https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3438&p=41156#p41156 ----------------------------------- GrouchoCaesar Tuesday, 17 March 2009, 08:23 AM Re: The Twelve Tasks Of Grouchales ----------------------------------- Number 10 WILLOW March 15 2009, 10:20AM Seeing as Faith, Anya and Harmony are destined to spend their working days in a small room, I need - well, want, really - another desktop to act as my primary workstation. With the excellent performance I found with the NEC Powermates, I went up a few notches to one of their high-range models - the X9320 - and Willow was born. She looks like the others, with the same solid construction, and is configured more or less the same as the others in terms of software, but that is where the similarity ends... First off, Willow comes with a faster processor - which is nice. Second improvement is a Blu-Ray burner - something I didn't expect to own for a couple of years yet. But it's her storage that floors me, and puts her into a class above. The others came with a 500Gb 7200rpm SATA drive. Willow has [i]four[/i] of them - currently set up in RAID 0 configuration for lightning fast access. That's not to say Willow was perfect. There are two weak spots. The first real flaw with the Powermate X series is the somewhat pedestrian graphics cards they come with. And this is probably due to the other issue they have - they are only supplied with 350 watt PSUs... which can charitably be called barely adequate. The others I own have no real problem running on 350 watts, because the nVidia 8600GT they have is not exactly a powerhouse, so sucks down relatively little juice. But Willow is running three extra hard disks for a start. And then there is that spare GeForce 9600GT my flatmate bought and couldn't use in Anya; just sitting around doing nothing. As Willow will be my primary workstation, I swapped out the 350 watt PSU for a nice beefy 850 watt PSU which has the bonus feature of running quieter than the original. That done, I removed the GeForce 8600GT and replaced it with the 9600GT. Performance is even faster now, certainly more than adequate to run Poser in all it's forms. Having said that, I wil seriously consider getting a purpose-designed GPU like a FireGL or a Quadro... maybe. To round things out, I bought a laser printer and a multifunction inkjet printer to hook up to Willow. Also added is an A4-sized touch tablet. As we all know from experience, backing up data becomes important when you are working with CGI. And as Willow is running a two terabyte RAID-0 array, it becomes crucial. Should one of the drives fail, the data on all four is lost. So, along with the NAS box I'm waiting for to use as primary storage for the render farm, I've been buying external 1 Tb drives like they are going out of fashion. Counting all my PCs internal storage, and not counting the NAS, I've got 15 Tb of storage in total available to me. Sounds like fun until you have to find something...! Willow's Vital Statistics NEC Powermate X9320 Desktop Intel Core 2 Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 Ghz 3 Gb DDR2 RAM Nvidia GeForce 9600GT 512Mb Samsung SyncMaster 2253LW 22" LCD Monitor 4 x 500 Gb SATA 7200rmp Western Digital HDD Matsushita Blu-Ray Burner Windows Vista Ultimate