(Speed) How many threads do I use when rendering in blender internal?

I understand that for a i7 processor I can use 8 threads in blender because per core it uses two threads and there are 4 cores in an i7 processor?
anyway I am not sure what to set the threads to. I want to make the render time faster and I was wondering what I can do? I know that turning up the threads will speed it up but is it bad for the computer to turn it all the way up to 64 threads? I was wondering if I could do that and not damage my PC. I want the animation to be good quality but I want speed in the rendering time so I wonder how to do that. Any thoughts? I would appreciate it if anyone could help me.

Thanks!

Hi, you can´t speed up rendering much with thread setting but you can try to keep the tile setting small, 32x32 for example and the threads setting system threads + 1.
64 threads make no sense because of overhead.

Cheers, mib.

I sometimes run double thread count to actual processors but in the case of the i7 the hyperthreads are not 100% real processors. So 8 threads might be the right number. Also play around with the tile count. For Blender Internal I find a higher tile count actually produces a quicker render, compared to Cycles tile count. On Blender Internal I run a tile count between 64 and 192. For Cycles I keep it much lower, like 32x32 as suggested.

Also, you may notice that no matter what settings you choose you will find that Blender is just not using 100% of all your CPUs. At this point I launch a second copy of Blender to render a parallel animation frame range. So I might have 3-4 copies of Blender on a 16 core machines rendering frame ranges like 0-100, 101-200,201-300 etc… That is another reason to keep your thread count reasonable. When you launch a second copy of Blender for additional rendering you don’t need the excessively high thread count.

Thanks for the advice!

Thank you for the advice!