Hi guys!
With the new i7 6850 k Broadwell chip if I am using Vray to render in the
background does this new chip allow me to work with another application
simultaneously in the foreground like Houdini? Does anyone have a
preferred graphics card that you like to use for houdini that is under $3,000? What are the
advantages of having 128 gb of ram over 64 or 32 gb when working in the
Houdini environment? What can you do with the extra storage? What other
software or hardware solutions let you access the ram memory from the
motherboard like the octane render software to speed up your work
environment?

jb123
What are the
advantages of having 128 gb of ram over 64 or 32 gb when working in the
Houdini environment?

You can create more complex sims on a single machine. With only 32Gb you start to top out and sim time rises dramatically when physical ram is exceeded.

• Using more than one application requires memory more than cores. the Broadwell-E chips won't give you much of a boost if you don't have enough memory. You can use houdini -j# to limit Houdini to # cores if you need the extra cores for another application.
  
• Recommended graphics cards: Nvidia TitanX, GEForce 1080/1070, 980ti, 980, 970.
  
• Memory can also be used as a disk cache, though this is less of an issue now that SSDs are common.