CompuServe Thread

Bob: If you are going to add a few machines I would buy the fastest pentium machine available 120mhz or 133mhz, whatever. Actually, I would buy a DEC box as you can get them with dual processor motherboards which will accept another pentium chip at a later date or can accept one DEC Alpha chip. I mention this because 3DS r5 will be an NT release and could take advantage of the additional cpu and hopefully the Alpha chip. Also, you may not need to buy additional monitors, keyboards or mice for your new workstations if all they are going to do is render away. You could just use a switch box to control them (a few folks do that here). To send animations to VHS I would suggest the DPS PAR or its soon to be released successor the PVR. With these boards you would need nothing better than a home VCR to record great video. I record to SVHS often but to VHS all the time as well. The best part of the PAR/PVR board is the ability to make an unlimited number of 1st generation top quality tapes as you can record your animations in real time. For more info on the new PVR check the library for the PERFAQ file (Perception Video Recorder). Bob

Bob – You have a fair hardware setup for 2d CAD work, but if you are going deeply into 3d, you're going to need more beef. Given your reference to paper plans and ACAD plans, I am assuming that you will be preparing architectural simulations. The solution we like – Massive rendering systems: Modeling/rendering stations – Pentium 100, min. 32 Mb RAM, minimum 1+ Gb HD, Matrox Impressions card w/4Mb RAM, minimum 17" monitor, DPS PAR + TBC IV + RAZOR PRO (on one station only). This station is networked to a series of rendering stations, which are fast pentiums (min. 100 Mhz), with lots of RAM (64-128Mb), a minimum 500 Mb HD, and a low-end VGA video card. To conserve space, these stations are rack mounted, and share a single keyboard and monitor. Since they stations render to a file, no advanced graphics cards are needed. This type of configuration gets a lot of bang for your buck, you don't have to buy all of it at one time (you can add to it station-by-station), and if any one component goes down, you aren't SOL. Dual pentiums are not yet a consideration, as 3dS and ACAD will not take full advantage of their capabilities. The DPS PAR card will compress your animations and play them back in real-time, eliminating your need for a frame-accurate video tape deck (at least for recording purposes). The TBC IV allows you to capture video from live sources or a tape input through the PAR.When you need to do video editing, the Razor Pro software will enable you to do effects and transitions between video clips that have been captured to the hard drive using the PAR, and also synchronise sound to your video. The price differential between Pentiums and 486-100s has shrunken significantly from where it once was, to the point where we really recommend Pentiums to our clients that require processing power. Consider this – the street price of a 100 Mhz Pentium mthrbd+CPU is only about $500 more than a 486-100, and you get approximately twice the number-crunching throughput. We like the Matrox Impressions board for your type of application because of the on-board rendering capability wih the 3d Dynaview software. Amoung other things, this software does near-realtime rendering of your models within AutoCAD. This gives you the ability to error-check your modeling quickly. Add an inexpensive scan converter to your setup, and you could record walk-throughs directly out to videotape for client approvals. You're launching into a brave new world, and getting there is half the fun!