System Specs vs Rendering

I've heard it all, really. "get good ram" "get top of the line cpu" "it's your motherboard and chipset" "it's your hard drive" and so on... I want you guys to chime in here and I apologize if it's been covered before. I looked a couple pages back and found nothing. And I realize it may be a little bit of everything but....

What's the most important component(s) when it comes to rendering?
 
It's not quite that simple. Ideally you need the CPU, Ram, Video Card and HDD all to work fast, though you'll quickly run out of cash quick smart. It's then best to work out what you plan to work with the most.

Without knowing the codec, there is no way to know if rendering is CPU bound, GPU bound, requires specialized gear and the requirement of the HDD.

Maybe I should have asked first what you're doing. Rendering audio, editing, vfx or for finishing have different requirements too.
 
You really have to test the specific type of thing you want to render and see how it affects your system.

First watch the CPU - is it maxed out? If so, you'd likely benefit from a faster CPU.

If not, why? Take a look at the memory usage - if it's maxed out, then your CPU is likely sitting around waiting for frames to be swapped in and out of RAM. Adding more RAM will likely help.

If neither the memory nor the CPU are maxed out, look at your storage system - is it reading data at or near it's sustained transfer limit? If so, adding a faster storage system will allow data to load into memory faster, which will allow the CPU to do more work.

If your memory isn't full, your drives aren't running at max speed, and your CPU is still not maxed out it probably means your software isn't optimized to make use of all the cores in your processor. You'll either need better software, or a CPU with a higher per-core clock speed, to speed things up. It's also possible you don't have your software configured correctly to make use of the available resources - for instance After Effects often needs some options configured properly to really max out the CPU when rendering.

The problem is, whatever the bottleneck - once you eliminate it you'll likely just bump into the next one.
 
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True - I tend to forget about the GPU because most of the heavy rendering I've done was before GPUs were really leveraged much for the final render. I imagine it would be the same process though - look at the GPU's processor and memory utilization to see which was being maxed out, and if it's neither then look to storage, etc.
 
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