On 28/07/13 08:17, Dylan wrote:

On 28/07/13 03:19, Dirk Gently wrote:

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Dylan wrote:

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Hi All,

I'm helping a friend replace his old Windows Vista machine which died in the heatwave. He does a lot of 3d art with blender (which has been terminally slow under vista.) I've provided a temporary Linux box (actually my testbed machine: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with 2G ram, which is already faster than his old quad core with 4G) and I'm hoping that by the time he gets a new machine he won't want Windows on it...

The 3d art is a hobby and the budget is limited. I'll be using his existing graphics card and 'on-board' sound will be more than adequate. So, which aspects of the spec are likely to have the most impact? I'm assuming more cores and more memory, but which would have the most impact for cost? Is there an appreciable difference between AMD and Intel chips? Are there any other aspects of the motherboard that might have a bearing on rendering speeds?

1. Memory 2. CPU speed (cores * GHz) 3. Multiple disk availability (home directory & data on different physical disk than OS and apps) 4. Disk rotation speed.

Current AMD chips are bit slower (in GHz) than current Intel chips, but you can use the money saved to buy more MEMORY and a 2nd Disk drive.

Well, having been able to do some empirical testing thanks to some friends I can confidently say that memory capacity has barely any effect at all (rendering using consistently <500MB and no swap). HD characteristics similarly seem negligible in their relevance since there is no appreciable disk activity during the render cycle. All in all, doubling the cores halves the render time (approximately) so I'll be specifying "as many cores as you can afford".

Dylan

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Any and all comments welcome.

Dylan

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