>>7989
I'm still trying to work out what part of "I'm not going to spend any money on this" isn't clear. Eighty bucks is still eighty bucks more than zero. I'd be more inclined to put that cash towards a render package that can actually work on my machine, e.g. some older version of the same line which doesn't have such demanding minimum specs.

Especially as buying a CPU and motherboard doesn't help very much when I haven't got a desktop machine to transplant it into in the first place (laptops don't tend to be very amenable to CPU swaps, certainly not ones that need a whole different socket standard), and would then need to go about getting a system disc and OS for it etc, plus a video card of sufficient power, 8gb or more of reasonably fast RAM, so on and so forth.

After all if all that was needed was a sufficiently powerful CPU, why can't I instead just swap instructions/sec for a longer render time? I've enough years of computer use under my belt to remember when raytracing even simple scenes at 320x200 could be a 24-hour job (and then you had to go about the business of converting the truecolour output into something your 16 or 256 colour machine could actually display), so having my quad core (?? or maybe dual with hyperthreading, I can never remember) i5 run for 2 or 3 times as long as a Xeon might is no big hardship.