Hardware Guide for X3

[ktkcad]

Vista can be directly upgraded to 7. It is, however, recommended to install any new OS as a clean install.

[James Fenton]

Karl;

I have a high end HP laptop. Can you whip a laptop and load Windows 7?

[Dan Park]

Not sure if 'whipping' will help but you can try. We did a format and install of windows 7 on a 6 year old hp laptop last night. Got everything working and it's a lot snappier than it was using Windows XP.

The wireless was not working but we got it on the network and windows updates found the right driver. Now everything appears to be working well.

[ktkcad]

I did the same thing with a '06 laptop as Dan did. Hard drive had crashed. I am enjoying it much more with 7. I just have a little problem with the integrated video and CA's 3D views in X1.

[James Fenton]

Dan

Did windows 7 have everything that laptop needed to run like vidio cards and battery power, DVD player and so on?

Did the windows 7 have a "formate and load" selection? or was the formate something you did before loading 7?

[ktkcad]

Win 7 saw an unformatted drive and offered to format and partition it. Just like all the latest windows OS installs do. Yes it will reformat and load new if you choose that option.

There are many more drivers included than Vista had at first release, and if yours are not there, Vista drivers work fine.

My recommendation is: If you have any WIN OS older than Vista - get Win 7. If you don't like Vista get Win 7. If you want to move to 64 bit get Win 7. If you like Vista and don't need to reinstall it - stay with it. Win 7 has finally gotten me to move off W2K since I didn't care for XP or Vista.

[Doug Park]

James,

From my first post:

For the most part our system requirements will remain the same as for X2 with the caveat that X3 is designed for multi-core systems.

For someone that is looking for really cheap hardware that X3 will do good on a Core 2 Duo would be my recommended cheap machine.

You have a Core 2 Duo which is the low end of the recommended system scale.

3) A 64 bit OS is a must have.

You are running a 32 bit OS. I would recommend upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit at some point in time so you can access all of your memory instead of just 3GB. While not critical, it is probably the most important change you can make for your hardware to improve performance.

While it is theoretically possible to spend $18,000 for a new machine, $1800 would buy a very sweet desktop to run Chief on. The machine I developed X3 on cost us about $1300 to build a year ago.

[Dan Park]

Dan

Did windows 7 have everything that laptop needed to run like vidio cards and battery power, DVD player and so on?

Did the windows 7 have a "formate and load" selection? or was the formate something you did before loading 7?

Not everything was on the disk but as soon as we hooked it up to the internet it found most of the drivers we needed automatically. I was a bit surprised in this case considering the hardware.

So far I have had good luck with Windows 7 on older systems. These same systems would not run Vista yet windows 7 works as good or better than Windows XP.

[u2jimbo]

Doug:
Thanks for the information on recommended hardware. I am planning on upgrading my Win XPsp3 Professional OS running under Boot Camp.

My MacPro is a 3 GH Quad Core w/ 8GB of memory (though I can access less than 1/2 of that with XP - a primary reason for my wanting to upgrade to Win7).

I have run Chief Architect v10; X1; and X2 on Win XP on my Mac for two years and have never had a technical software issue - they all ran faster and with more stability than when they were on a dedicated Windows machine.

Do you know of anything 'special' about X3 that may make running it under Boot Camp more risky/less stable? Does CA have an official recommendation based upon any testing that either supports or denies using X3 under Boot Camp? If I installed Win7 64 bit today, would you imagine I could run CA X2 on it till X3 comes out?

Any other insights you care to share would be appreciated.

Thanks
Jim

PS: it is my perception that X2 takes substantially longer to load and to render than it's predessessors. I have imagined a couple of explanations for this: 1. X2 seems hard linked to the internet so when you load it has to go out to search for my serial number, and I guess other elements may be stored remotely and downloaded as needed, etc.; and 2. The evolution of the software and its need for memory exacerbates the memory limit under Win XP.

Any foundation for these perceptions? Will X3 share these attributes?

[Doug Park]

Boot Camp is just like running on any other Windows hardware so it is generally supported so long as the drivers for the hardware work. Which is no different than any other Windows hardware.

One of the reasons Mac hardware works so well is that Apple generally puts quality hardware in their boxes. Not all vendors take as much care about the hardware they put in the boxes so you end up with a fairly wide variance in how well systems work.

I'm pretty sure there is a configuration of non-Apple hardware that would be better for running Windows, but there are a lot more configurations of non-Apple hardware that are worse for running Windows. This make Mac, curiously enough, one of the better Windows platforms.

I don't think you will have any issues running X2 or X3 under boot camp that you wouldn't have running under similar non-Apple hardware.

[Justice]

Multi-Processor Support is the word for X3 by the sound of it?

64 bit is a must for business to go above 3.5 Gig of Ram & for future versions.

The bigger and more complicated models you render the more memory you need.

Multi-Story complicated hi-end renders need hi-powered hardware.

My newer machine is a Dell xps 630i that I converted from 32 bit W7 to 64 bit W7 OS,
4GB DDR2 ram to 8GB ram with a 2.66Gh quad core duo. I would love to put an i7 975 extreme 3.33Gh processor in it in future if it fits my mother board. My dual graphics cards Geforce 9800 GTs make a big difference.

While my machine is not the greatest and latest it does the job for a dell xps.

[Keith Jeffery]

Multi-Processor Support is the word for X3 by the sound of it?

Several portions of X2 make use of multiple processors, but yes, in X3 the support is even greater.

In X2, the multi-processor support was often found in niche operations. For example, the watercolor mode makes use of multiple processors. In X3, more fundamental operations also support multiple processors.

[SolarTerra]

Hi Doug,

I just purchased a Mac with the following:
- 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor
- 500 GB hard drive, DVD/CD SuperDrive, 4 GB DDR3 RAM
- NVIDIA Geforce 9400M + 9600M GT Graphics, 512MB Memory
- 17 inch LED Display
- Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard Operating System

I use Windows XP SP3 and bootcamp for X2, but I'd like to use VMWare Fusion 3.0 for X3 so I don't have to reboot everytime I switch between Mac and Windows applications.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Thad

[Doug Park]

We don't support running Chief under any virtual machine on any operating system. Most of the virtual machines don't provide support for video card OpenGL acceleration and they often have other hardware issues with mice and other devices.

Virtual machines are a neat idea conceptually, but no one has actually built one, that I know of, that works as well as running the OS on native hardware.

[Sledge]

Why is there no 64 bit version of X3? What are the advantages or disadavantages of not going this route.

Also I recall reading somewhere (I think it was in the X2 hardware thread) one of the limitations in the software being a 2Gb Memory limit (as opposed to the OS limit of 4Gb). Could someone please correct me or explain this. Thanks.