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]

Originally Posted by Michael T

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]

Originally Posted by 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!

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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.