I'm not a hardware person, I rely on a local one-man shop whom I've dealt with for many years. I just want to drive the car, not build it. I tell him I need a fast CPU for renders, and I buy whatever he recommends - he doesn't go too extreme like water-cooled, over clocked gaming monsters. In June of 2014, it was i7 4770k 3.5 (8 cores), plus an nVidia 660GTX (for Carrara previews, I think). I've been happy with it rendering short animations in Carrara. Now he tells me we can go faster ... and three years is long enough that my wife doesn't complain too much.