Who can get this UNIVERSAL 2.4 LWF scene down to 5min render?

[jstrob]

Here is your scene with my cheats if you want to inspect it.
Type VS Mode_strob01.zip

[Neilg]

I heard that i7 can be faster to simulate phoenixfd but I am a bit sceptical or I don't understand something about that.

take a single core side by side, the best i7's are slightly faster than xeons - it's just the xeons have 2 times as many cores if not even more. phoenix is multithreaded but it doesn't divide up perfectly like vray so the speed increase doesn't increase along with core count. a smaller number of faster cores works out slightly better overall.
not by much though, it's not a big deal. If you could get dual i7's it'd be a game changer.

e: you can get a 12 core xeon, so 48 cores max compared to a max of 16 with an i7. the xeon isnt 3 times faster though - more like twice the speed.

[jstrob]

One thing we must not forget is that we can run 2 phoenixFD sims at the same time on a single computer (on the same license too). I didn't do that often (in fact the only time I tried it one of the sim crashed so I stopped doing it) but if comparing dual xeon and i7 I would try that a little more. If you buy 2 i7 to run 2 sims you will have to buy 2 licenses.