• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

PC Suggestion for Flexi

D

dmcgary

New Member
Does anyone have a suggestion for the least problematic PC for flexisign pro.
It would be used for a station primarily for rip/print and cut functions (little or no design). I'm currently and for years have used macs here and really need a dedicated cpu for this function plus the newest flexi is crashing my mac... It's not supposed to happen I know, but trust me...it is.
I'm leaning toward a laptop for its lack of space that it would consume and PC variety for the increased support and wider array of options.

What I'm needing advice and especially from those using flexi in this capacity, is there a preference of brand of cpu, amount of ram needed, size of hard disk, vista or xp.... That kind of stuff.
Any suggestions??
 
trakers

trakers

New Member
We build our own, building a new one right now for a dedicated RIP station for Wasatch, but at a minimum I would go with:

Firstly I would *not* buy a laptop for this purpose. If you are dead set on doing that, buy a "desktop replacement" laptop which will be heavy and cost you 1 arm and 1 leg.

For space savings, you could also go this route
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856101039
and all you need to do is drop in a CPU, HD, memory and the OS and you are good to go. Shuttles are well built, tiny little boxes.

OS wise, if you are buying today, XP is the only real choice you have if you want a stable system. Windows 7 releases on Oct. 22 at which point you could safely upgrade from XP. You can pre-order a Win7 upgrade right now for $50. You can also D/L Win7 RC for free and use it until May of next year for free. Been using Win7 for months now were virtually perfect results.

Dual-core (or better) processor - fast as you can afford. Look for the sweet spot. There is a point where there is a diminishing return. If Flexi can properly utilize 4 cores (which I doubt) go for a quad core.

Load it with RAM. Either 3 or 4 Gig. Windows 32bit can use a hair over 3.

I prefer to use a couple smaller hard drives (such as 500Mb) due to redundancy and the fact the huge hard drives are exhibiting increased read errors due to extreme data density.

If you are building yourself you could build a very nice machine for around $700 or less.

I hope to have ours finished next week.
 
choucove

choucove

New Member
trakers said:
If Flexi can properly utilize 4 cores (which I doubt) go for a quad core.
Click to expand...

From what I understand, Flexi can use a maximum of three threads. One for the main program itself, one thread when sending data to the Production Manager, and one thread for actually printing and running the Production Manager.

While you can purchase a laptop that will handle rip and printing tasks from Flexi, it will be much more difficult and costly than getting a regular desktop computer. A high-clock dual-core processor at least would be recommended, and with the availability and price, a quad-core processor would be ideal. The amount of RAM is going to depend upon several things such as what type of processor and motherboard you purchase, what types of files you work with, and what type of operating system you will go with. Only 64-bit operating systems will recognize and utilize 4 GB or more memory. But in general the more RAM the better.

I have used AMD and Intel processors for all different computer systems. If you are wanting to get the best bang for the buck, you can't beat AMD's prices. But if you are looking for the ultimate performance and cost doesn't matter, then Intel has the lead when it comes to performance.

Hard drives again are like memory and depend upon the type of work you are dealing with. There are a lot that suggest setting up a couple large (at least 320 GB each) hard drives in RAID 0 for speed performance, and even possibly using faster than standard drives like the Western Digital VelociRaptor 10,000 rpm hard drives.

The digital RIP computer we have set up at our one office is a year old but has two quad-core AMD Opteron processors, 4 GB of memory (as they are still using 32-bit Windows XP), nVidia Quadro FX570 video card (you don't need a whole lot of power in the video card as the work is done mostly by the CPU for design work of this kind) and two 150 GB 10,000rpm Raptor hard drives in RAID 0 for speed. It has handled everything they've worked with without any problem.

If you really aren't sure what works best, I would suggest talking with several of the professionals here that deal with computers in a sign industry on a daily basis. One of these such people is Casey from Signburst Computers.
 
Steve Rife

Steve Rife

New Member
One of the only problematic systems I have encountered is Windows Vista 64bit. Even though Flexi functions under this operating system, the software still utilizes the manufacturers driver when communicating to your output device. Over the past few months many hardware manufacturers have released, at the very least, a "beta" version of their 64bit driver, which I am sure they will share with your production environment... but I would recommend to chose a 32bit OS if Vista is your only option.

Steven Rife
Beacon Graphics
www.beacongraphics.com
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top