the title says it all? and im talking about for media creation, blender, photoshop, movie and game making…stuff like that. and what are some good specs for each?
I’d go for what is most important to your needs. I’ve got 256 megs ram on mine - I could easily do with 3 times that amount at the moment.
see thts the problem…i dont know whats good for my needs. i think its ram but idk
Yeah, what kbot said. How many tasks do you run at once? Are you on Windows, Mac, or Linux? 32-bit or 64-bit? The old adage of “the more the merrier” certainly comes into play, especially with prices, e.g., of memory right now: 2X1GB PCR2 6400 for 45USD after rebates (newegg.com, no affiliation or promo, just a quick price check!). Are you building or upgrading?
The additional question to ask is 1CPU or 2 or 4? How much are you willing to spend?
It is a 1-line question without a 1-line answer.
[See what you did? Now I’m shopping for memory. Who knew it was that cheap?]
For blender, specifically rendering, the speed of your processor determines how fast rendering can be done, and ram determines how much stuff can be rendered at one time, I think that is accurate… I have a 1 GB ram and a 2.2 ghz amd processor and it does a fair job.
http://www.eofw.org/bench/
This site gives you an idea of the differences for rendering.
the two has different functions, it depend on your need. 
Easy. Both.
ok i guess im asking the wrong question although you are answering the one i asked perfectly. how does ram affect you and how does mhz affect you? mhz is the # of calulations per second…so thats like rendering speed. but then rams memory thats like constitly being replaced by different things and that affects how fast your programm can like uodate its self. i probably ethier just really skrewed up the explaining or am totaly wrong but anyway sry for the confusion
I’d say ram is more important than mhz… i don’t mind things rendering slow as long as it actually is rendering. The amount of ram you have can limit your abilities to render. I see 3 main facets to 3D content creation…
- Ram. Important for holding all that geometry and texture and animation info and being able to manipulate it.
- 3D Video Card. This controls how smoothly/fast your user interface works when your manipulating said data.
- MHZ. This will control small parts of the interface possibly… but mainly controls the speed with which you’ll be able to render an image.
But thats my opinion. Its all up for personal interpretation…
of course thats over simplifying it… but oh well… 
I’ve got an AMD Athlon 64bit X2 Dual Core 2.6GHz processor and 2 gigs of ram with an nvidia graphics card. If my system would take it I’d go up to 4 gigs of ram or more… I’m always pushing the rams limits on stuff when i’m working with several applications open at once…
Mhz is important so your tasks done quicker.
RAM is important so your CPU has quicker access to these tasks.
** so go for MHZ first . . . then upgrade the RAM l8tr on.
kbot is correct. Get the best cpu you can, then get enough ram to handle your workload.
To add:
mhz is not the rendering speed. It’s the clock speed of the chip, and it’s useless comparing the mhz of different chips to each other to see which is faster. A 1.5GHz core2 (using single core) will kick the arse of a 2GHz Celeron.
A gig of ram should be fairly cheap, so I’d suggest that. That will do for pretty much everything.
This is an easy question. Both are equally important. The computer (in theory) is just some memory (RAM) and processor with some input/output. The best case is, when these two components have balanced their performance.
So you have to find this balance. If you have feeling that the rendering process is slow, you want to make some animation and not too much complex scenes, then invest into your processor. If you want some huge scenes with millions of polygons, high-res textures and that rendered in big resolutions, you want more memory. The best case is to have a lot of RAM and powerful CPU, but if you cannot afford both, you have to decide what suits your needs better.
Hertz doesn’t designate how powerful a processor is, like IanC said. It would be good if you posted your current system specs.
Mhz, as previously said is only a clock speed. A certain instruction may take for example; 3 clock cycles. So instruction XYZ may take 3Hz of processing power from you.
If you have a 1Mhz processor that can perform every instruction within 1 clock cycle (processor A), and a processor at 3Mhz where every instruction takes 4 clock cycles, processor A is faster.
Your CPU needs memory no matter what (to perform functions / store results) and as such, memory is built into the CPU. If memory runs out, we either have to discard old data to make room, or we don’t process any more.
In reality, anything that can read and write data is technically memory. Sending and receiving data takes time, and if a certain process requires data to be retrieved in order to run a particular instruction, that instruction therefore = time to process + time to retrieve. This means your CPU can waste lots of cycles simply waiting for data.
In regards to speed, Cache is the fastest memory you CPU has, since it’s built directly in to it. Next up is RAM, it isnt as fast, but it is fast :). finally, we have hard disks and alike… Extremely slow :(. As you should know, hard disk are cheap, RAM is relatively expensive, and Cache in GBs would be worth millions (cache only really goes upto 2MB though). In terms of processing, as soon as you start using the hard disk as memory this is where CPU speed becomes pointless as there’ll be so much idle waiting, it doesnt matter how fast the CPU is, because its running at the speed of the hard disk.
A 4GB render is going to use 4GB no matter how fast the CPU goes, so RAM, in this case is relatively more important cause a 3mhz processor is better than a 4mhz running at 1Mhz, plus hard disks were never really designed for such purposes, and tend to cause problems.
If you only render small things, or If you break the render up into smaller pieces, and as such, never caps 2GB (…for example), 2GB and a faster CPU would be ideal. Of course, splitting a render up while decreasing RAM needed, can increase processing load so may not technically be faster, even with a faster cpu.
I would always get the CPU with most cache though. Also, I would get a SSD to run as as scratch disk instead of a normal hard disk. However, if i was in ur shoes, id get as much RAM, then the best CPU i can get.
A 3 or 4 mhz processor is not going to render much of anything though 
If you only render small things, or If you break the render up into smaller pieces, and as such, never caps 2GB
Just to point out, when we say small, we mean less than several million polygons. For most works you do not need a great deal. Going over 2 gig is good for sculpting mainly, and very large scenes.
A 3 or 4 mhz processor is not going to render much of anything though
Cue the old blender users “I rendered on a …”
waits in hope for the mention of a PDP-10
[just found this on wikipedia:
“Some of the CGI for the Disney science fiction movie TRON was rendered on the Foonly F-1 PDP-10 clone.”]
Your machine will run as fast as your slowest component.
I’ve got 256 megs ram - it’s good for 99.999 of the blender stuff I do. It just means that I get to concentrate on blender and not none of the flash games out there.
When I said small, I’m was referring to the maximum RAM /memory a particular task requires to execute fully. If you only ever use 256Mb of RAM, you only need 256. maybe a little more. you can therefore splash more out on CPU speed:).