Quote - I don't see that  hyperthreading would make much of a difference for Poser rendering.  When rendering, my non-hyperthreaded Phenom II maxes out all of the cores at 100% for the duration of the render; (It actually gets the CPU hotter than the Intel Burn Test.)  If it had hyperthreading, they would still all be maxed out at 100%. 

 

Of course, hyperthreading can speed up other tasks and programs aren't aren't as CPU intensive,  but I don''t see how it would make a big difference in Poser.  Does anyone have any numbers?

I rendered the scene that BB linked to above, and I got surprising results when increasing the bucket size above the 64 used in the scene (times with textures loaded in PP2012):

Size     Time Seconds

64          38.1

256        39.6

1024      40.5

With a 1024 bucket size, total RAM usage was a bit over 4GB; I have 16, so no issue there.

This is a simple scene with no scattering, raytracing nor IDL, so perhaps larger buckets would increase performance in more complex scenes...

 

EDIT regarding RAM capacity in a sub-$1k machine, many ASROCK MBs will accomodate 32GB; mine will(although I'm only using 16).  I built it last fall for $760, including Windows 7 Pro....

 

Back to the topic.......

Looking at the numbers, hyperthreading does make a difference. I render the scene with a mobile cpu with 2 physical cores and 4 threads. You render the scene with a 4 core or 6 core desktop CPU (not sure how many cores you do have). Your desktop cpu is only 7 seconds faster. Imagine what would happen if you buy a new i7 with 4 cores or more and hyperthreading, it will outpreform your machine easily, as BB's older i7 has already shown.

 

 

My 2 core i5 is almost as fast as your  4 or 6 core AMD Phenom II, so it's safe to say that the asker should buy an i7 if he wants the fastest machine available and not fall for the AMD's lower prices. Spent a little more and he will get a lot more preformance.

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