Hello everyone,
This is my first post and I would like to hear some comments on the parts I'm thinking about getting. I'm brand new to the world of 3D and have been wanting to start with Apprentice HD since it was released. Here is what I've got so far:

-Intel Q6600. Can Apprentice HD take full advantage of a quadcore processor?
-WD 320 GB 7200rpm HD. Would a 10,000 rpm drive be noticeably better?
-4 Gigs corsair memory
-video card. I really have no clue here. Some of the folks on cgtalk use Geforce 8800's, but I've heard that they can be really sketchy running Houdini. Would a Quadro card be worth it? If so, which one?
-Vista 64 bit - would this OS be OK or is it still buggy?

Thanks a bunch and have a good one,
Andrew

p.s. love this forum, btw.

Welcome,
Mantra, the renderer, will take full advantage of the 4 cores. Also, some parts of Houdini are multi-threaded (VEX, fluid solvers, compositing) so those will also take advantage of a quad core.
As for graphic card, the first thing is to avoid ATi. A GeForce 8800 is OK, no big problems. It seems problems can appear and dissapear depending on the version of the driver, but no show-stopping stuff.
Of course, a Quadro wil probably work better, but it'll cost 3-5 times more.
As for OS, the best for Houdini would likely be a 64-bit variant of Linux. SUSE and Ubuntu seem the most favored by the Houdini community. I also had good results with 64 bit Windows XP. Don't know about Vista.

Good luck

Dragos

Why do suse and ubuntu run houdini so much better than vista or xp 64 bit? Does NVidia have decent drivers for the 8800 under linux?

Just my 2c

After a few years of building my own machines (which were extremely fast and also cheap) I realized the need for a warranty.

Sometimes the parts I got were too new and I had to replace an updated fan etc, sometimes the parts were always just buggy together.

So, after my main machine basically died after 4 years of constant use, right when I needed it to keep working, I went with a pre-built system with a warranty. The Boxx systems seem to work great and have cool cases that you can put a lot of hard drives in. Works good on win64 and linux

my workstation is quadcore Q6600 with 4giga ram, Nvidia 7300, running Fedora Core 7.

Linux enviroment is reliable and faster than Winxp64 for Houdini, Maya and Nuke.

hope it helps

chris

windows is great; its just that linux is more of a workhorse in terms of memory management, disk io and multi tasking. if setting up linux is a chore then its not worth it for you. if you would tend to use linux anyway then it may be preferable. you may not even notice a difference until the scene starts using significant amount of resources. i personally think everything feels a bit snappier on linux.

just an anecdote from my own relatively limited experience - i once once had a maya scene that needed 1.5gb of RAM to render but i only had 512mb physical ram - it needed 1gb of virtual memory. it seg faulted every time in windows, rendered every time in linux. (the hard drive took a flogging in page swaps… but it worked :-))

what's a seg fault?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmentation_fault [en.wikipedia.org]

often attributed to memory management issues

“Memory Alloctation Error” is another issue so favourable with windows 32bit users. Linux is a magic balm on your fethered nerves in that context.

On the other hand I found XP64 being extremely snappy with POPs, when doing some crash tests (> 5 mlns of particles) back then with 8.2.

mark2
you may not even notice a difference until the scene starts using significant amount of resources.

I can't agree. You can notice a big difference even with empty scene. How Houdini works with panes, tabs etc. I'm even not talking about bugs under Windows. Memory allocation errors your best friends