X4 Ray Tracing - Optimal CPU

[Ian Pellant]

Hi Lew,

Nope... the gamer machines focus on:
Very fast hard / SSD drives
Crossfire or similar multiple gaming video cards

Both of which add considerable cost and are of little benefit to CAD apps and especially not ray tracing. Double the system cost for no performance gains... not a good move.

The disk drive and video card do nothing while ray tracing is running. Ray tracing is mostly CPU intensive.

That said: the motherboard and RAM I'm looking at is top level gamer stuff- but the video card will be FirePro (CAD certified, OpenGL accelerated, not so much DirectX) and the hard drive will be a modest WD Black Caviar, not a Velociraptor. My system configurations are pricing at Aus $1400... gamers seem happy to spend twice that.

But if one has to buy a ready made box, then an average gamer box is better than the average office box. I've been building PCs since the mid 80's so I tend to focus on application specifics.

Cheers.