I'm looking at building a new PC, $1500-2000 range, and wondering if anyone has recommendations for parts that will help me get the most out of Houdini, particularly in rendering.

Anyone got specific parts or even full builds?

Tip1:
Get a lot of ram!
Depending on what you want to do you will need a lot of ram.
And i guess it water, smoke etc. If so you cant have enough ram.
i have 64gb and i max out!

So for your budget you have a tough decision to make:
XEON or not?

With an i7 you only get up to max 64GB, but you get a fast maschine for less money.

But i would go for something like this if i had the +2k$:
970gtx 350$
xeon 2011-3 8 core 2.6 Ghz 6-800$ ?
64gb of ram 400$ ddr4 ecc
motherboard 2011-3 250$
case, power, hds etc: ?
This way you will be able to upgrade the ram at a later stage when you know 64 gb is not enough… Maybe if you shop around you might even be able to get 128gb within your budget.

I was on a tighter budget so i got the i7…

kind regards

Olaf

You could look at something like a refurbed HP Z620 if you didn't mind second hand. Dual CPU (Which Houdini will use nearly all the time), and capacity to take up to 192GB of ram.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z620-Workstation-2x-Xeon-E5-2670-2-6GHz-8-Core-32GB-1TB-NVS300-Win7-Pro-/131651117907?hash=item1ea704a353:g:ZicAAOSwKIpWDaF0 [ebay.com]

Chuck a couple of big SSD's in RAID0 for a sim cache and you're good to go. It's not going to be as quick in purely single threaded tasks as a modern i7, especially when you factor in overclocking, but they are solid machines that will run 24/7 at max without skipping a beat, or making a decibel more noise.