Building new system whats needed for enhanced rendering

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I'm building a new system and want an opinion of whats good for doing quality renderings. Currently I'm looking at the following hardware.

Archicad 12
Motherboard = ASUS P7H55-M DDR3
Intel Core i3-550 3.20Ghz
4G Patriot DDR3 1333 Ram
Graphics/Video Card - This is where I'm stumped. Nvidia Quadro FX380 LP 512mb or any suggestions welcome. Does the card have any control over the end result of your rendering or is it more about just navigating in the 3d window?
Windows 7 home premium 64bit.

Any help/advice will be most appreciated.

Thanks Grimaldi

[Laszlo Nagy]

I would buy the strongest processor I could get.
So I would get an i7 processor, not an i3.

Regarding the video card see my other post:

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=174069#174069

[Anonymous]

to render in ArchiCAD/Lightworks?
If so spend less on the hardware and include Artlantis in your overall system - you'll get overall better results with a whole lot less fuss...

[Anonymous]

ArchiCad North America has an online presentation called "AC Dream Machine". You need to be a subscriber (I think) to see it. Look here.

Basically buy lots of memory (8GB), use professional video cards with 512 MB dedicated memory (more video memory is usually a waste of money), fast-very-fast hard drives, SAS type at 15,000 rpm, true quad core (not core duo) i7 or better with high Hertz speed. Oh yeah, large monitor at 1600x1200 resolution min. In addition to that make sure the video card supports OpenGL 2 or better and DirectX10, not hard these days.

Think about SSD drives or look here for ramdisks.

Snap