Calling all Computer experts.
 

OK I got a question for ya - I need your help.

I want to improve mayas performance on my computer but I dont know how. I dont know what plays the most important part.

I have:

quad core dual 2 or whatever

32 bit OS thingy with 4gb ram.

my graphics card is ATI radeon hd 2600xt

is this any good? What can I do/buy to make it better without getting a new PC. would a new graphics card help?

thanks for your help...

get a geForce video card [or quadro]

That's not a must either.
Your computer is just fine... I run Maya on less then a third of that :D
Benny

I run maya on..... well you dont want to know how low my specs are...
you should be fine (youre not running *shudder* vista are you)

Re: Calling all Computer experts.
 

Well define "most important", the better the graphics card the more it'll take for the scene view to start lagging as things get heavy. The better the processor the faster the rendering etc etc. I'm no expert, a very special person "forced" me into becoming familiar with this stuff or risk wasting money by not being a informed consumer, now I'd tell anyone else to do the same.

On a comp like that it wouldnt make a difference, vista's resource hungry but its not that bad on a decent comp, on a crap comp then yes it would bring it to it's knees, and then slap it in the face.

Gen's right, you need to figure out where its got the problem, on a PC like that, it should be pretty much ok.

Lol I know, a joke

if its slow with those specs you have a problem, is it with all scenes or just heavy ones

Thing is with Vista, is that it solved the problems I was having with XP x64, and its not bad if you have a good machine and you disable a lot of the "security" features. And I went ahead and disabled the visual candy for performance's sake. Then I started getting insane brush lag in Photoshop, I mean to the point I was ready to drop kick my monitors, turns out, it happened because I disabled the Vista Aero theme :s

gotta love it, disable aero to enhance performance and then some programs lose performance because windows is using less resources... figure that one out.
I had that same problem and didn't know why. I uninstalled Vista.

You've a nice rig...
The thing i would upgrade if and when the time calls is the OS, 32bit won't take full advantage of the 4GB of Ram (think it will only register 3.5) where as 64bit would handle whatever you could fit in there (some boards take upto 16GB)and im sure the quad core would love the extra space, it also depends on what else you use the system for as 64bit OS can cause compatability problems with games and such (something you may want to checkout first).
Second would be to upgrade the chip, third would be the graphics card...

but all these are only if wanted to upgrade as your system is quite high spec, and the cost of the upgrade might not show that much of an improvement so i'd just see how you get along with it as is....;)