Mobo/CPU Combo For a Rendering Comp.

[walterbieber]

What would a good motherboard and prosessor combo for a 3D animation and rendering computer?

[mtekk]

What's your budget range? Is this going to be a workstation, or just a "slave" that may become part of a "rendering farm"?

For a workstation, even though a good processor helps, the most important thing is your graphics card. If you are going to be doing professional work that runs allot of OpenGL based software, getting a professional level card (FirePro or Quadro) may be worth the price premium they carry. Core i7 (any model) with 6 to 18GiB of ram, on any x58 motherboard that has 6 DDR3 memory slots (I personally prefer Gigabyte and Asus over other brands, intel makes solid boards as well, that said the ASUS P6T looks to fit the bill at a reasonable price), with something like the FirePro V5700 (very good bang for the buck professional card) or better.

For something that you are going to use as more of a rendering farm node, you want to get a high core count and lots of memory (Core i7 if you can afford it, C2Q or Phenom II are your other choices).