rendering speed comes from your processor.

I see, how will ram and extra hard disk ram help?

i think the 7200 RPM drive is fine, and the solid state as well

this is a very tough question, in my opinion, to answer, without looking into your hardware much more than i have (not at all)

the things that concern me right off the top:
- the system bus speed is 800 Mhz
- the RAM is stock at 667 Mhz, presumably DDR2 SDRAM
- the processor predates the i series

suggests to me that if you dig into the product data for your motherboard and processor, you may find that at most they support RAM speeds of 800 Mhz without too much tweaking of system voltages and clock speeds

the kind of tweaking you would need to do to go to 1066 Mhz or 1333 Mhz or 1600 Mhz is probably not possible in a laptop b/c either it will fry your components b/c you won't be able to dissipate the heat, since laptops, including mbp's, are already known for overheating when set up in stock configurations, or there may be safe guards in place which don't give you that much flexibility to tweak your hardware in a laptop

given all of this, a clock speed increase on RAM from 667 to 800, if possible, is a modest gain and while decent, is a bit slow compared to where most off-the-shelf computing hardware is right now, especially if you want to do rendering

in short, even if you buy more expensive, faster ram, if you try to set it up to run at its suggested frequency, you may find that the processor and MB will not go there but rather will just crash continuously

answering these questions seem as though they will govern any potential gains more so than the move from your current HDD to a 7200 RPM HDD or a SSD

nonetheless, the move to 6GB of RAM will be an asset for rendering capacity regardless of speed

in the end, you may find that as opposed to x-hundred number of dollars for new RAM and HDD, for $1000-$1500 you can get a new laptop with DDR3 RAM matched to an appropriate MB & i series processor that would blow away the tweaks you are considering

First of all, thank you for the detailed reply. They are informative and I learn a little more about tweaking system from your reply.

As for my current setup, yes, you are right that my system is only able to use the DDR2 Ram. I realized that my motherboard is the limiting factor for pushing the limit of my machine. However, I am not ready to fork out another $1000 for a new system or getting a softwares new licenses for the new system. It will be pretty costly and I am still a student on budget

However, having said that. I am willing to fork out around $200-300 to improve the overall performance of my laptop. I heard that the ram speed must never exceed or equal to the bus speed because they just can't use the extra power. On the contrary, they will probably just crash rather than working. I am planning to get the new 4gb ram from this website:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/5300DDR2S4GB/

As for my hard drive, I am considering to get the Momemtus XT 7200RPM but am wondering if it will works with my older version of macbook pro. Again, I am getting the drive from the same website:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/ST95005620AS/

I will really appreciate it if you could give comments or advises for the upgrade that I have shown you.

By the way, I am a bit confused by the statement by Cherith Cutestory and yours because it seems that he/she said that rendering power is coming from the processor where as you said that the ram will help tremendously in reducing the rendering time. Care to enlighten it as I am still learning about the hardwares of my system?

Again, thank you very much for the time that you took to reply my e-mail!

with respect to the hard drive, there has to be a forum or MB/processor product spec that covers whether the HD you're considering is compatible

i would imagine it is, as 7200 RPM drives have been out for a while, but it is worth digging a bit more

as far as my comment about added RAM being of benefit versus CPU clock speed, cherith is correct that with respect to increasing render times, clock speed is what matters most, generally speaking

but the additional ram will help in some instances. it will allow you to render more complex scenes more quickly, though it will not help you render simple scenes more quickly

for instance, let's say you render a teapot -- and the teapot is subd'd and so renders at 20,000 polygons and takes up 3 MB of RAM with lighting and shaders --- in this case, adding more ram has not increased your render speed, and if you primarily do small hard surface models the extra ram will not help

if however you render detailed interiors or large exterior scenes with millions or billions of polygons + bump maps and displacement textures + certain render effects, lots of grass and vegetation, you may push your use of RAM up to several GB per CPU core (render bucket) --- in this case, if you need 5GB of RAM (2.5 GB per bucket, not outlandish if you have lots of 3D vegetation + displacement maps), and you only have 4GB of RAM, then the added memory you need to access is coming from your paging file on your HD, accessing which is slower and more prone to throw an exception

in this latter case, having more RAM means you don't spill over into your paging file which will increase stability and speed when rendering large stills --- and if you do spill over, the faster hard drive will help to increase render time anyway

but again, it only seems of benefit for large scenes

Yeah, I come across the forum that suggest that the Momentus xt does work with the macbook pro. However, most of the implantation is done with the newer macbook pro (2009/2010) where as mine is the early 2008. I think I will send an e-mail ato ask about the compatibility issues but if there's any users that have answers to this, your replies will be very welcome!

I see, so that means that only render that pushes the boundary of 4gb will utilise the extra ram but any simple render that doesn't push that hard will not utilise the extra power that the ram is offering.

Thank you once again for answering my queries :)

sorry for the double post, how about an increase ram and hard drive rpm in respect to softwares like lightroom 3,photoshop, illustrator, etc? will these be performing significantly faster apart from having a faster application boots time?

again, i think speed of CPU cores and number of cores is most important, as cherith pointed out, unless you are working in massive documents in which case speed is being impacted by using virtual memory on the hard drive, then the extra ram and the faster hard drive should help

okay, thank you very much for the help! you have been really helpful! :)

The thing I hate about reading computer questions on archinect is that it's almost always a ton of either entirely incorrect or only half right info being passed around.

The real answers to your questions are incredibly detailed and very dependent on circumstances.

But basically: You probably can't do a whole lot to speed up your renderings. Ram will help a bit, if only because OSX likes to take whatever's available. But you'd probably still do better just rebooting before hitting "render"

So I'll just say this: everyone should get a good SSD*. Period. It is by far the most noticeable improvement you can do to a computer. It may not always help with rendering, but you'll see it just about everywhere else, even if you're on one of the Macs that is limited by SATA1 speeds. OS boots faster, programs load faster, and files open faster. Orders of magnitude faster than even a fast 7200rpm drive.

*For mac users, right now this is anything with a sandforce controller. OCZ's vertex 2, corsair's force, etc.

manamana is exactly right....especially on a budget of $200-300, it's probably better spent on a nice wacom or something that will increase your design efficiency rather than decrease your render time. I have a 2008 MBP as well and it's great for working in studio or on the go but if you really want to crank out those renderings, start saving and build yourself a badass desktop PC.

As for the new SSD, wow. Of course available capacity will more than double in the next year but I don't see the price coming down any time soon since it's such an advancement in technology.

next big SSD price drop will be the end of the year, when the intel 3rd generation drives come out. But like the G2 drives, they'll be hard to find for a while after launch.

But right now, $300 for a 120GB drive (or $200 for 80GB or $100 for 40GB) is peanuts for the benefit you get from a good SSD, especially compared to the prices you'll pay for a meager bump in CPU speed. Drop your old drive in an external case if you need storage space.

I imagine these tiny SSDs can't hold too many project files, so the time spent managing and shuffling what files you need on the SSD may become a nuisance compared to whatever time you gain from loading things faster.

Can't wait til they get larger and cheaper, though!

Curious though,

Do you guys keep just the OS, programs, and essential project files on the SSD, and then put your music files, pictures, archived projects, etc. on the external? And then another external hd to backup the external you use daily?

I'm trying to see how this would work if I jump the gun and go the SSD route sooner than later...

^ speaking of just laptops, of course

if I was on just a laptop, that's probably about what it would look like. Mostly all automated with backup software.

- SSD with a partition for the OS(es) and a partition for project files/storage.

- 2.5 inch USB3 or ESATA drive for daily backups of project files and large data that needs to be accessed frequently (music, movies, etc), along with a single clean OS image.

- 3.5 inch USB3 or ESATA drive (s) for weekly backups of the 2.5 inch drive.

I don't think SSDs right now are all that small. My desktop's SSD has about 55GB on it for OS and current project data. I don't think I've even had a project, academic or otherwise, that generated over 2-3 GB. I think in school a few years ago I was averaging ~5GB a semester, and most of that was photos.