Wasn't it Tek who wrote:
>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?

To find out what's fastest, I suggest that you take a look at the
"Official PoVRay Benchmarks" site 
<http://new.haveland.com/povbench/index.php>

The figures there are for the POV 3.5 benchmark and go as low as 
11 mins 7 for a single CPU and 1 minute 12 for 128 CPUs in parallel.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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