i was thinking of building a multimedia and graphics station. i was planning on buying these product. Top of the line MSI SLI mobo, Geforce 6800 GT, 1 Gig CAS2 memory, 300GIG 8mb hard drive, and athlon 3500 64 bit. Would having two GPU's really show a significant boost in rendering compared to one. I use sketchup a lot and need to rendering drawings fast. is this a good setup? If not what do u reccomend i purchase? I have a 1100 budget. No pentium please. Also what's the difference between cores on the 3500+. Which one is better?

Thanks for all the help guys.

Perhaps you would want separate HD's. One to hold the OS & programs w/ a separate one for your data with some sort of stripe set to also boost speed.

I'd buy 2 WD Raptor 72 GB 10k RPM hdd's for use in RAID0 (OS+program partitions) and then 2 200GB HDD's in RAID1 for backup purposes.

um do u guys not realize he only has 1100$ 2 raptorsa are alot of money, like 300$

yes 2 graphics cards will help alot but not all games support it, just get the one for now and spend the money on another hdd, maybe if u wanted to just get one raptor for ur installs and os

The fact of the matter is even with the Raptors, depending on what he want's to render, he'll see hiccups along the way. This is due to the overhead of the OS on the drive he's trying to render too. An internal drive or external drive just for the data is the way I'd go.

Treeman

for the core i would get a venice, its new and supports sse3

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp...19103532#sctNav

if u dont want that then get a winchester

I see a performance boost with dual core only with programs like Newtek Lightwave and 3D Studio MAX. For games I didn’t see a lot of frames more then on a single cored computer. (I use Lightwave and I’m happy with dual CPUs, waiting for the AMD 64 dual core to come up and becoming affordable )

yes 2 graphics cards will help alot but not all games support it, just get the one for now and spend the money on another hdd, maybe if u wanted to just get one raptor for ur installs and os

All games support SLI, you can force SLI and also make your own profiles. SLI works by each card rendering a seperate half of the screen so should in theory boost rendering time.

However, if the rendering intensity isnt going to be putting both cards to thier fullest ability then there wont be any improvement. But as ive never rendered using 3d progs I wouldnt know how intensive this.

Ild get an San Diego processor with SSE3 and the extra cache, drive wise ild also get a 16mb cache NCQ compliant HDD if your motherboard supports it.

with rendering, cache does help!