Hardware-Software
From Ultrafractal Wiki
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Memory Use Monitor Calibration UF on Mac Setting Number of Threads
Hi Don,
Just a note to muddy the waters here. With certain formulae AMD chips absolutely trounce Intel CPUs because of the different way the architecture handles buffer overruns. In general, the higher clock speed of the Pentiums trumps the AMDs but there are a number of formulae that render about 50x slower with Pentiums. So while generally Intel chips are probably your better bet there are a number of specific cases in which they are much, much slower.
Toby
Yeah, I've heard that (i.e. no H.T.) about the newer Intel chips. I reckon the two "extra" cores makes up for no H-T. Not to mention the horrendous maze of extra signal traces that would have had to be added to the die. I read also that the 4Q's are faster than 2Q's even when they have slower clock speeds. Unfortunately, I won't be building a new rig anytime soon - gotta ride this one a good bit farther into "obsolescence" - lol. My mobo isn't compatible with the new quads, so I'd have to do a pretty drastic rebuild.
Zalman's a great cooler. I have the Asetek Waterchill X-ternal and it rox. Knocked my top cpu temp all the way down to 38-40C from 64C with the stock fan. Nice for peace of mind during multi-day long renders.
UF can use quite a chunk of RAM depending on the size you render to - my print files are anywhere from 6000 to 15000 pixels on a side - and how many layers are involved. My latest piece has 355 layers and it was using right at around 300Mb of RAM just to render to 1024x400-some-odd for desktop wallpaper. Apo flames and - I think - some of the IFS fractals can use ungodly amounts of RAM because they are calculated all in one big chunk rather than in "slices" like "normal" fractals.
There's a page at the UF website that tells you how to calculate the RAM usage on those so you can figure out your maximum possible size. I've had one with a flame in it use a little over 1.3Gb if I remember right - whew! :-)
Rick
Re Windows:
Hi Cliff,
In addition to Virus and Adware protection, I occasionally run msconfig.exe. This program ships with Windows and is found on my machine here:
c:\windows\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\msconfig.exe
Look at the 'Services' and 'Startup' tabs. Pay close attention to anything where the manufacture is 'unknown' or where the command is empty. If in doubt, disable them. You can always reenable them later.
Rob
