[vtkusers] Suggestions for volume+surface hardware ?

[Lisa Avila]

Hi Rob,

I just bought a new system - it has two 1.7 GHz Pentium IV Xeon processors, 
768 MB of RAM, and a Elsa Gladiac 920 (GeForce 3) graphics card. It is VERY 
nice for volume rendering and image processing (because of the two fast 
processors) and is nice for geometric rendering (because of the GeForce 3). 
The whole system was about $2500. If you really want to splurge, go for the 
2.2 GHz processors and a slightly newer graphics card - probably bumping 
the system up to near $4000. If I am not mistaken, this is still quite a 
bit less than most Unix (Sun, SGI, HP) workstations - definitely less than 
any dual processor Unix workstation, and probably outperforms it by quite a 
bit.

Lisa



At 04:04 AM 2/21/2002, Day, Robert wrote:
>We have just been funded to upgrade our aging SGI, and so I am now facing
>the question of what to buy.
>
>Given the huge advances in PC graphics cards, and the fact that a lot of the
>software I want to run is now available on linux, I am wondering whether the
>best price/performance is to be had in a fast PC.  Robert and Sébastien's
>benchmark currently show a PC leading the pack by a significant margin, but
>the simple sphere does not test volume rendering.  We want to do medical
>image processing and volume rendering as well as polygonal surfaces (but
>rarely NURBS).
>
>So, realising that it's a difficult question that could produce more heat
>than light, I ask the question: What's best to buy to get fast volume and
>surface rendering using vtk.
>
>Any advice ?
>
>Rob
>
>Robert Day            ph  +61 8 9225 3227
>Project Bioengineer   fax +61 8 9225 1138
>Royal Perth Hospital  robert.day at health.wa.gov.au
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