Who Won In Our Dell Workstation PC Giveaway?

Two lucky Lifehacker readers are going to get some sweet workstation action, thanks to Dell.

We had lots of entries for our workstation PC giveaway, but there can only be two winners. The Precision T3610 workstation PC goes to Eleni Taylor. Here’s her entry:

I have been in the visual effects industry for over 12 years and have been very fortunate to work on some amazing film and commercial projects for some of Australia’s top studios. My skills as a 3D generalist have grown over the years along with the number of pixels per frame. From cars to junk boats to WW1 planes and space satellites, visual life is only possible with computers that house the latest in hardware.

Usually when working with 2K images and needing to model an object, animate it, create surface textures, light the object to match the shot environments and then put it all together and render the biggest failing a computer can have is not enough memory or a low end video card. Especially if you are running 3 or 4 software packages at one time, all of which are hungry for memory and the video card of the computer. A lot of hours are needed to create these visuals so when computers slow down because of poor video cards and not enough memory it only take longer to create the work which is not ideal for the studios who are already under pressure due to increasing competition and client demands.

I left an industry I love to have a family and now a mother of two and slowly returning to work it is increasingly hard to return to the same calibre of work due to the hours needed to achieve the high standard of VFX. I’m fortunate enough that currently there is a high volume of work and have been able to work remotely from home. This has not been smooth sailing as I am using my own computer and due to the high financial investment needed for a high end computer, it’s hard to be efficient with a low end computer. This affects the quality of work produced and the quality of family balance at home. Having access to better machines would allow me to achieve a work load from home similar to actually working at the studio. Especially with the large amount of memory and the high end graphic cards I could also in some cases render from home and not rely on a render farm. This would be great for the studio and allow me to have a balanced family life and continue in a career which I love.

The Precision M3800 performance laptop goes to Alex Symonds:

I fly UAV drones and map large parcels of land for mines, quarries, landfills, councils, and other clients and authorities in Queensland, Australia. We typically map 1-2km2 at a time with a Sensefly Ebee and need to process 2000 16MP images into a 10 million point cloud 3D model, high resolution Orthomosaic photo and draft and deliver the data in an AutoCAD file with contours, features and even 3D Flythrough animation and Google Earth overlay. The new work station would enable my second pilot to process his work alongside my current Dual Xeon Workstation that is our only means of processing at the moment.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks once more to Dell for the prizes.