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Aside from some futuristic system that only exists in the imagination (or Area 51, possibly), what features would you include to build the ideal system for fractal rendering and animation?  Multi-processor?  Video card?  RAM and hard drive size?

The reason I'm asking is, I am currently rendering an animation which, if my calculations are correct, will take between 2 and 3 months to finish.  I am assuming this long time scale (for 4:39 of animation) is due to the fact that my system is probably FAR from ideal.  LOL

The Rev

lol that is why I quit working on anything lengthy.  While rendering over night, I have lost everything due to "updates"  Or my SO gets home, checks out PC & says "do you have anything going on here?"  I sheepishly say "you can use it in a couple hrs"  And that is just for 2 seconds of animation.  I guess I'm not really a commitment type of person.

Focus on raw computing power.

Forget about hard drive speed, video cards, RAM size, all of that. You need lots of cores, and running fast.

You might want to check out http://www.hpdz.net/TechInfo/Corei7-980X.htm (http://www.hpdz.net/TechInfo/Corei7-980X.htm). That's the direction I'd suggest going, although I will admit I went a bit overboard on the enclosure (oh, but the HAF-X case is an absolute joy to work with). The motherboard and CPU are wonderful. I got 12GB of RAM, which I thought was too much, but actually my software can use it when making very large animations with frame interpolation. Other software, I don't know.

I selected the motherboard for its ability to overclock and provide fine-tuning to help with that. It turned out that OC'ing to 4.0 GHZ was absolutely effortless, and I am very happy with this configuration.

There are 8-core Xeon CPUs and motherboards that can hold at least two of them, if you're willing to spend about $10K.

My system cost about $2000.