Need to buy CPU for daughter-3D animation student

[kjennis470453]

Hello,
Non-tech mom needs help! Please don't recommend me building a system...not gonna happen! Daughter is an animation major. needs something that will run Maya and do rendering. Budget around $2200. Don't need monitor. Graphics card is a priority, but very confusing to me. Looked at some Dell Precision cpus. One had a 1GB ATI FirePro V4800, Triple MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI card and one had a 512MB NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 580, DUAL MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI card. Processor is al Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5606, 2.13GHz, 8M L3, 4.8GT/s.

[cdatechguy]

First one sounded pretty good....Price wise both vid cards are the same, but the ATI is a bit better for memory and OpenGL capabilities...Not sure if this comparison will work (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008333%20600044686&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&CompareItemList=449|14-195-096^14-195-096-TS%2C14-133-273^14-133-273-TS)....Everything else is good...Xeon's are awesome....(can you buy me one?)

The only thing you didn't mention was the Operating System and RAM....be sure its 64bit Windows 7 and try to get 12gb or more of RAM...8gb at a minimum though...

[BlackBox]

As a former Animation student myself, I also purchased a Dell Precision workstation (dual Xeon processors), which was 32-Bit Operating System back then. I set up a business account with them (back then), without a Tax ID, and paid almost half-price for my workstation.

I found it to be fantastic for my work (Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Rigging, Animating, etc.), and even for the rendering of scenes for my weekly animation assignments.

The problem I ran into though, was that I could not do any work while rendering (30 seconds of video x 30 frames per second x 11:17 minutes per rendered frame)... I ended up getting a second computer to act as my render farm, while I continued refining my animation, and or post production video / audio editing on the first.

Hopefully you find that the 64-Bit processing that will most likely come with your new Dell will be sufficient.