I am looking at building a computer to use mainly with Blender.
I would like to put in my Premiere with my Matrox RX 100 as well. I have been reading (Tomshardware.com and anandtech.com) for tips and checking out stuff on Cell processor and gpu acceleration.
It seems like Multi core cpu’s is the best way currently to get the most power.
Here are a couple of specs I think that I want.
Dual booting(XP and Linux).
Most power for the dollar.
Quad core ready(Maybe even dual quad???)
Water cooled
Nvidia GPU
Lots of ram 2gb
My question is will blender make use of multi thread beyond two threads soon? It looks like Pov Ray will in 3.7. What about yarfar in the future?
How long should I wait? Quads are really fast but will the work flow make use of the power?
quads would be handy even if blender couldn’t use them. for instance, if blender could use two, you could run two blenders at the same time rendering. or use blender and photoshop at the same time, with no slowdown. the extra processors will make blender faster even if it doesn’t use them, because your system (at least linux, i don’t know about windows) can make all the other processes (system processes, other programs) go to the other processors, freeing the ones working on rendering to concentrate only on it.
also, a really good gfx card is not really necessary. Blender renders to the cpu, not gpu, so it won’t speed up rendering much. It will, however, speed up editing alittle… maybe.
Yafray can use up to 8 processors. Blender will probibly use more in the future. The GPU would be good for the 3D view, and any editing you do, including video editing.