new toy…

As my computer graphics work gets more and more complex I’ve been gradually getting exceedingly frustrated with my laptop.  The computer that I’ve been using for the past couple of years is a base model Dell Vostro 13 inch laptop.  It has treated me very well, but as I get more into animation and some more complex elements (hair, sculpting, VSE, etc.) my workflow has really bogged down, so I decided that it was time for a new computer.

Since it was going to be used mainly for my computer graphics work (my wife and I still use our laptops for casual web surfing) I had some fairly specific requirements for a system.  I wanted a quad core processor for rendering, a decent video card, and a 64-bit OS.  I finally found a refurbished Asus Essentio desktop for sale on Best Buy online and snatched it up!  To match the tower we found a 22 inch Dell monitor on craigslist for a really nice price.

The computer has a quad core 2.67 GHz Intel i7 processor, 9 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB hard drive.  The operating system at the moment is Vista 64-bit, which I’m not a huge fan of, so I may switch to Ubuntu eventually.  The display has a resolution of 1680 x 1050 and is fabulous!  There is so much room on the screen (compared to my old 13 inch laptop) I don’t know what to do with it all!  (notice the blender library that’s building up on the desk as well.  The desk may be brand new and not organized, but there are priorities 😉

I ran a quick speed test between the two computers and was really happy with the results.  One of the frames from Tarzan’s walk cycle took about 16 minutes on my laptop to render and took about 2 minutes on the new computer.  This thing could have saved me about 3 days worth of rendering a few weeks ago!