Potential Upgrade for Rendering

[halomademeapc]

I'm working on a Safety Animation for my school's robotics team, and have been working in 3ds max. I can leave school computers on overnight to render and have a lot of them going like a little farm, but they're so dated that it's hardly worth the effort. I'm wondering if there's any substantial step up from my current CPU that I can do. It'll be a stretch in itself to get a new CPU, so changing out the motherboard is probably out of the question.

I think my motherboard supports FX cards, but when I upgraded from that god-awful Pentium D a little under two years ago, feedback on them wasn't great, so I stuck to a Phenom. Not sure if things have changed since then.

Anywho, here's my current setup:
300W PSU (I can get my hands on a 400 or maybe a 500 watt one if necessary)
Gigabyte GA870A-USB3 rev.3
8GB PNY Optima DDR3 RAM
AMD Phenom II X6 1035t
MSi GeForce GT440
Crucial M4 128GB SSD
Western Digital Caviar 250GB 7200rpm HDD (from way back in 2005)
Seagate Expansion 1TB USB3.0
SanDisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD
Samsung SuperWriteMaster DVD+-RW Drive
Toshiba 80GB 5400rpm HDD
RaLink 802.11 b/g PCI card
Conexant Falcon Analog TV Tuner
AVerMedia Analog/Digital Dual TV Tuner
ATI TV Wonder HD 600 PCI

(I listed out the extra stuff in case there are any PSU limitations)

Any recommendations for a better CPU (if there is one available for my motherboard) would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Neoaculus]

What is your budget?

 

[halomademeapc]

probably around $200 at the absolute max

 

[Neoaculus]

Good. Get these two items.
Motherboard: http://goo.gl/MfuQcw
CPU: http://goo.gl/rQTMIK

 

[halomademeapc]

Is a dual core i3 really going to outperform a hexacore phenom II at rendering? Keep in mind that 3ds actually uses all six cores, so the superior single core performance of the i3 won't mean as much.

 

[halomademeapc]

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i3-3220-vs-AMD-Phenom-II-X6-1035T
Yeah the phenom outperforms the i3 on multi threaded stuff

Anywho, I managed to convince the tech department at my school to install back burner and give me remote access to all the computers in the engineering department at school (a bit mediocre, but the best in the corporation). So, I have a render farm of about sixty 2nd gen i5 desktops at 3.2GHz at my disposal overnight Wednesdays and over the weekend.

I'm going to save my money for upgrading my PCs graphics this holiday season.

 

[Androideka5]

No it won't. The "go intel bruh cuz itzz way betters always" (not bashing the poster above, and I do understand Intel's benefits) doesn't really apply to rendering and virtualization. Those will always play nicer with more cores, and the only way Intel could beat it out is on the higher end chips, which are unfortunately outside of your budget from the get-go. I'm a programmer, so I do a lot of virtualization and a bit of rendering, and AMD chips generally perform better. But not so for gaming, which of course doesn't apply to this situation.

 

[Neoaculus]

Intel is better at application processing/rendering.