PC that must work with Maya, Adobe and Games

Hey,

It's not just me looking for computer specs or towers that will run Autodesk Maya, Adobe programs and the latest or upcoming games. It's me looking for one that'll run them efficiently.

First I believed any tower with the latest chips would be enough, but then I read how ATI graphics cards cause Maya to crash and Nvidia is preferred. People write up about using AMD over Intel, as in an AMD+Nvidia combo. Then comes 8 GB of RAM but that Win XP 32 bit doesn't support that, only a 64 bit version does though I would want Win 7 anyway.

Last but not least, I don't know why some people are saying their workstations run Maya smoothly but games poorly. "Purpose-built" "Purpose-built."

what's the best computer for maya? - The Gnomon Workshop Forums

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As a visual development artist I intend to use Maya in order to model and render characters that I design. I would also apply textures I designed or painted myself to the model, whether it be for an in-game design or a cinematics design. I also use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for drawing/painting/designing, and sometimes importing things to Adobe Flash in order to program and animate.

Gaming-wise I want to run SCII and D3 ever so smoothly, but running the most demanding game would probably cover that.

Can you talk about everything from combos to even the power supply and wattage?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well, if this isn't out of line — if the only games you're really concerned about running well are Blizzard titles and all your other work is in graphics design, is there some reason you're not willing to consider a Mac? I know this isn't really what you're asking for, but if this is indeed the case then you might save yourself a lot of hassle this way.

(Not normally a Mac evangelist in the least, this just seems like one of those corner-case situations where they might be legitimately useful.)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

There are graphics cards that are specifically made for rendering and they are crazy fucking expensive. They are wonderful at that. They are horrible for gaming. They aren't built for videogames.

And then there are your average and mildly expensive gaming graphic cards. Be it your ATI or Nvidia gaming card they are there for gaming and they can do a bit of rendering as well.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Why does the PSU have to be 850W? I had an 800W PSU and it fried. My PC would turn on and off and restart randomly until the PSU wouldn't work anymore. Flesh mentioned lack of amperes on the voltage rails. Am I supposed to replace a plug? Is there a problem with a less powerful PSU?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

You might be overloading one of the rails. Or your PSU is just horrible and needs to die in a painful fire. Either one.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Too many devices on the rail. Moving devices to a different rail will fix it. EX: hard drives, fans, optical drives, etc all running off of one chain of power from the PSU. Separate them out across the multiple chains that come from the PSU. Also, if the rail in question isn't pushing sufficient power for the devices to draw, it can cause weird problems, so a general rearranging of devices on your PSU might be something to try anyway.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

First of all if your budget allows it, I would try and create different computers for your gaming and production activities. Maybe just upgrade your current PC and use that solely for gaming, then buy a new one just for graphics production.

As for Maya, I've run it pretty smoothly on my old computer so any modern processor (around 3ghz) would be good. Of course if you are concerned with rendering times then look into top of the line dual (triple,quad,etc...) core processors

Pixar uses 2.8ghz Intel Xeon processors (1024 of them) in their renderfarm; which also features two terabytes of memory and 60 terabytes of disk space.

As for Adobe products, if you are fine using CS3, any processor as far back as maybe five years will probably give you satisfactory-exceptional performance. If you are running CS4 though you will probably want to have the most up-to-date computer possible. The only really CPU hungry products I've noticed by Adobe in my experience are After Effects and Premier, so again if you plan on using any of those for post-production you will probably want a top of the line processor/motherboard combo and plenty of ram to spare (no less than 2 gigs).

As for graphics cards, my old computer had an ATI card and my new one has a NVIDIA card and I didn't really notice any difference between the two in Maya. If you have been hearing bad things about ATI though and you believe the claims are credible then go with NVIDIA. I would try to get a card specially designed for graphics editing though as the demands will be slightly different than for your typical gaming card and you will most likely have better performance and rendering times with a professional card. Nvidia's Quadro line and ATI's FirePro cards may be worth looking into.

Of course try to get a motherboard that allows for the most ram possible (I hate rendering...) and use a operating system that supports that amount of ram. A 64-bit OS and at least 6 gigs of ram would probably be your best bet. I would also try and get a hard drive with perhaps a little less storage but a really fast data access rate, possibly a solid state hard drive if you can afford one, to use solely as a scratch disk as this will improve your performance greatly in Adobe's products.

In the end though despite what me or anyone else says just go with what ever you can afford. It is all too easy to come up with this perfect dream system that ends up costing well into the tens of thousands of dollars, but if your budget is only $500 dollars set your expectations accordingly. I would try looking at Tiger Direct and possibly consider getting a bare-bone system (w/o OS). They have pretty nice deals on those every once in a while, and I think I got a good deal on my last PC I purchased there. I would also continue browsing around on computer graphics forums and see what types of rigs other people are using. Not many members here would probably be able to give you the best advice in that sense.

FELIPE NO