[vadyr]

Hey all! Just so you know, this isn't a bragging post. You will see where this is going at the end of the post. But anyway, Cybersonics (Team 103) just had a new computer donated to us. It's a dell Precision 690 and the specs are as follows:

-PROCESSOR Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5060 3.20GHz, 2 X 2MB L2,1066
-2ND PROCESSOR Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5060 3.20GHz, 2 X 2MB L2,1066
-OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2 with Media
-GRAPHICS CARD 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 4500, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA
-MEMORY 4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 533MHz, ECC (8 DIMMS)
-OPTICAL DRIVE 48XCDRW AND 16XDVD+/-RW, w/Cyberlink PowerDVD™ and Roxio Creator™
-RAID CONFIGURATION C8 All SAS drives, Non-RAID, 3 drive total configuration
-HARD DRIVE 146GB SAS Hard Drive, 1 inch (15,000 rpm)
-HARD DRIVE INTERNAL CONTROLLER SATA/SAS Integrated Card - For Connecting Internal Hard Drives
-2ND HARD DRIVE 146GB SAS Hard Drive, 1 inch (15,000 rpm)
-3RD HARD DRIVE 146GB SAS Hard Drive, 1 inch (15,000 rpm)
-INTEL HYPER-THREADING Hyper-Threading feature preset to ON. Can be disabled/enabled in BIOS.
-MONITOR Dell 20 inch UltraSharp™ 2007FP Flat Panel, adjustable stand, VGA/DVI


This sucker renders anything. We rendered a scene with over 20 million faces and about 20,000 particles and it did it in a little while.

Anyway, I don't mean to brag, but the point is that we are considering offering to help teams render their animations. We all know that rendering can be one of the most problematic steps to creating an animation, and we want to help others with this. Basically we could then use better supersampling settings and use mental ray for a great render. THIS IS NOT DEFINITE! I don't want to get everyone excited, because if we are planning on creating a monster of an animation, we may not be able to render other animations, but hopefully we will. FIRST is all about helping eachother and team work, isn't it? So anyway. Good luck to everyone! I'll be keeping you updated!