What computer do most TAs work with?

Hey guys,

I just got started with playing around with 3D modeling, and i found out that my laptop isn’t the best choice to run most of the software used in the industry right now. I’m planning on upgrading from my old laptop to a new one. Now I know that generally 3D artist work with a desktop computer, so I’m considering on buying one. My budget right now is about around $1000-$2000, maybe $3000. Do you guys have any advice on what desktop computer I should look at or what laptop?

Hey there…

From my experience at modelling at university level we used pretty bad computers with dual core CPU’s, 2 gigs of RAM and a low range ATi graphics card…

I personally use a quad core CPU, 4 gigs of RAM and a Nvidia 470 card…

Your RAM and CPU is most important in my opinion but the industry guys on this may say otherwise! More and more software now a days is now using graphic cards to increase performance! like the new Max 2012!

I’d say get at least 8GBs of RAM. You’d be surprised at how quickly DDC apps will eat up memory. :eek: Of course there’s a price premium to pay for portability, but for most of us, “reasonably” priced laptop options exist that are quite capable of handling most coding and content creation workflows. I actual just bought a Sager laptop for personal use ( side projects, gaming etc.) from http://www.powernotebooks.com/ with the following specs:

-Sager NP8130 - Gaming Laptop
-15.6” Full HD 16:9 Wide screen (1920x1080) LED-Backlit Display with Matte Finished Screen
-nVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M 192bit w/1.5GB GDDR5
-Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM (2.0~2.9GHz, 45W)
-8GB (2x4GB SODIMMS) DDR3/1333 Dual Channel Memory
-500GB SATA II 3GB/s 7,200RPM Hard Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)
-Combo Dual Layer DVD +/-R/RW CD-R/RW Drive w/Softwares
-7-in-1 Memory Card Reader (All versions of MS + SD/MMC)
-Integrated 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN + Bluetooth™ V3.0 Combo Card
-8 Cell Smart Lithium-Ion Battery 76.96Wh
-Windows 7 Premium - (64-Bit installed - 64 and 32-bit CD included)
Total = ~$1,400

You might want to consider Win7 Pro or Ultimate if you’re going to be using the machine in a work setting (registering with a domain etc.). Regardless of the edition, you’ll definitely want to get the 64-bit version. The above purchase constitutes my first Sager build as well as my first exposure to powernotebooks.com, so we’ll see how things turnout.

For your price cap(3k) you could get a great laptop and a very, VERY powerful desktop. I am not much on laptops but four, around 1.5k you can have a solid desktop that will work very well for years to come. There are some big things that will very your price, first is monitor real estate. You can usually find a very nice 22"+ refurb on new egg for 250-300. If you want two monitors, obviously it will cost more.

Also another thing to watch is on new egg they have combo deals that sometimes are really good, like right now they have a Phenom X6 3.2GHz Black Edition CPU, 700W cool master power supply, a GIGABYTE mobo with dual PCI express 1.0 and 2.0 slots so you can run duel graphics cards if you desire. A Cool Master mid tower, 4gb of DDR3 1866 ram( I personally would at least double that. The mobo can hold up to 16) a 1TB Seagate Baracude HDD and Cool Master cooler for the cpu. All for 608 dollars. So from there you NEED to add a disc drive, display(s), video card, and a mouse and a keyboard.

GPU:EVGA 02G-P3-1386-KR GeForce GTX 460 $219.99
Disc Drive:LG Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 10X BD-ROM 4MB $99.99( or a standard dvd drive which would be cheaper)
good mouse of choice($50-$100)
keyboard of choice($10-$120)
Display:open boxSamsung B2330HD 23" 5ms Full HD HDMI WideScreen LCD Monitor w/TV Tuner & USB Port $199.99($399.98 for 2)

So without counting in the keyboard/mouse and only one monitor you are at a grand total of $1128.96 before shipping. That would easily leave you with $1600 to either get better(more expensive) parts or a really nice laptop.

Wow thanks for the quick reply guys, I didn’t expect anyone to reply until at least tomorrow. Eric I like that sager laptop you recommended, is that one of the best laptop choices for the price range of below $2000?

So Carey from what I understand from your post, I need to buy the different parts for the desktop and put them together to make my own computer right? Also for someone who is just starting to get into this, do I need to get the double monitor for me? Thank you guys.

+1 with what Carey said. $3000 is a really high price cap that will get you a great machine!

And definitely YES to dual monitors. My friends who only use single monitors always question the work efficiency of a dual setup without even trying it themselves! I have 2 22" with HDMI at home, and didn’t pay more than $150 for them.

[QUOTE=Aylwin;10506]+1 with what Carey said. $3000 is a really high price cap that will get you a great machine!

And definitely YES to dual monitors. My friends who only use single monitors always question the work efficiency of a dual setup without even trying it themselves! I have 2 22" with HDMI at home, and didn’t pay more than $150 for them.[/QUOTE]

I third the sentiment on dual-monitors (and more screen real estate in general). :): You will see an increase in productivity. I’m a bit spoiled with the dual 2408WFPs that I have at work, but I’d also suggest springing for higher end monitors.

As for building a desktop yourself, if you’re even marginally technically inclined and you have the time to deal with the possibility of DOA parts etc. this is certainly an option. I personally really enjoy the process for home builds, but I’d probably shy away from the DIY route for anything that I’m using at work (where down time just isn’t acceptable).

As for the Sager that I just purchase, with any luck it’ll be here around the end of next week. I"ll try to post my impressions to this thread once I’ve had some time with the machine. :D:

I have always had great luck with building my own machines. Only part I never got that was DOA was from a local shop and it was a HDD that they swapped out an hour after I purchased it. As for mail order it always went smoothly. If you can turn a screw driver and logically plug things in(i.e. line the male and female ports up right) you can build a computer. You could go with a pre-built machine but you MIGHT(not always) pay more for the same product as well as you are all but completely forfeiting your ability to upgrade yourself since you usually void your warranty as soon as you open the tower. I also suggest duel monitors, I run a 22" and a 24" and it is totally worth the extra money for the second.

Andy has a solid set of articles he keeps up to date with respect to hardware options for various budgets for 3d type work, originally aimed at architecture, but its about the same for here as its normally targeted at max use.

http://www.3datstech.com/

give him a read

If you’re going for a desktop:
CPU: i7/Sandybridge (assuming all the chipset stuff is resolved now!)
GPU: Nvidia 460 or higher
HDD: biggest SSD you can buy, HDD or two for other stuff

If going for a laptop, I’m quite happy with my HP Elite (i7, 6gb currently, ATI 5800 series GPU,it’s begging for a SSD). It’s faster than my old desktop that had an overclocked q6600, and the ATi 58xx series card does rather well.

I almost bought an Alienware laptop, but that was in the middle of all the Sandybridge fallout, so I chose to go with the “older” i7 with the HP Elite. The build quality is amazing.

dell studio XPS for 800 euros. Pretty much a “throw away” computer which I replace as a whole when I need more power. Has an i7 at 2.8 GHz, 8 GB Ram, 3 TB hdd, some dvd burner. Recently upgraded the video card. Might get a SSD. This PC is for home. I’m not building an entire game, editing super vast levels or render my own cinematic. For the stuff I do it’s good bang for the buck (Qt programming, gaming, Unity, some UDK, some zbrush)

For a monitor I got a 30" Samsung. At work I have 2 24" dells.

For the go I got a macbook air 11". I just love how portable it is and that it comes with a nVidia card. I’m not doing heavy duty work in it. Mostly tinkering, some python/qt, HLSL, etc. For that it’s perfect. I wouldn’t buy a laptop for my main machine though.
Hi end laptops just get too slow too quickly to be useful as a main machine imho. And when they’re not useful as main machine any more, they’re too heavy to use as a on-the-go machine.

3D Software can push every component to the max - CPU, GPU, Ram, drive speed, monitors.

Some things to consider

  1. Wacom tablet - for the dev side you will need it less but if you make tools for artists that relate to painting or sculpting you will probably need it (even a cheapo bamboo is ok for many tasks).

  2. Monitors - enormous productivity booster to have two large monitors both for coding and for art work. Most folks here seem to be games oriented so high quality color reproduction isn’t as necessary (typical LCDs are reasonably good) - if you plan to focus on colorists for film work though it will be.

  3. GPU - everyone is moving to add CUDA and/or OpenCL support especially for rendering; but also for simulation and frequently for other parts of the pipeline. Any current GPU will support OpenCL.

For a laptop try and get one with the best GPU and CPU you can afford - and reasonably expandability for ram. Also a large high resolution built in screen is good to have. How portable do you need it to be is a big question, portability is generally inversely proportional to powerfulness).

  1. SSD - it is worth looking to try and find a hard drive with a good SSD cache - i don’t feel that pure SSD is a good idea/worth the cost but hybrids are awesome. For compiling it can make a huge difference (one compile farm I read about dropped the compile time by 90% (I think?) by getting an SSD for caching).

It is at least worth considering a Mac and triple booting (Mac, Windows, Linux). If you buy a Mac you keep that option open, but it is a significant premium to do so (or you could get a Mac Mini at some point for about 700$). Mac allows iPhone/iPad development as well which might be desireable for you.

I’m not really in the industry (Blender dev/manager) so take my recommendations with a grain of salt.

[QUOTE=LetterRip;10873]2) Monitors - enormous productivity booster to have two large monitors both for coding and for art work. Most folks here seem to be games oriented so high quality color reproduction isn’t as necessary (typical LCDs are reasonably good) - if you plan to focus on colorists for film work though it will be.
[/QUOTE]
Correct color representation on monitors is more important now then ever in games. Most larger studios spend lots of money to make sure all the artists have calibrated high quality color reproduction on there monitors. So if you aim towards art work you may need it, but not necessary if you aim towards animation work.

So based on the input from all of you guys, I’m considering on getting the asus g37sw for about ~$1,250 with tax from best buy, do you guys think this is a good laptop for me? This ofcourse won’t be my main machine I will probably get a desktop later on, but for now this is just something for an aspiring tech artist to practice, do work on, and also to play games too:D:.

This is the specs for it
CPU : 2-GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM
Operating System : Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
RAM :8GB
RAM Upgradable to 8GB
Hard Drive Size: Dual 500GB
Hard Drive Speed : 7,200rpm
Hard Drive Type : Dual SATA Hard Drives
Display Size : 17.3
Native Resolution : 1920x1080
Optical Drive : BD-ROM/DVDRW DL
Optical Drive Speed : 8X
Graphics Card : Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M
Video Memory : 1.5GB
Wi-Fi : 802.11 a/g/n
Wi-Fi Model: Atheros AR9285
Bluetooth : Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Touchpad Size 4 x 2.1 inches
Ports (excluding USB) : Ethernet; HDMI; Headphone; Microphone; USB 3.0; VGA
USB Ports : 4
Card Slots : 8-1 card reader

Looks good to me overall (after a cursory look anyway). If you can afford it, I’d highly recommend that you swap out one of the mechanical drives with a 120GB+ SSD. I recently received an m6600 Dell at work that has this sort of drive set up (1x128GB SSD for the OS and apps and 1x500GB mechanical drive for content etc.). Conventional hard drives have been the chief performance bottle necks in PCs for years.

If you think you’ll ever add more RAM, it’s nice to have available memory slots. I’m guessing that the machine in your build has 4 slots. In this case, ideally you’d have 2x4GB dimms (and not 4x1GB dimms). Otherwise you’d have to “throw away” memory in order to upgrade. In any case, I may be misreading your post. If 8GB is the maximum amount of RAM that the lappy in question can accommodate, than please disregard this paragraph. :D:

The Sager 8130 that I recently purchased is similarly spec’d (see my post on the first page of this thread for details). I’ve been pretty impressed by the Sager. So far, the 8130 has been a dream to work/play on. It’s fast. The price was right, and it’s exactly what I was looking for in a desktop replacement workstation / gaming rig. :D:

I read your problem which are you facing right now and my opinion is to you should check the market rate of the desktop computer and then buy it but i think Pentium four will suited to your work. Thanks for sharing the information with us i hope in future you should also updated us.