Actually I have a PC with the following configuration: i7-4790K CPU, Asus dual 8X capable motherboard, 16 GB DDR3 2400 Mhz RAM, EVGA 750 Bronze PSU, one Gigabyte G1 gaming GTX 1070 and one EVGA GTX 970. I never rendered anything with Cycles before, but a few days ago I did my first test with the BMW benchmark and I liked very much both rendering quality and speed. I liked it to the point that I’m planning to use it over Daz Studio to do my renderings from now on with the help from mcjTeleBlender exporter.
I also want to learn to render short films. I know that for that I’ll need more power so I was thinking about assembling a second PC and build a small network. That’s why I ask the question: Is there a big difference between those three CPUs when rendering with GPUs? Since Cycles renders faster with the GPU than the CPU, I was trying to spend the less possible in the CPU to make room for a better GPU. I have some spare parts including DDR3 RAM laying around so right now I’m more inclined to get a FX-8350 to save some money.
Actually as I said, I have both the GTX 1070 and the GTX 970 in the same PC. Do you think that I’ll get faster render speeds if I move the GTX 970 to a second PC and render with a single GPU on each PC? Thanks in advance.
Questions summary:
Is there a big difference between FX-8350, i3-4170 and i7-4790K for rendering with GPU?
Is there a big difference when using two PCs with a single GPU each vs one single PC with two GPUs?
All the cpu above is good, i think they have the same performance when using the same graphics card, for example, there are two pc, one pc using cpu i7-4790K, the other using FX-8350, all pc use the same graphics card ie r9 furyx, i think all those pcs almost have the same performance for GPU render with cycles, because cycles gpu only requires the power of the graphics card, very different from Radeon Pro Render which requires both CPU and GPU, see also this https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?428743-Can-core-i5-enough-to-open-and-render-blender-roboman-or-core-i7&highlight=core+i5
Thanks, I think I’ll decide for the FX-8350. I can get it at a good price with a motherboard in a combo and can assemble a second PC with spare parts that I have laying around.