OTOY Forums

Dear All,

I am planning to use blender 2.5 with octane render. My budget is max. £1500, pref less. I would like to know what sort of hardware I could get away with. For example, i was thinking of getting the i7 870 with 4GB of ram plus a Gtx470. But I have no clue as to whether the CPU is more important than the ram, becuase i've seen posts where people are like they have 12GB of ram! I will be using blender for modeling, scupling (thanks to new cooler 2.5 features) & animation. Please help guys!

Thanks in advance,

Hi Squiggles, get as much ram as possible for blender if you go for sculpting or fluids/smoke simulation.
I could sculpt with about 20 Million faces on my system, what is more than enough, but ram is here my limit.
Get a 64 bit OS (i prefer linux, save 100€ for more ram ).
As option for the future and for smother work with octane get a mainboard with a second PCIe 2.0 x16 slot.
It is possible to put a cheap cuda card for display (8600gt e.g.) and use the gtx470 for octane renderer.
Later on you could buy another gtx470 for double speed renders (nearly).
At the moment they are driver issues with the gtx4xx series for blender (opengl).
I have no problems with my gtx260 because of more matured drivers for it.
But i think in a few weeks nvidia get it fixed otherwise many people with torches went to 2701 San Tomas Expressway, Santa Clara, CA 95050.

Have fun with octane, mib