hello everybody, I haven't been on these forums since i finished my last water cooling project 2 years ago. So im a little out of the loop on the latest hardware, im looking to build a rig mainly for media server/ 3d studio max, and my budget its around $800 USD so im just looking on suggestions on hardware specs looking at an AM2 shuttle. But im open for suggestions on a different stylish case shuttle just seemed to be the cheapest route.
Media server and 3d studio max seem to be quite different tasks. I think most people here would advise you to go Intel at the moment, although if you want a Shuttle that'll make it expensive. If you want bang for your buck, you could stick a 5000+ BE in the AM2 shuttle..
for ~$150 the best you will get is an ATI Radeon 3850 like this http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=707461 Its a bit over but a reasonable card from what I have heard. The next step down would probably be an x1950pro
It'll still work under DirectX 9 of course, but you'd need to be running Vista, to make use of the DirectX 10 features of the Radeon HD3850. As suggested above... the X1950 Pro ($153) is still a great card, for those on a somewhat limited budget. You'd have to double-check the clearances in a Shuttle box though, if you were to consider that card, 'coz that's quite a sizeable cooler it's got on it
For only about $15 more, the HD 3850 is a much better choice. It has a decent performance lead over the X1950Pro.
its only serving as a media server to play .avi files on my xbox and download torrents at night, id use my watercooled rig but my little bro stuck his finger in the fan so it cooked its self and my lappy isnt up to do 3d max so am2 shuttle 5000 + 400 gigs 2 gig ram and a 1950 or a hd3850 sound decent? or am i going to be needing more ram ? is there a 64 bit version of utorrent?
2GB is fine for ram, I run my gaming system with 2GB of ram and Vista with no issues. If you only want it as a media server, then it doesn't really matter what sort of video card it has. The advantage of the HD 3000 or GeForce 8000 series cards in a media center scenario is that they support better hardware video decoding to take load off of the CPU, which is a nice feature.
Yea but dont forget the 3d max. Thats making my lappy sweat balls i was just wondering if its very mem intensive?and if i would benefit from more then 2 gigs of ram
I don't know much about that program, but if it is very resource intensive, then yes, the 4GB of ram would be a great addition to the system. You may want to see if any video cards support hardware acceleration of the program as that would make running it much more smooth.
Rendering things will eat your computers RAM like theres no tomorrow. The more, the better. You'll probably only see a major benefit if you're rendering big things though. However, at the certain price of RAM, might as well get 4.