Hi guys. Some of you may have noticed that I decided to borrow a little money (gulp..) and go with a Dell T5500 Precision. I did this for a few reasons really, ones I wanted to discuss. Obviously I have my gaming rig. The thing is I have accepted that it's a gaming rig and, due to the nature of a gaming rig, can take a crap whenever its mood takes it. Example - a few weeks back I wanted to try Mantle. What I ended up with was a three day cursing exercise because AMD's drivers suck. What was particularly frustrating was I could not access the computer with a keyboard or mouse and there were files on my C drive for other projects that I nearly lost. Talking of other projects.. I love to design and code front ends for an emulator a friend of mine wrote which means long Photoshop sessions (16 hour plus). I really can't risk losing my art work because a game decided to make my rig take a poo. This is why I bought that Xeon thing, as I wanted a separate rig for all of this stuff. I also started learning Sketchup recently and thus it will be for that also. Now a while back I remember a friend of mine running a hacked Quadro driver on his GTX 470. He said it was because the 470 drivers were buggered and the Quadro one was better.. Now I have a GTX 480 Lightning that's going to be in the rig. Could I do the same? what are the benefits to the Quadro drivers? are they better? more stable etc? Obviously stability is key which is partly why I chose the Dell chassis (that and the fact it was basically the cheapest way I was going to get something that would support my CPU). What operating system would be the best for me to use? 7 Ultimate? I must say I really don't fancy using 8 on it.. I do know that the rig fully supports Win XP 64 bit so was thinking maybe I could use that? Also. What movie editing software is easy to learn? I really fancy trying my hand at it
It was a while back, but I used to run a Dell M90 (Lovely laptop) that came with a NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M. I found the quadro drivers to be pretty unstable. Having said that in theory a quadro class driver 'might' give you better performance and/or features in certain pro software (Maya/3DS etc). It's been a while before I spend any serious time in Maya though so I don't have anything like recent experience. Last time I used Maya they had enabled all the funky openGL stuff in any driver. Suck it and see, a different driver might unlock some additional floating point performance. If you want optimal stability I'd go with stock drivers for everything. It's always worked best for me. Win 7 isn't being updated as quickly or as significantly as 8, so again good for stability. Only go with pro if you need the pro extras such as the ability to join a domain. Gwen's golden rules for a stable system: 1. Use good hardware. 2. Use stock settings. Don't try and do serious work on a system that has been over clocked within an inch of its BSOD. 3. Go with stock drivers ( from windows update if possible ). 4. Stop dicking around with beta drivers, registry hacks and software that seeps into the OS like wine seeps into a carpet. Leave it all alone. Stop messing with it, you're only making it worse!
Don't use win XP 64, it's not very good, drivers are all a pain and it's entirely not great, it's what happens when microsoft try to crowbar 64 bit support into an operating system that was written to not be 64 bit.
Ack ! I don't have much choice mate tbh. I don't need to run it as the primary OS but in order for this emulator to work properly I have to use it, if even for literally just playing the emulations. Basically it was coded to use hardware sound acceleration and basically 'beeps' the sound card similar to the spectrum (it runs fruit machines from the 70s and 80s and uses the hardware sound acceleration to generate the sounds). In Windows 7 it sounds bloody awful and my friend stopped coding for it in 2007 so it never did get 7+ support (using software sound, he really couldn't get his head around it). Mind you all is not lost I can always use XP Mode (it's still not ideal though the reel animations are very stiff through XP mode...).
Yup this is exactly what I intend to do. I can't overclock the CPU because of the Dell board but tbh I think that it's going to be more than fast enough for my needs (six cores and 12 threads at 1.73ghz or 4 cores at 2ghz) and I want to get on a set of drivers once and then leave it. As for number 4? that's what my gaming rig is for
If you're after stability then I'd probably say don't bother with trying the Quadro drivers with your 480. That's not because I have any information as to whether or not they'll work well together, but rather because introducing potential causes of instability (as Guinevere says) isn't something you want to be doing. The Quadro drivers might be brilliant, or they might not play properly with your 480 and end up causing you a ton of wasted time and effort. Just my 2p worth
Yeah for sure. I just wondered if the Quadro/Tesla what not drivers were actually better for rendering etc. Still, I guess I can play with it first and see what happens before deciding on something permanent God bless Acronis hehe.
OK. Software time.. 1. Easy software that edits videos, adds soundtracks etc? I currently use Virtualdub but it's pretty limited.. I want something I can overlay text with and so on. 2. A 3D studio that doesn't need you to have a IQ of 200 to work out. Something well documented that can be learned without needing a teacher around. Obviously I now know the basics of sketchup but I wanted to take on something a little more challenging..
Now I know the architecture has changed compleatly; but I did a bit of testing a while ago with 8800GTX+S flashed to the cosponsoring Quadro driver pitting them against the same Quadro - FX4600. The results were far from impressive. Here's a pretty typical example. The GTS slowed down having been soft modded - despite (technically) being closer to the FX4600 than the GTX, which onlyl saw a benefit of 2.8FPS. Pairing the soft moded GTS and the FX4600 again, slowed down the single card (FX4600) performance. If you need a professional card, then get one. If you don't, then dicking about with drivers can kick you in the butt.
Hmm thanks for that man very useful. I think I should be fine really. Finding a Quadro with the power of the 480 Lightning could be very expensive so I think I'll stick to the desktop drivers
