adrianr

Sign me up!

He tells you how in the comments - (Just noticed you're probably the same guy asking in the comments )

“I projected an image onto points and baked that color into the point color value. It's pretty cheap for what it is”

It's a 2.5 million particle sim, so with comp on top, maybe a bit of blurring for the more fog volume parts (hard to tell as it never really gets very three dimensional), and some selective grading, especially blowing out the middle part of the galaxy, that could get you there.

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.