I am wondering, i mainly use my 8 core i7 laptop to render, its the most heavy machine i have.
But cycles is not that fast on it, ok its 4 times the speed of a dual core, but still, scenes take a minute or more.
So movies take easily a few hours to render. Dough sadly on a laptop one cannt change video cards, neither there exist some kind of USB3.0 Cuda device that i know of. (or is there one ??)
So now i am wondering, Since i also have a cheap Asus Asrock 350M1 dual core PC.
It is (1.6 Ghz 4Gb ram, max 16Gb and a SSD) i use it mainly for XBMC to watch movies on TV.
This is a low end cheap PC, but i have one empty PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot (@ x4 mode) left on it.
Would it make sense to buy a GTX 780 Ti for it, or a GTX 580, and put it in ?
Maybe just to draw on my laptop (for baking etc) and then use that cheapo PC as a render farm just only to render ?
i7 in laptop usually mean renamed desktop i5. You better avoid any mobile CPU for rendering. 780TI sound very good, but double check you have enough PSU power for that, in fact you can end upgrading everyting, so may be better to get new box.
It should work fine for the main rendering part… the CPU bound part of the BVH creation and what not will be pretty slow though so just keep that in mind.
doublebishop is correct, be carefull with the BVH creation and other data transfering (texture loading, etc…) this can cause a huge bottleneck in the system if your CPU or memory are not fast enough. Specially in engines as Octane Render (the standalone version with the external plugin) can be significant slower if the CPU and the GPU are not balanced.