with absolutely no problems. If you don’t run a 64 bit OS the max RAM you’ll be able to run is 2GB.
I did a quick cost comparison using a dealer in Toronto VS. a Dell 420:
BUILD WITHOUT CASE
ABit IP35 … $160
Intel® Core™2 Quad Q6600, 2.40-GHz @ 1066Mhz … 230
500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 … 105
2 X 2Gb DDR2 Ram Module, PC5400 … 100
GeForce™ 8800GT w/512Mb … 195
700W SLI ATX 12V Ver 2.2 Power Supply … 125
DELL UltraSharp 2208WFP
22-inch Widescreen … 350
Win XP Pro OEM … 140
$1,405
Canadian tax 200
$1,605
(Note: the build has 4G RAM but will use only 3G under Win XP Pro and the total does not reflect the price of a new case… using my old one)
DELL XPS 420
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™2 Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1 edit
MEMORY 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs edit
HARD DRIVE 1TB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM HDDs) edit
GRAPHICS CARD 512MB nVidia® GeForce® 8800 GT edit
OPTICAL DRIVE Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability edit
MONITOR 22 inch SP2208WFP widescreen Flat Panel Monitor edit
SOUND CARD Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio edit
Starting From $1,918
You Save $249
$1,669
Canadian tax 283
$1,952
Bottom line, why build when you can get it all assembled with a warranty and support plus a lot of bells and whistles for about the same price.
This echoes what Maximum PC mag has said… that it’s not like the old days for someone who wants to build.
1/ XP pro or home cannot work with 4Gig of ram. Unless you tweak the ini file, you’re limited to 2Gig.
2/ You can buy a car that goes 150miles/hour at half the price of another car that won’t go any faster. How come?
You ask for a recommendation, but in fact you have already decided. If you don’t see the advantages of assembling yourself, then the Dell might just be what you are looking for. And you can buy with your credit card.
Happy ZBrushing!
The Dell was on sale for Canada day but I now see it has has returned to it’s original price $219 higher than my quote above. I noted the XP RAM issue in the post above, thinking I can then upgrade to Vista.
I’m still considering a build, and since I don’t have a credit card, I still might get enough of a deal buying piece by piece locally. Or, a used machine form ebay or Craigslist.
Buying Zbrush would be capital idea as well.
Try doing a search on the 'Net about upgrading a Dell. It can be done but your options are limited. If you build it yourself with the right parts you can upgrade for quite a while and as your budget allows.
FYI - a similar powered Dell product as the one I put together was almost double the price I paid and my system had higher quality parts…therefore generally speaking…it will be more reliable.
About limited upgradability for a Dell: yes, for example, the unit I posted above (XPS 420) has the BTX instead of ATX format case, which has very limited upgrade potential so I hear. I had never heard of this type of case before.
I think you are right in general about the high Dell prices compared to a home build, unless it’s on sale as the XPS 420 was this past weekend in Canada. I need to look into this more. I would think that there’s an advantage to not needing to build a machine quickly; this way you can wait till the parts you want come on sale and build slowly.
Are there any things that I might need to know if I do a build for optimum ZBrush performance? I know the more RAM the better is one goal.
This isn’t true. I have done nothing to my ini file, yet my XP Pro has and uses 3GB. And no, it isn’t 64-bit. However, many mobos may be limited to 2GB, and some older–especially mobile–chipsets may be limited.
Getting the full 4GB address space will take some OS tweaking–but 3 is no problem.
I have heard as high as 3.4G. So, if you had 8G, XP would still use around 3G, but Vista could use the full 8?
The OS tweaking? What sort of things can be done?
There are 3 main factors in how much RAM you can use:
-
Motherboard. You just have to check the specs. They vary quite a bit.
-
CPU. If you are buying desktop–as long as its fairly recent (within a year or two) should be ok. With Mobile CPUs, you will have to be careful about chipset.
-
OS bitsize.
No matter who makes the OS, if it is 32-bit, the max RAM you can address is going to be 4 GB. It doesn’t matter if it is XP, Unix, Linux, or Vista. If you are running a 32 bit OS, you can’t address RAM beyond 4GB because the bits aren’t there.
This is not a bug, or a flaw. Its just the way the numbers work.
If you want more RAM, you will need a 64-bit OS, make sure you are using a 64 bit CPU, and check to make sure your mobo will support more. Non-server boards seem to capped at 8GB at the moment. I have seen server boards support up to 16, but not all will do that.
Even if you have more than 4GB and an OS/mobo/CPU combo that can use it–it doesn’t mean you get to use it. 64-bit OS’s are still…a bit fuzzy when dealing with 32-bit apps, which is the dominant target architecture right now.
Furthermore…if you go 64-bit, you will NEED more memory because your minimum ‘word’ size has doubled. So…you might not see the performance boost you are hoping for.
A 32bit operating system can refer to 2^32 (some 4.2 billion) possible unique locations for each byte, hence the limit of 4GB.
This 4GB is in fact virtual memory. Each application has 4GB of virtual memry at its disposal. But those 4GB are equally divided: the Kernel gets 2GB (and these are shared between all apps) and the application itself also gets 2Gig.
When you install 3GB, there is still the upper memory limit that takes its (small) portion. You can still install DOS (or use it) on nowadays computers after all. Above the 3GB, things start changing drastically. For example your memory card’s memory takes up a chunk that is MUCH greater that what normally should be taken ( just look at your hex adresses). In fact, a 512GB vid card takes 512 GB from your RAM if you install 4GB.
In short: practically speaking, your application in 32bit gets maximum 2GB, but practically speaking, there are some overheads that reduce this to some 1,6GB.
With the actual prices of RAM , you can install 4GB, but your system won’t be able to use it fully, so there’s no real use for it as you won’t get a real advantage over the 3GB.
But no application in a 32bit system will ever get more than 2GB, unless you tweak the boot.ini. Which is not a good idea after all because, by giving 3 to your application, you take one from the kernel.
That was a really good explanation Erik and Jhikar. Thankyou.
As far as ZBrush goes, do you have any specific recommendations? Should I save up and buy/build a machine with a quad cpu and 8G RAM?
I would be doing 3D ZBrush version of the sketch image attached. Probably very high polygon count. 
8GB of RAM means 64bit. Ok if you also leave other apps running. For ZB 4GB would be enough.
here’s a useful thread:
There is a fuzzy bit you are kinda sidestepping: What you are referring to as virtual memory is more a virtual addressing. These addresses will map to either RAM or the swap file on a hard drive. Without tweaking your .ini your virtual address space per process is limited, but that isn’t the same as RAM utilization.
The more RAM you have, the more those addresses can map to RAM instead of HDD. RAM is MUCH faster than HDD access.
(Just wanted to clarify as the way you worded it suggested installed RAM was virtual.)
No matter how much RAM you have, Some portion of it will end up being used for those other tasks you mention–but the more RAM you have, the more remains for processes. The impact of having more RAM accesses instead of HDD accesses is non-trivial–and increases with the number of apps you have running at a time.
Also, I suspect concerns regarding Virtual Addressing can be sidestepped a bit by having modular processes that communicate with each other. Though, you may end up with a new set of headaches–but there is a potential for a kind of ‘soft-pipelining’ to exceed the limit in virtual address space…but I don’t know of anyone who is actually doing that.
But I think the theory is sound…
*Note: Anyone following along at home who wonders where to learn about this stuff, I recommend:
“Computer Organization and Design” 3rd edition by Patterson and Hennessy is highly recommended. And reasonably priced…for a Comp Sci text…
Just for everyone’s information, from link to another thread in Erik post above, two systems people are happy using ZBrush with in 2007:
EVGA 680i mainboard
4GB Corsair dominator ram
E6300 cpu overclocked to 3.1ghz
Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit
8800 GTX
Vista Home Premium 64bit
EVGA 680i Motherboard
4gb RAM
qx6600 CPU
Nvidia 8800 GTS
I could probably get the stuff for these two systems (dated from 8/07) cheaper than the fastest/best of what is available now. But, now that it is 2008, any recommendations on a possible cost-effective improvement on the two above?
Oh, also… is premium RAM from the well-known companies (Corsair, Kingston etc) really better than run’o’the mill stuff from companies we’ve never heard of?
Thanks Jhikar. You not only worded it very understandable, you also made things more clear for me.
I am not native English, so I sometimes “translate” literally from my native Flemish. Which cannot always be done.
I haven’t read that book, and I’m interested. What I know, I found on the internet, a bit here, and a bit there. And sometimes people come up with contradictions.
I also reread my first post, and I was more than unclear there: instead of XP, the operating system, I should have written: application.
shokan: I personally would go for the Q9450 instead of the Q6600 now. It’s the best value for your money. And, for ZBrush, the video card can be less, making it less expensive. Unless you want to game.
Even those better known companies have more and less expensive RAM. It’s speed, reliability,…
I personally would not take DDR3 for the moment. I would stick with DDR2 800.
I know Corsair and OCZ from experience and I never had a problem with them.
Good news: eVGA makes great mobo’s.
Bad news: You may need a new power supply with them. They are cutting edge–so make sure your power supply has the right connectors. That particular one you will need a 24-pin plus another 8-pin. Earlier mobo’s only required an addition 4-pin connector.
This is not to be confused with the additional power requirements of the 8800…
Though…buying a new power supply for a new build is usually a good idea–and NOT one that comes with a case. They are pretty universally crap.
I recommend going with one that has modular cables–easier to work with and cleaner look when you finish.
With regard to memory–read up on latency and discriminate based on that–after size and format/speed.
Corsair tends to be pricy but decent. I’ve been happy with Geil lately. Cheaper but same performance.
OCZ is much like Corsair.
If you don’t want to do research on memory, and just want the cheapest, safest buy, Kingston Value Ram has earned a reputation for that. But in my experience–it is a little unstable. I’ve gotten read errors from it, but my not from my Geil or Corsair mem.
Not to be a shill–but Geil gives high mid-range features for slightly more than value ram solutions from Kingston, Corsair etc. I’ve been very pleased so far.
No matter who you go to for RAM–go to the mobo maker’s website and find the QVL for your mobo–and visit the RAM maker’s website and see if they recommend it for that mobo. If you can match RAM to mobo in this way–you will have much more peace of mind.