3D Kingdom -- Free ....

Ok, so my teacher gave me a job today, and the job is finding brand-spanking-new computers for our DGA(digital graphics and animation class) which uses 3ds Max (we have vrs. 9 right now)

SO:
I was wondering if anyone out in cyberspace has any ideas on which computer modle or what should go into a computer for 3ds Max to run the fastest with rendertime and reactors(our current comps cant handle reactors so it exits anytime we use them ) ect.

PS:
price range is fairly high!


Well, it's just like any other app, The better the CPU the faster the rendering will go, i hear 3Ds max is especially effective with dual-cores. Visual aspects on the other hand, like how many polys you can have on screen while modeling is determined more by the video card, its kind of hard to say what you should get without understand what is your price range exactly and not to mention "fairly high" is pretty abstract. without knowing how much you can spend we can pretty much just hint you at what you need.

Processor: Dual core is a must these days, hell, go for a quad core if you can afford it, its not used by much these days but in a few years, who knows. I recommend AMD 64 x2 line of processors, they generally tend to be faster and more efficient than the equivalent Intel version, the number at the end of the processor name, i.e. 5000+ represents the power of an equivalent single core processor., not to say that a 2.6GHz dual core processor is the same as a 5.0GHz singe core but it will operate as smoothly as one.

Video card: im gonna go with telling you about Nvidia because to be honest i know nothing about ATI card.
Nvidia is named in the XXXX line, the first number is the generation, the second number is the range, low/mid/high, so basically an nvidia 8800 would be high range, while and 8600 would be mid range.

pick a range and than look through the cards that are avaliable in it, the Video card's RAM is important, but you also have to pay attention to the core and clock speeds, as a 256MB DDR3 going at 580MHz would beat a 560MB DDR2 going at 400MHz, on top of that if you buy a video card from a company like MSI you can get the Over clocked versions which are clocked through hardware so they go even faster than their default version.

well there are a lot of things i missed out, but i just realized i can tell you that basically the best PC for 3Ds Max is a Gaming rig, the both need the same thing for the same thing CPU for Rendering, VGA for Processing pixels/visuals, RAM for... everything else, but all in all, if you can find someone capable of doing it, you should pay a person to make a gaming/modeling/rendering rig for you rather than buying it complete, for example, the most expensive Alienware PC is Just Half it's full price if you assemble it yourself. so custom made is usually cheaper, not to mention better because you can skip on the useless stuff that the pc wont ever need.