Expert: Bobbert - 9/2/2008

Question
Hey there, I have a question about buying a PC for animation.

               I am going to buy a PC to use for animation and I was wondering what
aspects should I be most concerned about? (i.e. Ram/HDD/Processor/Graphics
Card/any other things you know of)

Answer
Well, to be quite honest, how's "all of the above" strike you? Animation is right up there with CAD and Collaborative Engineering/Scientific Visualization in terms of the load it places on the system. So I'd be looking at a system with a lot of memory (3-4GB at least), a powerful dual or (ideally) quad core processor, high end professional graphics card (AMD FireGL or nVidia Quadro FX), enough storage for your projects, and any other features you might need "on the side", such as connectivity for video input, or things like that.
A top of the line system for this kind of work can easily exceed $10,000 US (and some of them can claw at $100,000 US), although something more than functional shouldn't cost more than around $3500 US. Look at workstations from Dell, Boxx, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard, or building the system yourself.

-bob