Best Platform for Running Maya?

Kieckerjan asks: "A friend of mine, who's an architect, has been appointed a research position at a small university. Along with the job he's been assigned a budget to spend on whatever he thinks is necessary to get the job done. One of the things he needs is a fast machine to run Maya. As he is fed up with Wintel systems, he's been looking into alternatives. His eye fell on SGI's Fuel workstation, which costs about 15.000 EURO. For that kind of money you can buy a seriously bad-assed pentium-based system, and run Linux on it. His question to me was: is it worthwhile to shell out the extra money for a SGI system? Since I have no experience with modern SGI's, I am in no position to judge about performance differences, but maybe someone on this forum does."

Comments

Dreamworks...

[OneFix]

Uses Maya on Intel boxes...they are currently one of the many graphics houses in Hollywood that are switching over to Linux...

They are using high-end nVidia cards ...and all told, the advantages of using Linux just far outweighs the advantages of using SGI hardware.

Re:Dreamworks...

[4of12]

using high-end nVidia cards ...and all told, the advantages of using Linux just far outweighs the advantages of using SGI hardware.

That's my experience, too.

The price/performance ratio of Lintel is hard to beat.

I think it depends on your price point and tolerance and desire for reliability.

For seriously high-end stuff, go with the SGI. But if you're budget's not unlimited and you're willing to suffer some hiccups once in a while, you owe it to yourself to see what the "low end" can offer these days. It's not too shabby and beats out a lot of the older SGI hardware.