Thanks for all of the dialogue. I have also been asking others and the
consensus seems to be that more processing power will  bring the biggest
bang for the buck although there could be some improvement with faster
memory. I'll probably go with an 1800+ and overclock it a bit and save the
money for DDR and go with sdram 133.

Now my most exciting discovery ... in the midst of this discussion (and
others that I have been having) I stumbled on a web page that hosts a
benchmark and a recompiled version of POVRay 3.1g that is optimized for the
PIII and Athlon, it was done as an experiment. I took a low resolution
render of one of my images (160X120 no AA) and rendered it. Standard POVRay
3.1g took 15 min and 47 sec. With the code optimized it took 4 min and 0
sec. I was astounded. Combining this with a faster processor, I think there
will be a great improvement.

Now, because of the complexity of the image, most of the time saved with the
optimized POV engine was in the parsing. I'll let you know an approximated
time savings after I render a few of the pictures at full resolution where
most of the time saved will be in actual rendering.

For those interested in the site, it is located at:

http://students.washington.edu/sschmitt/pov/

Kirk

"Kirk Hubbell" <kir### [at] yahoocom> wrote in message
news:3c1ea50e@news.povray.org...
> I am building a new PC for rendering images with POVRay. I am working on a
> project that will require a lot of images. I have already done the work
but
> I still need to render. Due to the complexity of the images each image
takes
> over a day to render, so  speed is important.
>
> The problem is my budget.
>
> Question, for the Windows version of POVRay has anybody done a benchmark
> comparison of how fast images render with the Althon XP processor with 133
> sdram versus DRR 2100?
>
> I know the DDR is faster but I have heard that streaming applications (not
> computative intensive ones) are the big winners.
>
> I guess that I really want to know if it would be worth the money to
upgrade
> to the DDR memory if my other choice were to upgrade to a 1800 or 1900
> Althon (assuming that I could not afford to do both).
>
> I have looked at some POVRay bench mark sites but they do not distinguish
> sdram/DDR in an apples to apples comparison.
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Kirk
>
>

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