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Help For School / Gaming Desktop


humechanics

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I'm trying to build a whole desktop for college and gaming. I'm majoring in Game Art & Design, so I need a computer that can run programs like 3ds Max and Maya, but also run newer games for "research" ;) . Here's a list of parts I have in mind right now. I'm already covered for speakers, but I'm not sure which operating system to go with. Any suggestions, critiques, comments, etc are greatly appreciated.

 

My budget is $2,000, but any build lower than that price would be nice. I'm new at building computers so I would value any explanations for answers because this is also a learning experience for me.

 

Processor - AMD Phenom 9750 Quad-Core Processor - $215.00

Motherboard - DFI LanParty DK ATX AMD Motherboard - $134.99

Memory - Corsair 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM - $86.00

Hard Drive - Western Digital Caviar 320GB 7200 RPM SATA - $64.99

DVD Burner - Pioneer 20X DVD

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At the moment Intel is the way to go you can get much better performance for about the same price.

A p35 motherboard would be good for your need and go with a 3870x2 you can probably save money somewhere else in the build for it.

just my opinion

Edited by damian

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The wireless cards that I looked up on Newegg have decent to horrible customer ratings. Is there a card in particular that anyone recommends? Also I'm considering sticking with XP, as 3ds Max is unsupported by Vista and Maya has issues with Vista.

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At the moment Intel is the way to go you can get much better performance for about the same price.

A p35 motherboard would be good for your need and go with a 3870x2 you can probably save money somewhere else in the build for it.

just my opinion

+1, Intel C2D / C2Q and a P35 mobo FTW

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At the moment Intel is the way to go you can get much better performance for about the same price.

A p35 motherboard would be good for your need and go with a 3870x2 you can probably save money somewhere else in the build for it.

just my opinion

Okay so say I exchanged these, should that be alright?

Processor - Intel Core 2 Quad Kentsfield 2.4GHz

Motherboard - Asus LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX

Memory - Corsair 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM 1066

Video Card - HIS Hightech Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

 

 

3d Studio Max and Maya both work perfectly in Vista...

Thanks, that's good to know then. Because I read somewhere that they are unsupported by Vista. Would it be worth it to dual boot XP and Vista? I have no idea about all this so any other ideas are welcome.

Edited by humechanics

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Thanks, that's good to know then. Because I read somewhere that they are unsupported by Vista. Would it be worth it to dual boot XP and Vista? I have no idea about all this so any other ideas are welcome.

Both just require an update I believe, or you can run 3DS Max with desktop composition disabled if you don't care to update. Maya is *slightly* slower but that's it.

 

Dual booting would take minimally more effort but I have the feeling that once you get used to Vista you'll have little to no reason to move back to XP...especially since you can't use more than ~3 GB of RAM in XP.

 

 

EDIT: Your new choices are worlds better. :) If you do heavy graphics work I'd definitely get 8 GB of ram though.

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Well I'm just starting my first semester of the Game Art course, so it'll probably be mostly drawing and basic graphic design for a couple weeks. Thanks for the suggestion, I guess when I get into the more hardcore graphics work I can add 4GB of ram, for a total of 8GB.

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