General hardware questions

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So, I’m planning on building a new desktop for blenderizing purposes. It will likely be running ubuntu and be used almost exclusively for blender work.

My question is… what are some general hardware bottlenecks or focus points for a machine like this? I want to do whatever I can to improve render times.

Would it be better to have a nice single machine, or build a small (four or less) machine cluster to use as a mini-renderfarm and use an “old beater” desktop and send renders to that?

I don’t think I’d need a mini-renderfarm with my current workload, but it would certainly open up a few animation possibilities with complex scenes.

On the note of a single desktop, what would i run into common bottlenecks with hardware, would RAM be the first bottleneck, or amount of processor cores?
Are there any specific video cards with features or technologies i should be looking for?

Thanks for reading this overly-long post.

austen:RocknRoll:

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Well it all depends on how much your willing to spend. If your looking to render projects then the main thing to focus would be the processor speed. A quad core would be recommend for one machine of course. As for multiple machines you want to shoot for something that has high Clock speed. A dual-core with 1.8 Ghz just really does not do it. You might as well just go with a single core with something that has 2.8 Ghz. But if you can have four or two machines with dual-cores with high Clock speed that’s great. Two or Four machines with Quad-Cores is massively cool. It just depends on the amount you have to spend.

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I would say my budget is less than or equal to $1000 US… thanks for the info, recommendations?

austen