[vtkusers] hardware and benchmarks

[Jeremy Winston]

Eric Engelhard wrote:
> A few weeks ago someone gave me a pair of Xeon 3.16GHz/512/533. [...]
> Other than a good pair of CPUs and an appropriate amount of RAM for my data
> sets, can anyone recommend bottlenecks to look out for and/or graphics
> cards?

Dual channel DDR helps keep mem access from being a bottleneck.  The
ASUS PC-DL Deluxe mobo gets high marks:
http://www20.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030827/asuspcdl-02.html
http://usa.asus.com/products/server/srv-mb/pc-dl/overview.htm

"[...]With [dual channel] DDR333 technology support, system bottlenecks are
eliminated with balanced architecture and peak bandwidths up to 4.26GB/s."


The nVIDIA Quadro FX line also fares well:
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030916/index.html
http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx.html

If you want to do interactive volume rendering, I believe your only
choice is still the TeraRecon VolumePro line:
http://www.terarecon.com/products/volumepro_prod.html

HTH,
-Jeremy