Rendering Times - what's hot today?
 

As I type, my other computer is rendering a 30 minute video as a flash FLV file. It's telling me that it's going to take about 1:45 minutes total. Wow!

My main PC is a couple of years old - it's running

AMD X2Dual
Core processor 4600+
2.4 gighz 2 gigs of ram

So today - what's the state of the art, and what would be the factors that will speed my rendering by say 100%?

Thanks!
Milt

State of the art, to my mind is a 2 (two) Quad processor system. Dell has them in their workstations, but I'm sure you can find them elsewhere.

However you can increase your rendering time with much less than that.

You can today purchase a singel Quad core system for around $700 that will likely double your rendering speed. I haven't looked but you might find them cheaper.

Somehwere between dual quad core and a base quad core the (the Q6600 chip) are sytems with an extreme version of the Quad core but you'll pay an extra $1000 for that chip alone, not worth it IMO.

HP, Dell, etc. has fine prices on workstations and if you look around you'll find something good.

Don't forget the RAID 0. One problem with the cheap Quad Core systems is they often are not very expandable, and you could be very limited if and when you want to add a hard drive or two later.

From what I've seen in this forum I think I would go with an ATI chip on my graphics card as well and avoid NVidia to avoid possible conflicts. While most running the Nvidia are fine, I would avoid them to be safe.

Good luck

I agree. If you want a dual CPU Quad Core machine (8 cores) that's not based on a workstation motherboard (and you don't mind putting it together), look here:

http://techgage.com/article/building...ltrail_system/

Or you can wait until later this year/early 2009 and there will be desktop machines with 8 or more CPU cores.

That SkullTrail machine is wicked, Jay. For a cheaper 8 core here's one:

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellsto...=MLB1668&s=biz

I quite like the absurd performance that I get out of my Xeon 5450-based system, but my quad-extreme desktop is just as fast for quite a few tasks (things that aren't heavily threaded), uses less power, and makes less noise.

That said, FB-DIMM memory is significantly less expensive than DDR3, and that can eat into the cost-difference quite a bit.

If it were my money (it isn't), I'd buy more in the back-side of the curve, like the budget quad-core, DDR2, 750GB hard drives (though the 1TB are coming down in price), and a nice, quiet graphics card, like an 8600GT.

You can put together an absolute screamer for under $700, a price that can end up just buying a processor for something not significantly faster.