(Well, I hope this goes in this category…)
So, I am actually pretty good with computers and asking this makes me feel kinda stupid, but does upgrading the RAM module decrease render times?
I’ve been interested in upgrading for a while, but I never really had any reason to do so until now (I’ve got my first heavy animation and it takes quite awhile per frame).
So? Will that help me?
No idea about the RAM piece, but you should look at SSD for speed. Once I have the cash I’m going to update my harddrive and add an internal SSD for speed.
I upgraded my RAM and Video Card…
That made blender render run really fast…
But I think it’s the RAM that makes the renderer run faster, the Video Card would just be for realtime.
@RedHawk
Ehe…I actually have no idea what an SDD is. 
@McThingy
Good. I think I’ll do just the RAM though.
Actually it really shouldn’t make it run all that much faster, unless you are dealing with issues of having the page file accessed because you are running out of memory. In many cases this just causes the render to fail. Render time deals with scene complexity and calculation of the scene attributes from polygon count to surfaces/materials, and so on which in most cases happens in the CPU/GPU. Execution of commands and things like that will seem more responsive if more things can be loaded into RAM. In a case where you have a high poly object that you wish to decimate (reduce polys) more RAM can benefit this operation since it limits how much will need to be paged, if any. On the rendering side, what is needed to be placed in RAM at the time of render, will be, meaning that if the scene requires 200MB then it doesn’t really matter if you have 1GB or 24GB installed since it will only use up 200MB. Speed of RAM may make a difference, but you won’t be able to see it, unless it is a grand leap and your RAM will only run as fast as the slowest module.
SSD or Solid State Drives, do nothing for rendering as well. Just access time and speed of information retrieval, and at this point in time I would never use an SSD for archiving.
And an old rule of thumb, “The system is only as fast as it’s slowest component.”, meaning capacity isn’t as relevant. Only when you get into GPU rendering then capacity of VRAM does play a role, but that’s a different discussion. Look at it this way, you could put a high capacity fuel tank on your car with a fuel pump able to dump a lot of fuel into the engine, but without upgrading the engine, you’ll be stuck going the same top speed.
Just a few things to think about.
@ajm
Ah. Well, thank you for that explanation.
I’ve always had trouble with the physical components of computer science, but I think I understand what RAM does for rendering now.
Technology is so strange…
But, as for everything else, consider this thread SOLVED! 