G'day,

I was just wondering what the best set up for Blender is. That is, what is the best combination of Processor, RAM, G. Card. This is because I am hoping to delve into some major 3d projects after I learn a bit more and I think my current computer won't be able to handle it.

Does any one have any comments?
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~ Talon ~
"Strike swiftly and silently"
http://mysite.iptic.com/blendergrav/

I bet your current computer actually can handle it. True it may be slow, but you could run it easily on a 350 mhz with 60meg of ram but the video card needs to be set up for openGL and the best, so far, is Nvida. You can easily get away with a TNT. The game engine may be a bit slow, but you can work with it, really- you can!

Have fun, and download blender on what you currently have, give it a try.

Ingie

IngieBee wrote:

I bet your current computer actually can handle it. True it may be slow, but you could run it easily on a 350 mhz with 60meg of ram but the video card needs to be set up for openGL and the best, so far, is Nvida. You can easily get away with a TNT. The game engine may be a bit slow, but you can work with it, really- you can! Have fun, and download blender on what you currently have, give it a try. Ingie

In Ye Olden Days (two years ago?), I ran Blender on a K6-2/350 with 96 MB RAM and a TNT2. Ran fine. Of course, the more vertices/faces, things slowed down.

Even longer before that, I had Blender (v1.67!) running on a P1/100 with 16MB RAM and no 3D accel. Eerily, it was actually tolerable...

I'd say Ingie pretty much spec'd a decent base (minimal) requirement.
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echo '70:68:61:65:74:68:6F:6E:40:6C:69:6E:75:78:2E:75:63:6C:61:2E:65:64:75:' |
perl -npe 's/([^:]+):/chr(hex($1))/ge'

what are you packing? give us an idea and we'll be able to help you choose

for a long time, I was running Blender on a P1/166, 64 mb or RAM with a 4mb ATI card. And it ran smooth most of the time (well, as long as there wasn't more than 5K faces on screen)

Martin
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Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.
- John Lennon

I have a celeron 366MHz, 64MB RAM- 8 of which is in the Graphics card. Blender does run pretty well, and there hasn't been a problem so far for the tutorials I have done, but I just thought as I move into more complicated operations, I might run into some problems. I didn't know that the graphics card had to be set up for OpenGL, I actually thought that having OpenGL stuffed Blender up, as this happened to me when I updated my card's drivers.

I pretty much know that I need a new graphics card, but the problem is that the existing card is integrated and therefore there is no AGP slot, so I might as well invest in a new rig as I will need it anyway.

Thanks for the help so far, it has given me a pretty good idea for my search, any more help would be much appreciated.
_________________
~ Talon ~
"Strike swiftly and silently"
http://mysite.iptic.com/blendergrav/

The fastest CPU, with the most RAM that you can afford, but most important, the best video card you can afford, openGL complient, Nvidia seems to be the best with blender. a geforce 2 with 64meg of ram works pretty good. Modeling is the graphics card, rendering the CPU and RAM, so for modeling, or the gameengine the video card is the important component, for rendering the CPU and RAM are. Single CPU, blender doesn't use 2 so it's a waste of $$$ to set a dual CPU system up for blender.
My $.02 worth

theeth wrote:

for a long time, I was running Blender on a P1/166, 64 mb or RAM with a 4mb ATI card. And it ran smooth most of the time (well, as long as there wasn't more than 5K faces on screen)

And now you're not?

Eric wrote:

theeth wrote: for a long time, I was running Blender on a P1/166, 64 mb or RAM with a 4mb ATI card. And it ran smooth most of the time (well, as long as there wasn't more than 5K faces on screen) And now you're not?

I got a Toshiba Satellite 2400 laptop about a month ago.

P4/ 1.6 GHz, 256 mb of DDR RAM, 14.4 inch LCD, 30 GB HD, but a not so good 16 mb S3 SuperSavage...

Martin
_________________
Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.
- John Lennon

theeth wrote:

Eric wrote: theeth wrote: for a long time, I was running Blender on a P1/166, 64 mb or RAM with a 4mb ATI card. And it ran smooth most of the time (well, as long as there wasn't more than 5K faces on screen) And now you're not? I got a Toshiba Satellite 2400 laptop about a month ago. P4/ 1.6 GHz, 256 mb of DDR RAM, 14.4 inch LCD, 30 GB HD, but a not so good 16 mb S3 SuperSavage... Martin

Coolio. Sounds like quite a good improvement ....thought you still didn't beat me to it.

P133 32mb RAM no g-card ===> AMD athlon XP 1800+ 512mb ram Geforce2 GTS 60gb hd...

But I would still like to have a nice laptop instead of my hot refrigerator

Well, I have running on a 200Mhz computer running Linux, with 32MB of RAM and an nVidia TNT video card. It gets choppy with complex models (high poly-counts), but it works just fine none-the-less.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the "optimal" configuration for Blender would be. Probably a fast CPU, lots of RAM, and a kick-ass video card. As far as *requirements* go, however, it will run on just about anything that's even "sorta" recent.

VelikM wrote:

buse 2 so it's a waste of $$$ to set a dual CPU system up for blender. My $.02 worth

it's not useless. you can render on one cpu and work on the other cpu - or split the rendering in two parts

p.s.
i have a dual xeon 2.2m's

blender ran fairily well on my old 486 with 8MB ram and no 3d card! Beat that!

Ran version 1.8 to 2.23 with a K6-2/300mhz, 32mb Ram, 4mb card (S3).

Ran pretty well....despite the occasional slowdowns. Rendering was a bitch though.

I wish Blender ran faster on my AMD K6 500Mhz....and 8MB Via Crappy Video Accelerator. Also there's a problem i have (and other people, too)with OpenGL hardware accel in blender (buttons and 3d window dissappearing )