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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tim Davies who wrote (33412)	10/30/1999 2:04:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

fastest system that a person can buy for a graphics workstation, PC based.... No one is the final authority when it comes to this question, most certainly not me. You should get several replies to your question. I'd encourage you to look at the Reviews at: tomshardware.com anandtech.com aceshardware.com and the links to additional pages that the they provide. Remember that the constraint for high end graphics is often the video card, rather than the workstation. Also remember that total memory can be more important than processor speed, video card, or memory speed. In terms of CPU, Coppermine and Athlon seem to be roughly equivalent right now, clock for clock. Also think about your procurement and budget schedules. If by acquiring systems a notch or two down from the top now, you can replace the box sooner, follow that strategy. For some of our staff, we keep the disk and monitor and swap out the box (CPU, RAM, and Video Card) every 6 to 9 months. Spending some of your budget to buy future technology (at future - lower - prices) will give you greater benefits overall. If you're going to be stuck with whatever you get now for a long time, get the best you can. My own opinion? Start with a decent 21" monitor. For performance, the most important thing will be the video card, and the card of the hour seems to be the just released GeForce 256 - so start with that. I've brought in some Matrox G400's recently, and they certainly have been impressive, too. We used to always go with SCSI in performance machines, but have lately been pretty happy with ATA-66 on 7200RPM drives (and it can save significant dollars). Next determine how much memory you will need; are you using one program to edit one image at at time? (unlikely) If so, you may need as little as 128 meg of RAM, but 256 is usually the minimum acceptable for a graphics workstation. More likely you are editing many images in a session, using several tools, and sometimes (or often) editing video - in which case go for as much memory as you can. 256 meg is a minimum, and in some cases, a gigabyte or more is not unreasonable. Memory and CPU (at least on this thread) can be religious issues - if you have some pre-determined conviction, follow it. 12 months from now, anything currently available will seem slow, out of date, and look like the same system from the rear view mirror of next year. My own feeling (partly subjective). The floating point pipelines in the Athlon will be better utilized by software in the coming months, so that the Athlon's floating point performance should pull ahead of coppermine for systems purchased today (SP6 for NT was just released, for example, and provides some speedup already). If your applications take good advantage of multiple threads, the Coppermine/BX/GX or Coppermine/840 combo is better (since it supports two processors - 4 for GX). Multiprocessor Athlon based systems won't be out until near the end of the year. If you may need a lot of memory, either now or in the future, do a review of the limited memory expansion available for currently available Rambus systems and currently available Athlon systems - a BX or GX system could be your best solution. For a moderately priced system, I'd go with an Athlon and 256 meg of RAM. For a high end graphics system that doesn't use heavily multithreaded apps, Athlon 700 and 512 to 768 meg of RAM. For a system that does video editing or for other reasons needs a lot of RAM, Coppermine/BX and 1 gig of RAM or more. For a high end system aimed at multithreaded apps that didn't need a lot of memory, Coppermine/BX or 840 and 512 to 1 meg of RAM. If memory is important and you use multithreaded apps, Coppermine/BX or even Coppermine/GX and 1 gig or more of RAM. Very high end? The kryotech 900 with 768 meg of RAM, of course - but I would expect it to not last as long as a conventional system. Scrutinize all the reviews, price out the alternatives, and make your decision. Good Luck, Dan