It’s new PC time.
Given my newfound love of blender, I’d like to build something optimised for Blender / CGI rendering.
I’ve been thinking about SMP (Tyan 2466 with 2*Athlon MP 2400+ 1gb ram), but I’m not sure if this is the best route.
Anyone got any experience of dual processor boxes and whether I’d be better off spending the money on a better spec single processor box?
I’d prefer to use linux (most of my other stuff is linux based), but can use W2K if necessary.
thanks in advance
Matt
I am sorry to tell you that Blender doesn’t support dual cpu at the moment, maybe in the future when Blender 3,0 will be, but that I don’t know anything about, so I would stick to a fast single cpu system 
okey…if you render, your system will not choke while doing other things or to model in another Blender opened 
0.2 €
/.Z
Yay, no dual CPU… BUT if you render animations you can launch two blenders, each rendering some frames (possibly from command line)
Stefano
I would say definitly from the command line. If you are doing anything more than a test render you should always use the command line; it is a bit faster.
But if you are not planning on doing any heavy animations don’t bother with dual CPU.
I’ve got to put in my .02 here.
I would go with a SMP Intel solution.
First off, you’ve got the dual memory channels, plus hyperthreading, which while not a huge performance increase, it does create awesome /proc/cpuinfo…
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel® Xeon™ CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 1599.993
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 3191.60
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel® Xeon™ CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 1599.993
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 3198.15
processor : 2
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel® Xeon™ CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 1599.993
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 3198.15
processor : 3
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 2
model name : Intel® Xeon™ CPU 2.40GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 1599.993
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips : 3198.15
Total bogomips = 12792.60
Nice.
Yes, not too many applications are SMP capable, but you will find that your system is capable of handling a lot more processes than a single proc box.
Worth it? You bet!
lol
depends what you want, but also. IT could also be Waste of money!