i7 X980 3.33 ghz

Win7 Pro 64 bit

12 GB Ram

6 minutes 3 seconds

Due to multithreading, 12 simultaneous processes.

Carrara 8 Pro

Love it!

Ran a few more tests, without firefox on in the background (doh!).

I get 5 minutes 57 seconds.  Same with full raytracing on.

With the hex core, I get 8 colored render blocks working, then another 1 through 4 for the full 12 threads.

Water cooled and 128 GB Solid State C: drive, twin 1TB Sata 6 program and data drives.

VERY nice!

One of my main questions now will be the future of PC's available for real PC users.  In other words, most people use computers essentially just for email, surfing, music, and video.  Most people don't use computers for hard core number smashing like people who render images.

So now that we have significant alternative devices for serving communication and entertainment interests (like smart phones and the ipad), I wonder what the future will hold for hard core serious computer users like us.

As an additional quandry to the computational future, the stuff I've been reading also leans towards gamers going to console based platforms.  Games were a big part of what motivated computer developers to keep pushing so if the gamers abandon the PC environment, I wonder where we're headed.

I never get tired of bigger and meaner and faster computers.  I'm always in the mood to render faster so I hope that continues without the prices killing us.

Interesting - I kept my old machine (quad core 2.6 mhz intel) and am cleaning it off to just do finances - online banking, investing, Quicken and taxes.  I am clearing out everything else, no email and no everyday browsing.  I intend to lock down the security and keep it off line most of the time.  The new bruiser is for rendering, email and general playing around.  I've wanted to do this for a while.  Never had a security issue (I keep on top of security issues, use AVG and Malwarebyte), but as time goes by and more and more of my finances go on-line, my concern has ratcheted up.

As a side note, I really like my first water cooled rig.  Temps (CPU and mobo) stay around 38 C, even with all cores plugging away at 100%.  Sweet!

Klebnor

3 minutes 41 seconds. Boxx 24 core zeon 12gb ram.

Even so it's possible in C8pro to push render quality to the point it would take days to finish.

I put a new machine together over the weekend and got most things installed when I decided to stop and run the benchmark.  The new machine is running Windows7, 64 bit addition and it has an AMD Athelon X6 1090T CPU running at 3.2 GHz (no overclocking).  I am currently running C7P.  I ran the benchmark first with 8G of DDR3 PC1600 memory and then ran it again after adding another 8G (tha additional memory just showed up tonight).  The render times are 5:01 with 8G, and 4:38 with 16G.  I was quite surprised that the additional memory helped as much as it did.

Once again, I'm reminded of the time when I made this benchmark and several people didn't like it because it took too long. Now that were running all this multiheaded, multithreaded hardware, the benchmark is proving to be a good one as it continues to challenge hardware enough to truly test a machine. When hardware gets us to a point where we all starting rendering his benchmark in about 30 seconds as a common result, I'll pump it up again. Until then, I think ts still working pretty good.

I think it's great becuase it lets me experiment with render settings and impact of additional machines in a meaningful way.