Weee, I got around and upgraded my old workstation this week. I’ve been running on a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a Pentium M 2.0GHz processor for about a year now.
It has served me well, but I have been drooling to get a Core Duo processor since it’s release. And now when the Core 2 Duos where available I decided it was time for an upgrade.
Anyway, I got my new Dell Inspiron 9400 the other day with a Core 2 Duo processor and some other goodies, and have spent the last days configuring it. It does take some time to set up all my software from scratch on a new machine, but finally everything is perfect, just the way I like it.
The creative corner in my apartment
The new Core 2 Duo processor really is a dream come true. It renders about three times faster than my old PM 2.0. I haven’t had this huge leap in rendering performance since the middle 90’s in the Lightwave 4.0 era, when I made the jump from my trusty old Amiga 4000T with a 060 processor to my first Windows based workstation, a Pentium 133MHz machine which were running circles around my Amiga when using Lightwave.
Now more than ten years later, that feeling has emerged again. It’s a joy to press the F9 button to render and have blazingly fast results pumped out to the screen.
Some quick numbers I did to compare the Pentium M 2.0 and Core 2 Duo 2.0 when rendering the same scene in a couple of 3D applications on both the PM and the C2D, both machines are equipped with 2GB RAM.
- LightWave 9; PM: 39 minutes – C2D: 15 minutes.
- Modo 202; PM: 4 minutes – C2D: 1 minute 32 seconds.
- Vue 5 Infinite; PM: 7 minutes 42 seconds – C2D: 3 minutes 13 seconds.
Wonderful difference, and will make a big impact on my workflow. I couldn’t be happier with this upgrade. Also the GeForce 7900 GS card in the machine makes the OpenGL viewports a joy to throw real heavy meshes at.
Just drooling over a 24″ screen to go with this setup on my desk sometime in the future.
Setting up music: Anna Ternheim – To Be Gone (EP)