Reading the forums one gets the impression most Renderosity folk have lotsa money to spend on the latest hardware. I don't. I managed to scrape a few bucks together to try speeding up my Poser animation renders. They say faster renders come from more RAM. a faster processor, or a better video card. I must choose one of the above. I need advice.

Present system: HP Pavilion P6740F. CPU: Phenom II quad-core. RAM: 8GB, Video: integrated ATI Radeon 4200. Windows 10 64-bit. Poser 11 64-bit.

Each of the following costs about the same. Which would provide the greatest speed boost?

--8GB of RAM to reach the system limit of 16GB? --An AMD Six-core Phenom II processor (the fastest that will fit my motherboard) to replace the quad-core? --A 600-800-watt power supply so I can install the Zotac GeForce 250 AMP video card a friend gave me (present p/s is only 250W)?

All advice appreciated. Thanks.

For the price of a very modest graphics card you might consider a dual Xeon workstation.

As usual, It depends on a lot of things. If you use large textures more RAM will be the best option (it should improve performance of everything you do on your computer). If you use Superfly you could use a better graphics card (so choose the power supply). If you use Firefly a faster processor with more cores would improve render times (but it could be hindered by a small amount of RAM). There isn't a single best answer. It all depends on your promblem. Do a render and check your system statistics. If you run 100% load on your processor with very little I/O the bottleneck is likely the processor. If you see a lot of I/O you are probably short on memory. Most likely you find 100% CPU load and a lot of I/O so again no easy answer. Do consider the generate heat. Extra RAM doesn't generate (a lot) more heat. A bigger power supply and video card could cause heat problems. A bigger CPU is very likely going to cause problems. All things considered I would suggest more RAM but don't expect wonders for rendering times (anything over 20% improvement is a unlikely).

Jfbeute, hanks for laying out the options. I've decided to go for the extra RAM. Even a small boost will be welcome. HarryBart, I'd love to get a nicer computer but the lowest prices I found on dual Xeon machines was around $350, about twice what I have to spend.

Another possibility: Get an SSD. They will speed up anything a lot. Even if you change nothing else.

RAM for your current machine is slow. Even if you double it. And can't be used in modern systems. An SSD can be moved if you upgrade.

I have an older Laptop here. 8 GB RAM and a Intel dual core. But a fast SSD. So it is able to run my Python development framework (PyCharm) under Linux and Windows with Poser in a virtual machine at the same time - surprisingly fast. Sure, not as fast as my workstation, but fast enough not to scrap the machine.

Does extra RAM speed up Poser? Let's go back to the very beginning. I was using Poser 2, but I was also using a Mac Classic which had very little RAM. Fortunately, Poser configured it so that I was able to use part of hard Drive as virtual RAM. The benefit of this was that my classic didn't have to spit out it's operating system disk every minute or so. When they added virtual RAM, rendering took me only half as long.

Virtual RAM needs to be written to and read from the hard disk. The hard disk is by far the slowest component in your computer. Avoiding access to the hard disk will speed up everything. Poser (as any other program) benefits from additional RAM. It can store everything it needs in memory and still has some memory over to use as a cache to temporarily store things. Nowadays textures are very large and having them in memory will speed up things.

With regards to an SSD I can only say it will bring an improvement in performance but not as much as sufficient RAM. When buying an SSD be sure to buy one big enough to contain the OS, all your executables, and all your temporary files. Personally I would advise buying at least 500 GB (more is better).