Recommended Hardware to run MaXX Interactive Desktop

The MaXX Interactive Desktop, a.k.a. MaXX Desktop, is design to be small and very fast. The main goal is to provide the right balance of eye-candidness, performance and GUI friendliness.

The MaXX Desktop like its cousin, SGI's IRIX Interactive Desktop is design to maximize your creativity and provide you the most robust and stable environment for your demanding pro applications. Additionally, we carefully designed MaXX Desktop to make use of hardware acceleration for XRender, OpenGL and OVERLAY_PLANE graphics extension. CUDA and OpenCL GPU computation are on the drawing board and we hope to bring GPU accelerated image processing features soon!

* CPU We recommend a EMT64 or AMD64 capable CPU (intel or AMD) @ 2.0 GHz. MaXX Desktop runs on 600Mhz Pentium machine with 256MB RAM, but not so good for Maya

* Memory With recommend a minimum of 512MB. Just to avoid swapping. But more is better and with x86_64 support, the sky is the limit.

* Graphic Subsystem With recommend a NVidia AGP or PCI-E with a minimum of 512MB of VRAM. The more VRAM is made available to MaXX Desktop the better it can cache and performs with XRender and OpenGL. The NVidia Quadro series works even better and OVERLAY_PLANE is supported right out of the box.

ATi and intel GPU(s) are compatible but no special care nor optimization are provided at the exception of the driver itself.

We test in and out with 4 different working systems with the following configuration and let me tell you, they all mean business.

Config 1 - Fast Desktop

  • Intel Quad Core CPU 2.66 GHz
  • 4GB RAM
  • Nvidia Quadro FX1700 with 512MB VRAM.
  • ASUS P5KVM motherboard and Kingston 1066MHz Memory
  • 2X SONY CRT @1600x1200x85Hz with Xinerama

Config 2 - High Performance Desktop

  • Intel Quad Core Exterme CPU 3.2 GHz
  • 8GB RAM,
  • 2-WAY SLI Nvidia 9800 GTX+ with 512MB each card.
  •  ASUS Triker II Extreme
  • 24" SAMSUNG 1920x1200 LCD

Config 3 - Professional Workstation

Config 4 - Ultra Fast Workstation (my daily beast)

  • Intel i7 960 3.2 GHz(8 cores available)
  • 12 GB RAM DDR3 1800MHz
  • 3-WAY SLI Nvidia 285
  •  ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution
  • 30" 2560x1600 Samsung LCD

So let us know your success story with different amazing hardware configuration...

Go back