[Flipside]

Well, hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll be getting a new system, however, my old system will be kept, I'm using the new one as a render-server, running purely stuff like Poser, Lightwave etc, for rendering large sized images or long animations. A simple switcher box will allow me to jump the monitor from one computer to the other, same for keyboard and mouse, though I may need to get PS2 kb and mouse for that.

The new system will be a 3Gb minimum processor, with 120Gb Hard Hrive, high-level motherboard, but everything else will be entry level or onboard.

Now, which do you think would be better, that I use the 1700XP+ as the render computer and beef up the new one into a games machine, or keep using the 1700 for now, since it runs anything I buy pretty happily (And it'll be shot of a load of rendering software) until I'm forced to swap over?

Vote which one you would use for the Games Machine

[mrduckman]

I think that would depend on the work load.
And if the game you're playing takes up too much of a computer you should choose the best one for the required software. Game or otherwise.

I'm at work at the moment

[aldo_14]

Can't you set-up a dual machine cluster?

[Janos]

2 votes, 100% Aardvark.

[Ghostavo]

er... a Gb[/I] processor? Or is that RAM?

If you can run anything happily then why do you want to buy a new one? I say you wait until the market settles because of the whole 64bit issue amongst other...

[Taristin]

Get a dual processor AMD rig and use that for renderring.

Edit: There was a dual P4 system (both at 3GHz) on display at Circuit city a few months back. That thing was amazing except for one thing: It had a 9200SE in it.

Everything was top of the line, but that. I'd have thought it'd have a 9800xt, but it didn't.

[Black Wolf]

*Refrains from asking how you convinced the better half to let you spend the money*

Personally, if it was me, I'd keep going with what you have, until you find a game that you want but will require a higher end system than you currently have, then decide if you want to switch over.

[Flipside]

It's a 3 Gig processor,, sorry 1 Gig of High speed DDR.

I was thinking about a dualpro system, but was wary because of price and availability.

The thing is that I use a lot of stuff like HyperVoxels and other CPU-Intensive effects on my rendering, and even if I leave the thing running overnight, I can sometimes get 2 frames in 8 hours, which is completely useless when trying to get together a 15-second shot at 30Fps. So my own thought is to make the new Hard-Drive a permanent Network drive, that way I can render one scene up whilst working on the next one.

The 1.7 could do this, but I'd still be getting 1 frame in 4-5 hours sometimes, which is still a bit too slow for my trastes, a 3Gb processor would probably halve that time, and if it's running on a system that's not being slowed down by other stuff, possibly better than that.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Raa
There was a dual P4 system (both at 3GHz) on display at Circuit city a few months back. That thing was amazing except for one thing: It had a 9200SE in it.

Everything was top of the line, but that. I'd have thought it'd have a 9800xt, but it didn't.

They probably did that cause whoever is buying it probably doesn't want it for games (Dual CPU's are virtually useless for gaming cause unless the game was written to be multithreaded only one CPU will get used anyway). Either they're buying it for something scientific and highly processor intensive or they're 3D modelling in which case they'll probably chuck the game card and buy something modelling specific.

[Cyker]

Well... lessee.... if you don't mind leaving the other box on for ages then let the AMD be the render server and steal all it's good components for the other one to use for games.

OTOH, if you don't play many high-spec games and want your renders to some out before the next ice age then use the gutted P4 as the render server

[Flipside]

I may have to fork out for a graphics card, the onboard card no doubt supports Open-Gl, but I'll just have to see how hard I'm pushing it

[Kosh]

A 3 GHz P4 can run rings around a 1700+ Athlon, but both platforms are being replaced.