Attached is an Excel sheet listing the render speed of different PC configurations.

Please note that Ligthwave was used for the benchmarking not Poser. But the general concept is the same for both.

The faster the CPU and the more cores the lower is the render time.

EDIT: for some reason I can't upload the file (tried *.xls, *.txt, *.pdf). So here is the link to the post in the Lightwave forum where the sheet can be downloaded:

http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?133251-11-5-s-BenchmarkMarbles-lws-share-your-machine-s-render-time-here&p=1316809&viewfull=1#post1316809

V1.01_ Benchmarks.zip

For example I took out a very fast, a middle fast and a not so fast config out of the sheet:

Hour : Min | CPU                     | overclocked |   OS    |  RAM   |      PC Model

   0 : 34  | two Intel Xeon ES-2687W |     no      | Win7 64 |  32 Gb | Dell T7600

   1 : 15  | one Intel i7 3970X      |     no      | Win7 64 |  64 GB |   ?

   2 : 28  | one Intel i5 3570       |     no      | Win8 64 |   8 GB |   ?

You can see that an i5 might not be the best solution if you want speed (but of course it is a better solution with regard to your purse ;-) I am not sure if more RAM would speed up the i5 config. Unfortunately it was the only i5 example in the sheet, so I can't tell.

(side note: the test scene was made to stress the hardware and therefore is not optimized for good render times - this just in case somebody thinks a few marbles should render faster)

One more note: Some features in Poser are still not coded to utilize multi cores (the worst example I tried is the hair room; collusion calculation is using one thread only on my machine; the other 31 threads do nothing (tested in PPro 2012)). If you want to use those features, you not only need a CPU with as much cores as possible for rendering, you also need a CPU that is fast when only one core or thread is running (in the Intel world that normally means as high GHz as possible).

Regardng the integrated graphic unit:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5871/intel-core-i5-3470-review-hd-2500-graphics-tested/3

It is horribly slow in games and I would expect it to be slow in GL as well.

Regarding SSD:

My opinion is they are the best invention since sliced bread.

You can check all the benchmarks of HDDs and SSDs here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives-and-ssds,3.html

I use them at home and in different company's PCs. Models are:

3 x Crucial C300 (256GB), 1 x Crucial M4 (256GB), 1x Samsumg 830 (256GB), 1 x Samsung 840 (512 GB), 3 x Samsung 840 Pro (256 GB)

Some are used for years some are more new. They all are under heavy stress (even with sporadic full secure erase of empty space). So far not a single failure of any of them. Other collegues have Intel SSDs; also there was not a single failure so far.

Regarding Poser 32 Bit or Poser Pro 64 Bit:

This depends on what you plan to do with it. Main limitation of 32 Bit is that firefly cannot address more than about 3 GB. If your scene requires more than that, you either get a crash or render speed will decrese because of swapping.

In case you wonder if you ever get 3 GB scenes have a look in my next post.