Kitchen, bathroom, what?

murph101

I'm looking at upgrading my laptop gear and found the Dell Precision Mobile Workstation a likely candidate. I had purchased an Alienware 18 with 2 NVidia GPUs, but returned it as it was a 15 lb. monster and too big to take anywhere.

I asked Dr. Phil(W), and his take was that Carrara does NOT use the GPU for renders, yet Dell suggests that the Precision (not alienware) NVidia card (capitalizing on the OpenGL use of said card) will help with rendering speed. (I hate to keep bugging him at every turn, but wanted to get everyone's perspective after sniffing around for a couple weeks).

I am primarily looking at saving time on renders so I can produce more finished images. I spend a lot of time waiting for renders to see how a scene looks. I render a small version to test lights, then a bigger version as I feel I'm getting close, then a 1500X2400px version to see really awesome results, but it also shows all the flaws I need to go fix. Big renders can take an hour, ranging down to small renders which take 5 to 10 minutes each.

BTW I gave the Octane demo a try but found recreating lighting using meshes was a huge tradeoff. Maybe I'm going about it the wrong way, but if I spend hours re-lighting, where's my time savings? I'll have to save Octane for a future date ($600... whew!).

Anyway, here I am, Alienware rig returned, but looking to pick and choose components carefully. Where am I going to get the most bang for my buck in the way of render speeds?

CPU?

GPU?

RAM?

Solid State Drive?

Kitchen?

Bathroom?

Any other aspect?

JimmyC_2009

A GPU will only help with rendering speed if the render engine uses it, Carrara (or even DAZ Studio) does not.

Luxrender can use both CPU and GPU together, Octane uses GPU only as far as I know, and does not use the CPU at all for rendering.

So, if you want to use the Carrara inbuilt render engine, you should concentrate on CPU, particularly the number of cores, the more the better (faster).

evilproducer

The GPU can help in the assembly room view, but that's about it. As JimmyC_2009 says, the Carrara render engine only uses the CPU, so the more cores the better. I would also add that the more RAM, the better.

WendyLuvsCatz

I would not even think about using Octane Render on a laptop myself, I watch my temp on my well ventilated tower for it and iClone as it is
that and gaming would be the only reason to get a more powerful graphics card I think.
i over heated my old cheap Dell using Carrara as it was.