i'm wondering peoples take on what cpu is best when it comes to fastest rendering speed?  like for vue scenes for an example.

and also best video card so that working with scenes in vue 5i or even maya while creating heavy scenes doesn't begin to slow you down.

i guess in a way you can think of this as a poll.

http://www.wagner-michael.com/vueben.htm

There is a new benchmark thread at Cornucopia3D about V6I - and some old ones with generation 5.  All in the forum "General" there. The new is sticky, the others are not anymore so you have to browse a little to find them.

But maybe this is interesting for you.

the wagner site was interesting...i'll check out the threads at cornucopia.

now let's say that cost was no retraint what hardware would you guys buy to optimize speed while working in a scene and later for rendering.  just say you were trying to buy parts for building a POWERFUL PC.

CPU you'd get?
motherboard obviously one that supports that CPU.
RAM? i guess at least 4gb. but what kind?
Video Card?

btw...i've read around forums that there are video cards that are dedicated and not....i take it that the dedicated video cards are the better option.  how exactly do i know if a video card is a dedicated one.  is there something in the specs that will tell you? and if so, what would it say?

Dedicated video cards - I guess this is about dedicated video RAM.
Many laptops use so-called "shared" memory: the graphics subsystem doesn't have its own dedicated memory, instead it uses some of the main memory. 
The disadvantage of shared memory is reduced performance - the route between the graphics processor and main memory is a lot slower than the route between a graphics chip and dedicated video memory.

Shared memory is not as commonplace in desktop computers. Cheap desktop computers sometimes have "integraded" video - a graphics chip mounted on the mainboard, which often uses shared memory. 
But each and every desktop computer that uses a graphics expansion card will have dedicated graphics memory - it's mounted on the expansion board.

You'll probably want to avoid systems with "integrated video" and/or "shared video memory".

When it comes to rendering, the speed of the graphics subsystem is a non-issue. Rendering is done using the CPU only. So if you plan on building a machine that will only render, you'd best spend your money on a fast CPU and use the cheapest and simplest graphics system you can find.
But when it comes to setting up a scene, graphics performance is much, much more important. If you plan on building a PC for building 3D scenes, you'll want a fairly fast CPU and a very fast graphics subsystem.

I build my Vue scenes on an Athlon64x2 4400+ system with an nVidia 7800GTX graphics card  (512 MB dedicated graphics memory) and 4 GB of main memory. Works fine and fast. The machine is a year old, so by now there are faster machines, and faster graphics, but when I bought it, it was definitely a high end PC in all respects.

cool..thanx svdl for your response... that was very informative.

I am running an AMD Athlon 3500+ Nvidia 6800GT and it works just fine - key though is RAM - minimum according to E-on for the software is 512 and I started with 1Gig, but found working to be lumpy and rendering slow as well.

Upgrade of an additional 2 Gig and this is a completely different program. 

I asked the same question on Cornupcopia and the answers I got were that RAM is king (if you have a decent system).  From there processor choice is how much can you afford.

There are some people who are using old PC's (P4's etc.) as render cows to speed up the process - the comments are generally good from them.

Hope this helps.

thanx stelwire for you input....just one question regarding ram.  what type of ram is the best for this purpose?  thanx and merry xmas.

Actually, the exact type of RAM doesn't matter all that much. The V6I tests by louguet (spelling?) indicate that buying expensive fast RAM will only gain you 1-2% of rendering performance.

So straight-on DDR400 or DDR2-533 will do the job. You can have a lot more RAM for the same money - you don't have to spend it on fast DDR2-667 or DDR2-800.

And a tip for the CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700. Only slightly more expensive than the E6300, and significantly faster. It's not the absolute fastest CPU around, but the Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 is far more expensive, and only a little faster than the E6700.

Amount of RAM: if you're going to use Vue 6 Infinite and a 64bit OS, as much as the mainboard can hold. 4 GB is good, 8 GB is better. And if you can afford 16 GB, more power to you!

That's why the MacPro is a VERY interesting machine these days. The mainboard can hold 16 GB, and it can hold 2 Xeon Core 2 Duo CPUs, giving you 4 cores to render on. It can run both Mac OSX and Windowx (also XP 64bit, as far as I know. Vista will run). 

I can heartily recommend running Vue 6 Inf 64bit on Windowx XP 64 bit. I now can create and render scenes that were completely impossible under a 32bit OS.

thanx svdl for that info....i'm actually an AMD kind of guy.  but if there is an intel cpu that is faster than a the fastest amd cpu  i'd be all for it. 

right now i'm up in the air if i am to invest in a machine with some serious performannce.  i'm just investigating in case i do do it.

I'm an AMD guy too - all my desktops and my server are AMD machines. But the plain and simple fact is that Intel has made a major coup in the CPU market as of this summer. 
The Core 2 Duo series delivers more bang for the buck than AMD Athon64x2. 
I believe the AMD people are working very hard to top Intel once again, but the Am2 series of the Athlon64x2 just does not cut it. Maybe in six months...

Microsoft, AMD, and ATI are  to release a chipset on the ATI Video card designed by AMD, that is supposted to optomise Direct X 10, but I do not know how that will affect OpenGL, if at all.  

Vue tech tells me memory on the Video board does not matter at this point, but they hope to address that issue later on.  Only OpenGL is a primary concern, since many Cards and software drivers do not fully support all of the features of OpenGL that VUE does.  They won't say which cards they recommend.

Hope that helps.

When it comes to OpenGL support, nVidia has a much better reputation than ATI. My personal experience is the same: never an OpenGL problem with an nVidia graphics card (Ti4200, 6800LE, 7800GTX, 7400 Go), some problems on an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro - reputedly the stablest ATI graphics card ever.

When it comes to DirectX, the ATI graphics cards do their job well. But only a few 3D graphics applications can make use of DirectX - 3D Studio Max comes to mind.
Vue does NOT use DirectX. So if the graphics card doesn't have good OpenGL support, you're stuck to a rather slow and primitive wireframe view.

I agree the ATI 9600 on my AMD, which I have, will crash using Vue, however the same PCI version on my Intel will not.

Quote - thanx svdl for that info....i'm actually an AMD kind of guy.  but if there is an intel cpu that is faster than a the fastest amd cpu  i'd be all for it. right now i'm up in the air if i am to invest in a machine with some serious performance.  i'm just investigating in case i do do it.

I just built a new PC around the Intel D975XBX2 motherboard and the Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme processor with 4GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR800 memory. This thing is scary fast! Vue correctly recognizes 4 CPU's and my render times are noticeably faster. What I should have done was timed a few renders with my old AMD X2 4600+ before I replaced the motherboard but I forgot. (sorry)

If you want the fastest PC you can get, IMHO, QuadCore is the way to go. Your video card is only uses for OpenGL preview. All rendering is done in software which means your CPU is doing all the work. So I recommend the fastest CPU you can afford.

~jr

you guys that know how to read cpu specs.....can you tell me what to look for to know how to read specs and be able to compare which cpu is faster within intel cpus and even intel vs amd cpu?

artleon, in Vue 6 an Intel Core 2 system is approximately 15% faster than an AMD X2 / Opteron system at the same GHz. 

You can see benchmarks result here : http://www.cornucopia3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3344

A very good price / performance ratio is the Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz and easily overclockable), but in fact every Core 2 Duo, from E6300 (1.86 GHz) to E6700 (2.66 GHz) is a good buy. I do not recommend the X6800 as its price is too high compared to the quad-core QX6700 (which is the best performer for Vue 6 rendering right now).