What processor for fast rendering

[Guest]

I would be grateful for any info....Im rendering scenes in 3d software...not concerned about quality but speed ...my present quad core is not too much faster than previous dual core ... rendering software is very difficult to figure out and there is no exporter which fits carrara any way .....I need a new processor maybe a card too ..I have geforce 210 and athlon am3 11 640 quad core........any advice

 

[ionut19]

If you need a CPU for rendering, where applications take advantage from multiple cores there are two ways to do this.
1. Cheap way, buy an AMD hexa core CPU and overclock it.
2. Buy a new motherboard on 1366 socket, triple channel RAM and buy an intel i7 hexa core and overclock it.

Option two is more expensive but faster.

Does that 3D software take advantage of nvidia cards? If so you can buy a gtx570. For that someone else can advise what to buy since it's not my domain, but in terms of CPU those options are the best. If the software uses video cards do not buy 400 series from nvidia, nvidia has problems with those cards when used for editing programs. Buy only from 500 series.
I did not specify the new i7 sandy bridge because you can find them only in quad configuration for now.

EDIT: werner123 you posted wile i was writing. If he has the money, a hexa core from the previous generation of i7 is going to be faster then a quad core sandy bridge because it has more cores, regardless of architecture differences. If he still wants to limit himself to quad then a 2600k series would be the best choice since it has hyper threading, the 2500k does not.

 

[Cygnus x-1]

The reason you didn't see a big difference going to your quad is not all transcoding/encoding software can handle more than 2 threads well if at all. Your first step should be to research software that is fastest on 4 cores or more. If your looking to transcode to mp4 or some form of the h264 codec, then video card acceleration is a good place to look. I used a program called Badaboom (I know sounds goofy but was a good prog.) with my gtx285 a while ago and it was fast as hell going avi or dvd to mp4, much faster than a quadcore cpu.