I need more power for rendering in 3ds max, whats best?

Question

I am currently teaching myself 3ds max, my laptop has been doing fine until now, but now i am starting to do more complex designs, rendering time is starting to get a bit silly! I dont have the exact figures to hand, but my laptop is approx 3Ghz Pentium 4 HT, 1024mbRam, 128mb Graphics. I am on a budget (i.e. ebay here we come!), what sort of spec should i look out for purely to use for rendering in 3ds max?
Thanks for any help.

Sorry, yes, looking to buy a whole new computer just for this use, keep the laptop for everything else.

Answer 1

i use lightwave and have a similar system to yours,

P4 3.2Ghz 1024 (400Mhz) ram 256Mb X800SE gfx card,

if i was to upgrade to get more performance i would first double or quadruple my RAM and maybe (if i had the cash) buy a new motherboard and processor that supports 800Mhz ram and buy a dual or quad core processor, i also found for pure 3d rendering that turning OFF HT in the bios made it run a little quicker

so ideal would be

P4 DC (dual core) 3Ghz
4096Mb 800Mhz dual channel ram
graphics card dont really matter imho cause you are not using openGL or directX (if you are you should turn it off :p)
hope this helps

Answer 2

I think that your main problem is that you are using laptop for such things. laptop is very hard to upgrade and I would suggest you to go for PC with lots of RAM and dual core processor...