Quote - > Quote - All in all I would mainly like to improve the performance of the pre-render work.  That seems like its all driven by video card and hard drive.  The harddrives you can't do that much about (you can go scssi but that doesn't buy that much more for the price) but the video cards you can right?    .... Am I right to say the pre render performance has little to do with the cpu (with in reason I'm not saying to put somethign less than a pentium 3 in or anything) and is mainly based on video card?

 

Naw, as Louguet said it is very much a mixture of memory, CPU and Graphics card; if you have old tech in any one slot then it will only hurt the other two.  Hard disk should rarely enter into it, that is only an issue if you do not have enough memory to load and work with the entire frame at once (and that's very bad).

And here, at the pre render stage, it is probably only using one core of your cpu.  If thats the case then perhaps a higher clocked single or duo core may give better performance than a lower clocked quad core.  

On memory, I think Louguet was saying that as long as you have enough that is all that matters.  Also I think he may have only been refering to render speed and not pre render performance.  I could be wrong though.