Best upgrades for a G5 to run/render from Maya

[Kholi]

Anyone got any advice? I have 5.5 Gigs of ram, 1.5 Terrabytes of space.

G5 Dual 2 Ghz Processor

Nvidia GeForce 6600LE VRAM 128mb

Powering 23" Cinema HD and 20" Cinema Display.

Do I move directly to ram or should I also be looking for another Graphics card?

Suggestions on either?

[kai]

Ram is fine, card's not bad either. To get the speed increase you're likely after (rendering i'm assuming) you'll need to move up to a faster processor set. Quad or Intels will do the trick.

Not the cheap answer i'm sure you're after, but the system you have now is about maxed for a Dual G5.

[Kholi]

Don't want to spend that much money! Err, well, I don't think I can. =(

Thanks, Kai.

[Michael T]

:) I have the same setup except for one thing. I made my main drive a pair of 160 sata drives setup as a 1drive raid. It seems to be about 15% faster mabye a little more. Also this has proven to be the most stable OSX drive setup that I have used so far. I havn't had any problems with at all so far for the last 2 years.I also run 5.5 gigs of ram. Can't save protools to it this way so I use another internal or a set of external drives to record audio to. Works great. To render faster you can use 10,000 rpm drives or the fastest way to go with your machine or a new machine is to go fiber channel card to an array. Thats pricy so I went with a esata card and 4 bay box.
I will upgrade to a new machine sometime next year. I need to buy the hvx-200 before I get a new machine. I would try to render at night on large projects.
Good luck!:)

[kai]

To render faster you can use 10,000 rpm drives or the fastest way to go with your machine or a new machine is to go fiber channel card to an array.

Not really true. AE renders frame by frame, so the write speed of those frames isn't that big a deal. If you're working in Final Cut and actually pulling real-time feeds off a drive then that's where your drive bandwidth comes into play. AE relies on processor speed for render horsepower.

[Kholi]

:) I have the same setup except for one thing. I made my main drive a pair of 160 sata drives setup as a 1drive raid. It seems to be about 15% faster mabye a little more. Also this has proven to be the most stable OSX drive setup that I have used so far. I havn't had any problems with at all so far for the last 2 years.I also run 5.5 gigs of ram. Can't save protools to it this way so I use another internal or a set of external drives to record audio to. Works great. To render faster you can use 10,000 rpm drives or the fastest way to go with your machine or a new machine is to go fiber channel card to an array. Thats pricy so I went with a esata card and 4 bay box.
I will upgrade to a new machine sometime next year. I need to buy the hvx-200 before I get a new machine. I would try to render at night on large projects.
Good luck!:)

Thanks for this info! I will look into separating my hard-drive like that.

I might be able to go 10k RPM hard-drive, but not arrays. Will that help?

I am also looking into a GeForce 7800GT card to replace my Geforce 6600LE. I have the final G5 released in 05 that can handle 16gb's of ram. It has PCi-X slots from what I know. This 7800GT will work, right?

Here's my shopping list:

Maya Complete - 2000.00
Kingstom 4gb pc2-4200 Ram to bring me up to 8gbs - 670.00 (MacMall)
Nvidia GeForce 7800GT PCi-X Card - 160.00 (NewEgg)
G-Tech G-Raid 500gb External - 420.00

Is that a decent way to spend the money? I think that I can look for 10k RPM internal instead of an Extra 500gb. What brand? What type would you recommend? ?GOTTA GET THIS ALL SOON!

[kai]

Sorry I forgot you're using Maya not AE. Anyways, it still holds true, processing power is what you'll need to render faster.

[Kholi]

Sorry I forgot you're using Maya not AE. Anyways, it still holds true, processing power is what you'll need to render faster.

Even if I got a Mac Pro, Maya has yet to release a Crossgrade for the platform, right? So it wouldn't even matter at this point.

I could only go Quad-Core.

And, I thought Maya's load was mostly on the Video Card's memory?

What do you think of the list of hardware? I have plenty of external storage, should I opt for a 300gb 10k RPM Seagate Internal from Newegg instead?

[Greggl]

I'd add a second machine for a render only box.

[Kholi]

Dang. A second machine? I'm on a serious budget.

[Greggl]

How are you tapping out the current machine? Ive got the same setup and I'm
doing 2K work for features on it. Ive got a few machines in the renderfarm though.

[twocik23]

Have you thought of Renderman?

[Kholi]

Dunno what that is. =P

[oneinfiniteloop]

Have you thought of Renderman?

Overkill for someone just starting out with Maya...mental ray is enough and plenty fast.

kholi, it's another renderer, it's practically what the big boys use for all the CG heavy films. It's developed by Pixar and it's more programmer friendly than artist friendly, from what I hear.