I'm planning to build a new system, specifically for POV rendering. My only
interest is in getting it to render pov scenes in the shortest time possible.
Budget is pretty flexible but not completely ridiculous, somewhere in the
thousands not tens of thousands of US dollars, and I'll be building the system
myself so all the money will go on components/OS.

So, what I want to know is: What hardware & OS configuration will give the
fastest povray rendering performance? And how much work would it take to get it
all running?

I'm open to options including multi-processor, multi-machine, custom pov builds,
etc... The only restriction is that the more work I need to do to get the thing
running the less likely it is I'll ever find the time to do it!

My ultimate aim is to improve my overall productivity in povray: I want to have
a fast way of rendering very complex high res still images and very long low res
animations, without needing any manual work to set the render going and retrieve
the result (i.e. if I have a PC farm it should be entirely automated so I don't
have to do any more than if I were rendering on a single machine).

One final note, I'm really not interested unless the system will be a number of
times faster than my current setup (Athlon XP 3000 overclocked to 2280MHz,
running Windows XP), which ran the POV 3.6 beta benchmark in 28 minutes.

So, what do you think? What sort of system should I build?

--
Tek
www.evilsuperbrain.com

P.S. Obviously if I do build such a system then I'd be quite happy to let other
people use it's power when I don't need it :)

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