Choosing Processor For Rendering Speed.

[Merazomo]

When looking for a processor specifically for faster rendering, do you guys research the Processor name, type, and benchmark or just by looking at the processor specs are you able to know approximately how fast it’s going to render? I always thought that the more cores you had, the faster the rendering speed was going to be. I'm probably wrong since there's more to it than the number of cores I guess. I'm thinking of building a desktop for basic family video editing, nothing special really; however, I would like to edit everything as fast as possible. HD, Ram, video card, etc... is not that important since I've been getting by with just a dual core and a simple video card; it's when I'm rendering that I have to wait for hours. So what are the main specs to look at when looking for a processor to render fast? number of cores, Ghz, name, brand, etc.? Obviously going for an i7 Intel Processor would be everyone's answer, but I would like to choose based on a budget as well as on my own, what the best processor is.

 

[elemein]

CPU - Quite simply, renderings are no more than different kinds of brute work.Things like cache size and cache segregation make little difference to it. More clock, more cores, more FPUs, more integer units, and more efficient utilization of such while keeping a relatively forgivingly short pipeline is key here. Some CPUs have special instruction sets that some rendering software can use to speed up rendering times. An example of this that is almost completely widespread is MMX or SSE, while newer ones would be AVX. Good rendering CPUs are the i7-3770K or the FX-8350.

GPU - Not as important as the CPU for this purpose usually, but a GPU is important. Aside from very important instruction sets that some GPUs have (CUDA or OpenCL), rendering is still a brute work. More cores and more speed. That's all there is to it. Renderings are like that because they have tons of both integer unit instructions, floating point instructions, SIMD instructions, MIMD instructions, and even some MISD instructions.

RAM - As long as you have enough to store your project as it's being worked on, sortof irrelevant. Speed helps up to a certain point.

Motherboard - Pretty much not a performance ingredient. Not news.

Hard drive - Also not a big performance ingredient here. A new rendering project begins in RAM, ends in RAM, and retires to the HDD. So not a big deal.

 

[Marco Barbosa]

Very Thanks, Elemein!
I was looking for the same informations and 4 months ago I reached the same conclusions, that you could now explain clear and objectively.
I made a price research, and I chose the configuration for my "low-cost video renderization pc" :

- Processador AMD FX 8350 - $210
- MB Asus M5A97 R2.0 (AMD 970 Chipset) - $102
- (2x) Mem Corsair XMS3 DDR3 2GB 1600MHz - 2x $18
- Power ATX 600W OCZ Modxstream 80PLUS Semi Modular - $84
Total: $506

Note: I used my previously HD's Sata II Seagate Barracuda 7200 (1Tb and 2Tb), and the video board Nvidea 9600.
I'm thinking in put one SSD HD SATA2 30GB Corsair CSSD-V30GB2A - $56 only to run the OS.

Marco