computer advice

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sean90291

Veteran
I'm running After Effects 6.5 on two computers. An older Inspiron 1150 Laptop with 1 gig of RAM P4 2.8 GHz and obviously the factory installed motherboard/graphics card. I also put together a desktop system that I intended to use mainly for such purposes, and so I made it more powerful with 2 gigs RAM P4 3.0 Ghz an Asus Motherboard (P5RD1) and the MSI NVidia GeForce 6600GT graphics card (128MB DDR3) and a massive Maxtor Hard Drive.

But get this...the old laptop outperforms the desktop system in speed and rendering times (gotta love Dell). Anyone know any reason my Desktop isn't performing up to par? It should be blowing the laptop out of the water.
 
I too would like to know this, as I'm just getting ready to buy a new system and don't want to run into the same problem as you! (No offense.)

Bartender! I wanna buy that poor bast*rd a drink! He's got serious "speed & rendering" issues at home.
Matt
 
I'm no computer expert but a couple of things to consider are:

AE takes advantage of OpenGL performance in your graphics card, I don't know what card is in the laptop but I don't believe the 6600GT's OpenGL is all that great.

The frontside bus speed is important along with the the speed of the memory and hard drive, although again I would imagine that the laptop should be slower than the workstation with 5400 RPM drive and DDR1 memory. Be careful with "masive Maxtor" hard drives, I have found them to be a bit unreliable.

There's not much difference between a 2.8 and 3.0 GHz chip except the amount of secondary cache, the chipset with the bigger L2 cache generally performs floating point calculations much faster.

Have you done all of the usual disk maintenance, disk defrag etc,? Also how much cache does that big maxtor have? With 2D applications the speed at which you can read and write is very important the larger the cache the more data it can buffer the faster the I/O.

As far as loving Dell, I agree, I have an XPS workstation and the thing rocks.

Sorry I couldn't really help with this...
 
Hey, thanks for the advice. Yeah, done mucho defrag and disk error scans and all that. I'm taking it to a professional computer guy. Something ain't right, but I don't know what it is. I have to say Dell does test their computers extremely thoroughly for hardware and software compatibility. I have found every Dell computer I've purchased (probably near 10 of 'em now) to be extremely efficient, well built machines. Not just the assembler of parts, I think Dell delivers pretty finely tuned machines. I'm sure really knowledgeable custom computer builders can do better for the price....but it's hard to beat all the testing and support Dell pours into their products.
 
Check memory timings and FSB speed. Make sure you have a good fan on CPU but you wanna make sure you've cranked it up as fast as you can.
 
hey sean, i have nearly the same set up as you and used two little apps to help me troubleshoot the issue. I've uploaded these mini-apps if you guys want to try them out, i got them from downloads.com or someplace like that. (they are .exe files which you should be suspicious about normally, but try them if you want)
http://www.markcheng.com/benchmarking/
Run these apps on your desktop and laptop to compare CPU speed and disk speed. These were my results:

CPU laptop final score: 3292
CPU desktop final score: 5093

laptop disk overall score: 3807
desktop disk overall score: 7695

anyway, AE uses a ton of RAM and processor power so if you're not getting faster render times on the desktop system, those are the first two places to start.

FSB and hardrive speed will affect how quickly the program responds when you jump around on your timeline/composition.

Another thing which sounds like a generic tip but it is true is make sure you got all the up to date drivers. when I bought a pcmcia card for my laptop that had SATA ports, i experienced horrible slowness until i had the new drivers.

one final note about my scores. My desktop uses AMD processors and the laptop uses intel. i heard amd is better for rendering, but that type of info is always disputed by fanatics.

mc
 
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