Hardware - size matters.

Great idea!

Could you elaborate a bit on your setup? For example, what do you feel is the relative contribution of the various parts of your computer? Obviously the graphics card is key. How important is it to have two? Is 768 MB VRam more important or a dedicated 10,000 RPM HD devoted to cache?

I've always thought my computer was fairly decent (Core2Duo, 256 MB nVidia 7600, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM SATA), and that going all out wouldn't make a huge difference. Your post however makes me consider reconsidering .....

Thanks,

Doug Danforth

This isn't really the right forum for this discussion, so the thread will probably get moved, just so you know. If we call this "tips on building a PC" would it work here? Probably not.

Anyway, to answer your questions (keep in mind, this is only my experience; others' mileage may vary):



That's really hard to say since most of it was put together all at once. It's not like I added one piece at a time and found that Eureka moment when SL all of a sudden started behaving itself. It was more "old machine, bad; new machine, good."

I've added more hard drives since the machine was new, and I changed from liquid cooling to air cooling, but that's it.

I'm not sure there's any single big contributor anyway. Every component in this machine was built for speed, without exception




So far, I'm really impressed with the GeForce 8 series. My laptop has a GeForce 86000 (256MB) in it, and it runs SL really well also. nVidia seems to have hit a home run with this series.

I'm guessing that the PCIEx16 (electrical) connection that these cards use probably makes a difference as well over the old AGP, but the main things are probably the implementation of DDR3 as VRAM and the architecture of the GPU.




As I said, with SLI enabled, I get a 20-40% boost in FPS. For me though, dual monitors are really important, so SLI has to take a back seat to that. With both monitors plugged into the same card, Maya tends to have some draw problems while SL is running, but with them each plugged into a different card, the drawing problems go away.

So, I'd say having two is important only if you're dying to get the absolute maximum performance possible via SLI, or if you're running multiple GPU-intensive applications on multiple monitors at the same time. But if your only concern is running SL at a good speed, then a single 8800 is plenty.


That depends on your definition of "important". If your only concern is immediate speed, then putting in a dedicated cache drive probably won't benefit you in the short term. I was actually getting a smidge more FPS when the cache was on the system drive. That might just be because of my RAID configuration though, so it's hard to say for sure. My system drive is actually 2 drives on RAID 0, which essentially doubles the read/write speed. The cache drive is not part of the RAID, obviously, so it's read/write is just the normal speed of the drive (which on a Raptor is crazy fast anyway).

However, in the long term, the benefits are huge. The main reason I moved the cache to a dedicated drive was to try to keep SL from being so brutal on my system drive. As I'm sure many here have noticed, SL can bring a hard drive to its knees by fragging the hell out of it in a matter of days if you use it all day every day. It's constantly writing and rewriting so many files, fragmentation is inevitable (and Mac users, I know from colleagues' experience, you're not immune to this either, despite Apple's claim that OSX is somehow frag-proof; SL proves it's not). For the overall health of my machine, the dedicated cache drive seemed a must.

To bring this back to the speed discussion, here's how I'd sum it up. Since nothing slows down a computer more than a badly fragmented system drive, the overall effect of the dedicated cache drive is steady speed, even if not quite increased speed. The additional drive might not up your speed today (it might even slow it a little), but over the long haul, the relatively flat speed of the healthier system drive is "faster" than the average of the ups and downs you'll experience with the cache on the system drive. Make sense?


By the way, you wouldn't believe the fragmentation reports on the cache drive. Two days after I installed it, 40% of the files on it were fragmented. But the beauty is who the hell cares? It's just a scratch disk.

Incidentally, I'm using also using that same drive as my scratch disk for Photoshop and for every other program that needs one. It fulfills its purpose really well. If you've got room in your machine for a dedicated scratch disk, I highly recommend it. It's an expensive solution, dollar wise, but in my opinion, the savings to system health are well worth it.

All that having been said, this latest SL viewer crashes so often, it's doing a pretty damned good job of fragging my system drive to hell and back, even without caching on it. When a program crashes 5-8 times a day every day, it leaves pieces of itself all over the place. I'm defragging every other day now just to keep up. Thanks, LL. Hopefully the 5-8 crash reports a day will get someone's attention over there.

To get back to the 768 MB VRAM question, I'd say that that is absolutely worth it. SL doesn't officially support that much VRAM yet (highest option is 512), but I have to believe it's better to have it and not use it all than to need it and not have it. Plus, the extra breathing room probably benefits other programs running at the same time.

Possibly more important than the amount of VRAM though is the type. The GeForce 8 series uses DDR3, which is lightning fast. And that's on top of the GPU itself being a speed demon to begin with. From what I've read, even a 256 MB GeForce 8xxxx will beat the snot out of a 512 MB GeForce 7xxxx.

My laptop seems to confirm this, since as I said earlier, it has a 256 MB GeForce 8600 in it, and it runs SL really, really well. On the laptop, I keep the draw in the high 200's to low 300's, every graphics option turned on and maxed, and I use 8XQ anti-aliasing. On private islands, I get around 25-45 FPS, and on the mainland I get around 15-30. That's nowhere near the performance of my desktop, of course, but for just a $2000 laptop, I think it's pretty damned good.

The laptop is an Asus G2S-A1, if you're curious. Specs are:

2.2 GHz Core2
2 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
150 GB 5400 RPM SATA HD (very slow RPM, but not uncommonly slow for a laptop)
Plus the nicest screen I've EVER seen on a laptop (1920 x 1200, 17"

My only complaint with this machine is that it has so many battery wasters on it. But hey, it's a "gaming laptop", so flashy lights all over it are really that important, right? The thing looks like it fell off Darth Vader's chest plate.

Oh, and it's Vista only (no XP drivers for it), which really bugged me in the beginning. But I'm starting to get used to Vista and it's not as bad as I had first thought. Vista seems impossibly slow in the first week or so, but it gets a lot faster as it's used (some sort of adaptive file cataloging thingy that supposedly tailors the computer to how you use it takes about a week to sort itself out). I won't bring it near my desktop machine until at the very least it supports SLI, but I've been pleased to discover the future of Windows might not be quite as bleak as I had thought. Vista might not be the best OS ever, but it's not bad.



By the sound of it, your computer IS decent, so I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it. I just wouldn't call it a hell-on-wheels speed demon though. I notice you didn't mention your processor speed or your system RAM. Assuming your processor is in the 2 GHz range (most Core2's seem to fall in there), it should be more than adequate for SL. If you've got anything less than 2 GB of system RAM, I'd say that's your bottle neck. SL uses system RAM for a lot of things it should be using VRAM for. It also uses the CPU for a lot of things that should fall on the GPU, which is why a fast processor is so crucial. Much of SL is engineered bass ackwards like that, from what I understand.

If you upgrade the video card to an 8800 GTX, or even a GTS, you'll probably notice a big difference in SL. And, to repeat, if you've got less than 2 GB of system RAM, upgrade to 2 GB or more as soon as you can. DDR2 is so cheap these days, there's no reason not to.

If you up your hard drive to 10,000 RPM, you will notice a difference in performance over the 7200 you have now. A Raptor would be almost 40% faster than what you have now. However, there is a big tradeoff in dollar cost per gigabyte. At $225 for 150 GB, Raptors are really expensive. You can get a 750 GB 7200 RPM drive for the same price.



On a side note, be aware that if you do invest fully in ultra high end hardware, you must be prepared to contend with problems. It's a bit like owning a Harley, I think. It's a hell of a machine, but you have to treat it with love to keep it performing properly. So far, in my desktop machine, I've had to replace a failed motherboard (not a small task), my liquid cooling system leaked (thank God it was powered off at the time; the CPU got soaked), I've suffered BIOS corruption from an incompatible piece of software (affected both my motherboard and my video cards, requiring a flash of all three), and I even somehow managed to smoke a Raptor (which is practically unheard of).

All that was after suffering some pretty intense stability problems from the so called "professional" factory overclocking that I had paid for when I bought the machine. Originally, the manufacturer had overclocked it from 2.6 GHz to 3.4. Insane speed boost (I was averaging 130 FPS in SL at the time!), but definitely not worth the stability hit. In the end, I had to undo the overclocking completely to make everything run properly. Moral of the story, don't overclock.



Anyway, I hope this has been helpful. I've probably written way more than I should have on this. Again, keep in mind all of this is just my own experience. There are many chaotic and indefinable factors that go into the "speed" of a computer. As I said in the beginning, your own mileage may vary.