Preferably in the neighborhood of 1 GHz?

I'm finally fixin' to sink this boat anchor of a P-133 and I desperately 
want something that'll render POVRay scenes fast, run modelers fast, and 
fill my life with sunshine, rainbows, and little birdies singing.
-- 
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I websurfed, weak and weary,
Over many a strange and spurious website of 'hot chicks galore',
While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
"'Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my cheap hardcore!"

Quoth the server, "404".

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By "numbers" maybe you meant prices?
I was just looking at systems in that range, but not the DDRAM things (egad,
costly).  Looks like a decent one goes for approx. $1500, less the monitor.
Reason I was checking up on this is because I'm standing on the edge about to
leap off into a notebook buy.  Thought just maybe a fast tower PC in the right
range would pull me back.  Apparently not.  With monitor considered into the
deal the cost of a notebook computer with 850MHz CPU is not a whole lot more,
or about five-fourths that of a slightly faster desktop computer.
Obviously there's more to it than the CPU but not much difference.  Wanting
portability is going to sway me to finally get one I'm fairly certain this
time.  I feel it's the last of the current era of computers before things take
another step onward and I'm not going to want to wait out the settling dust
again.
That's my viewpoint anyhow.

"Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen" <rev### [at] therectory> wrote in message
news:8FD372465revbob@204.213.191.228...
> Preferably in the neighborhood of 1 GHz?
>
> I'm finally fixin' to sink this boat anchor of a P-133 and I desperately
> want something that'll render POVRay scenes fast, run modelers fast, and
> fill my life with sunshine, rainbows, and little birdies singing.

That last part will probably never happen except when going outside into the
fresh air of springtime  ;-)
Far as speeds go I'll guess that your 133MHz is about 10 to 15 times slower
than a 1GHz, translating to 10 to 15 minute renders being only 1 minute (or
less?), a render taking a day now only taking a couple hours.
Would be nice to experience that kind of change, if true.  I'm no expert.

Bob

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The kindly Rev. overheard
per### [at] aolcom?subject=PoV-News:%20&body=Relating%20to%20POV-Ra
y:%20 (Bob H.) saying on 20 Oct 2000: 

>By "numbers" maybe you meant prices?

Er, no, actually I was looking for raytracing benchmarks.  Price is no 
objects.  OK, I see you don't believe that one.  But since I've never 
had a computer that was by any stretch of the imagination state of the 
art, I thought just once I'd get something nice.  Within reason.

I noticed that the POVRay benchmark hasn't been updated in a while, and 
there isn't even an Athlon in the spreadsheet.

Basically I was wondering if people had data to support that Athlons do, 
in fact, do POVRay faster than PIII's do, like the spec numbers indicate 
they ought to.  Considering that PIII's cost twice as much (or more) 
than Athlons, and Athlons are (at least in the benchmarks I've read) 
faster, especially in floating point math (opposite to the K6's vs. 
PII's), I just wanted to make sure that held true in the real (i.e., 
POVRay) world.  Getting a chip that will play Quake faster is a real 
don't-care.  Getting a chip that will run POVRay faster is a do-care.

>> I'm finally fixin' to sink this boat anchor of a P-133 and I
>> desperately want something that'll render POVRay scenes fast, run
>> modelers fast, and fill my life with sunshine, rainbows, and little
>> birdies singing. 
>
>That last part will probably never happen except when going outside
>into the fresh air of springtime  ;-)
>Far as speeds go I'll guess that your 133MHz is about 10 to 15 times
>slower than a 1GHz, translating to 10 to 15 minute renders being only
>1 minute (or less?), a render taking a day now only taking a couple
>hours. Would be nice to experience that kind of change, if true.  I'm
>no expert. 

Cool!  Of course, all that means is, I'll be doing more elaborate stuff.  
If it doesn't take all night, it isn't raytracing.
-- 
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net

There are two rules for success in life:
  (1) Don't tell people everything you know.

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On 20 Oct 2000 12:39:20 -0400 Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen wrote:

>Preferably in the neighborhood of 1 GHz?
>
>I'm finally fixin' to sink this boat anchor of a P-133 and I desperately 
>want something that'll render POVRay scenes fast, run modelers fast, and 
>fill my life with sunshine, rainbows, and little birdies singing.

  Rev. Bob, you might take a look at "The Need for SPEED -
Waa-Hoooooo...", a thread posted in p.off-topic. Ken recently purchased
an Athlon 950mhz machine and conducted a few comparisons to his old
Pentium 200mhz box.

-- 
Alan - ako### [at] povrayorg - a k o n g <at> p o v r a y <dot> o r g
http://www.povray.org - Home of the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer

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The kindly Rev. overheard ako### [at] povrayNO-SPAMorg (Alan Kong) saying
on 20 Oct 2000: 

>  Rev. Bob, you might take a look at "The Need for SPEED -
>Waa-Hoooooo...", a thread posted in p.off-topic. Ken recently
>purchased an Athlon 950mhz machine and conducted a few comparisons to
>his old Pentium 200mhz box.

Great!  Many thanks.  I saw another couple of posts on p.general that 
indicated that the Athlon is working well for some other folks, too.

I've set followups to povray.off-topic, but I just wanted to finish up 
here by saying that the chip I'm really drooling over is reviewed at 
<http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/index.html>.  Another site 
that reviews the 1.2GHz Athlon says you ought to have a 300-400W power 
supply and more cooling than you think you could conceivably ever need 
and then some.  The whole setup of the system they ran the benchmark on 
gives me "that special feeling".

Speaking of GMAW -- this is barely on-topic because I recall reading 
that the Athlon had some hardware instructions that did matrix 
manipulation -- I was wondering whether there's a C compiler anywhere 
that would generate those instructions.  Doing a render with those 
instructions enabled would go so fast it'd create a black hole.
-- 
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net

Omen:  A sign from God of an impending obscurity.

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"Rev. Bob 'Bob' Crispen" wrote:
> 
> Preferably in the neighborhood of 1 GHz?

950 Athlon - Skyvase.pov about 26 sec.. I don't have access to
a comparable P-III machine so no help there.
 
> I'm finally fixin' to sink this boat anchor of a P-133 and I desperately
> want something that'll render POVRay scenes fast, run modelers fast, and
> fill my life with sunshine, rainbows, and little birdies singing.

Since changing from a P-1 200 to a 950 Athlon I have rendered fast
(oh so very fast), rotated a 150,000 triangle mesh in Autocad in
near real time (no waiting for the view to update), my life is a
bit more sunny, seen diamonds in the sky, and the leetle birdies
couldn't be singing any louder with a bull horn stuck to their
precious little lips.

According to a very old DOS benchmark program I still have this
machine is 559,000 times faster at performing FPU calculations
than an 8088 with a math co-processor - but I have no idea how
accurate that really is (the numbers are fun to look at anyway).

I once briefly overclocked her to 1.1g and the performance increase
seemed negligible. A gain of only a couple of seconds on skyvase.
The CPU temp started heading for the sky so I backed er down to
950.

-- 
Ken Tyler

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On Sat, 21 Oct 2000 00:43:06 -0700, Ken wrote:
>bit more sunny, seen diamonds in the sky, and the leetle birdies

If you happen to see Lucy, give her my regards.

-- 
Ron Parker   http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html
My opinions.  Mine.  Not anyone else's.

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