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NEWBIE: I just bought a graphics machine for freelance work.
I posted this in the aftereffects forum too.
Before I discovered forums like this and things like Quadro and workstations and RAID 5 I bought what I thought was going to be an excellent graphics machine. Turns out that my Dell XPS 710 h2c is an excellent gaming machine and I just received it yesterday.
So I made a mistake and spent 7000 on a good machine (that was my absolute budget) but now I need help trying to figure out how to optimize it for NLE, aftereffects and 3D graphics work.
Background: I work on adrenaline media composers at work but this is my machine for doing some freelance stuff on the side.
Now my main questions are:
is there any way to split the two 500 gig drives in a RAID 0 configuration and make one my boot drive and the other my content drive (I just learned about this stuff yesterday)
Are my dual GeForce 8800GTX video cards that much slower than a Quadro card for graphics editing?
Did I back myself into a corner with my current set up?
Any suggestions for optimizing the system before I start putting software on it.
This is what I bought:
I bought a Dell XPS 710 h2c:
Intel Core2 Extreme processor QX6700 (3.20GHz,Overclocked)
(2) 20 inch wide screen monitors
Windows XP media
4GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
Dual 768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX
Serial ATA2 RAID 0 With Dual 500GB Hard Drives
Dell 13 in 1 Media Card Reader
Creative Labs X-Fi PCI Sound Card
Logitech Z-5450 Digital 5.1 Speaker System
Ageia PhysX Processor
water cooling system
3 year warranty (including accident protection)Thanks for the help
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1 Reply
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[bumpthekoala] “is there any way to split the two 500 gig drives in a RAID 0 configuration and make one my boot drive and the other my content drive (I just learned about this stuff yesterday)
Depends on how it is made a RAID. If it’s software only, it would be in your system’s drive manager (My Computer –> right click –> Manage –> Storage Device manager). You’d simply unlink the two disks and need to reformat them. If it’s a hardware RAID, you would have to follow similar procedures by going to your BIOS or launching a special setup utility from disk in command line mode. You should have docs on that or consult Dell (considering you pay 3 years warranty, they shoudl definitely help you on this)
[bumpthekoala]
Are my dual GeForce 8800GTX video cards that much slower than a Quadro card for graphics editing?No, speed is not the issue here. Quadros provide more options for configuring OpenGL and a few other things. If you’re really unhappy, you should find a tool called SoftQuadro which will fool your computer into thinking you have real Quadros and give access to those options. Your cards are very new, so said tool may not have them in its list and you’ll have to wait a while.
[bumpthekoala]
Did I back myself into a corner with my current set up?No, I just wouldn’t use Media Center Edition as it’s a bit limiting which in part also pertains to some of the configuration issues I explained above. Win XP professional would have been better, considering you were spending so much money on the system in the first place. It would also allow you to configure separate users, so your wife and children can use your computer without completely messing it up. You can’t do that with Media Center Edition. ;o)
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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