Nei### [at] kjopenglobalnetcouk wrote:
> 
> So if you had a choice between;
>     a Sun Workstation (UltraSparc 333MHz, 3D Creater, etc.)
>         and
>     a PC (PII 400Mhz, etc)
> 
> If price wasn't an issue, and the machine was to be used for purely
> graphics (rendering etc.), which would you choose ?
> 
> Neil
> 
> Ps. Thanks for every ones comments.

	Well, if your only doing povray work, the 3D gfx hardware isn't really
going to help you too much for povray, though I'm not sure whats out
there for sun.  You may have other uses for it.  Lately it seems as
though SUN hardware, atleast in the lower end bracket costs somewhat
more than SGI hardware.  Both the SGI and Sun machines are going to kick
a PC's butt for doing anything realtime, from modelling to video
playback, especially if your running one of the various *nix oses on the
PC.
        If you simply want rendering speed, your best bet is most likely
to go with K6-233/66s in cheap older socket7 mbs.  Then you can use
cheap EDO ram, and (this is what I would do) build an enclosure for
maybe 10-20 Mbs, and feed them all power off one central source.  While
the K6 isn't  a terribly fast cpu for floating point, the
price/proformance ratio is pretty good, on www.pricewatch.com I believe
you could find the chip selling for around $90.  Network cards are also
selling pretty cheap if you look in the right places, I've picked up
used ElinkIIIs for about $3.  With all this, you could setup a cluster
of linux machines, and run pvmpov.  The only problem with this setup is
that each machine needs it's own amount of ram, and each machine has to
parse the file, which can get redundant.  This kind of setup works best
for Scenes with low parse time, higher render times, and smaller amounts
of memory.  So basically scenes that don't have too much geometry, but
are being rendered at very high resolutions, and have fpu intensive
options enabled. (focal blur/Radiosity). This type of setup would also
work well for longer animations, in which case you wouldn't run pvm at
all, you would simply want to assign each machine a set number of
frames. another option rather than a K6 cluster would be a smaller Dual
ppro cluster.  it would mean less network cards, less power needed, and
less space, though the dual MB prices are still up there.  The 180mhz
ppro chips are selling for around $100 I believe.  They DO overclock to
200 nicely as well.  a setup of 10 of these boxes would be able to
easily do the job, and given enough ram, could still work well for
complex geometry scenes, especially if it's for an animation.  If you
are rendering scenes that are in the hundreds of megabytes of ram
though, and arn't planning on animating them, it may be better to go
with 1 machine with 256-512MB of ram, and a very fast cpu.  (21264 alpha
would do the job nicely).

                                        Nite_Hawk

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