[vtkusers] Suggestions for volume+surface hardware ?

[Matt MacLaurin]

Make sure to pay careful attention to the type of RAM in any system you consider:

    RAMBUS RDRAM is the most expensive and the fastest, but the gap is narrowing
    DDR SDRAM ("2100") is really fast, really cheap, easily available, and very well established from a quality/stability
perspective
    DDR SDRAM ("2700") is event faster and about as cheap, but the (bios) chipsets are very new. it's just abut RDRAM speed
    "plain old" SDRAM is still, unfortunately, used by most off-the-shelf manufacturers, and is to be avoided at all costs. it's
simply way to cheap to dramatically improve your overall system throughput by using at least DDR 2100 RAM. If you go that way, which
I recommend, it's worth looking for a system that uses the Intel 845D (the 'D' is critical) chipset for the best stability &
performance.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lisa Avila" <lisa.avila at kitware.com>
To: "Day, Robert" <Robert.Day at health.wa.gov.au>; <vtkusers at public.kitware.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 8:54 AM
Subject: Re: [vtkusers] Suggestions for volume+surface hardware ?


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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