Thanks numerobis. I have couple more questions (hope I'm not too much for you:) ). I took a maybe 2-year-old 600w psu from one of the servers(they're made to be more reliable than those for PCs and all of the cables and supply fit so I hope it's enough to power an oc'ed 2700k and the single 570 card) that I don't use anymore for now. I'm planning on getting better psu in 750w-850w range and the second card in near future. I've decided to order Asrock Z77 extreme4 for my mobo 8gb Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz CL9 and zalman cnps10x optima (I saw couple tests where it kept 2700k oc'ed to 4,8GHz under 74 degrees and I don't plan to overclock it that much. Plus Zalman includes one of the better thermal pastes so I won't have to buy it). Other than that I have couple questions that popped up in my mind this week.
I read somewhere that Vray will try to use any OpenCL card I have in my set up as long as it is the same type of architecture as the main one. So first of all is it true? If so could I also use 6xx series (providing that the new drivers will make them better than 5xx series at rendering) since small kepler is pretty much a revised fermi architecture? Is it the same in Octane, iRay etc.? On the side note If I've ever lost my mind and went to try is (aside from sketchup) Radeon's new 28nm architecture better or at least at similar level as 5xx geforce series at GPU rendering?
Based on those two links having AMD and nVidia at the same time is possible:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/355840-15-running-radeon-geforce-time
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=156878 (nvidia's forum doesn't work though)
Speaking of extra video cards. I still have an old 8800 GTS and will have 3 PCI-E slots on asrock. Would it be beneficial for me to include it in my setup (when I get stronger PSU of course) for viewport or something or would it be just couple cents more on my monthly bill?
I am open for suggestions and constructive criticism.
Edit: Temperature is in celcius.

ok, so i decided to trust both of your advices and i went with i7 2700k + EVGA GTX570 w/ 2,5 gb ram.Btw, thank you guys so for help, much appreciated.
I just saw a trailer of THEA4su's utilization of gpu in scene rendering and i'm considering overclocking my card up to about stock 580 performance and cpu to about 4,2~4,5ghz. Is overclocking gpu, cpu or ram recomended for non professional rendering? I haven't bought mobo and psu, yet, so i have some wiggle room for minor tweaks.

Thanks you for your valuable input. Really apreciate it.
I found brand new EVGA GTX580 for $200 (although offer is no longer valid) and I heard good things about it on this board so I thought it could have been the one to go with.
Seeing and hearing how vrayRT is developing I wanted to think ahead and set up machine that wouldn't be too expensive for me and could handle vrayRT GPU render preview that chaos group showcased some time ago, one that could render fairly quick and wouldn't be too sluggish while operating on 150mb+ sketchup models . Since it's just for fun and I care only about 3d modeling, animation, rendering and I'm stretching my budget a bit, I want to cut down as much as possible on things I don’t need.
The reason why I wanted to go with FX-8150/8120 is the fact that in benchmarks focused on 3d modeling and rendering it seemed almost on par with i5 2500k but for almost $100 less. I don’t care about games and I have laptop for work so if sacrificing some functions wouldn’t hurt my main goals significantly, I wouldn’t mind it.
So what to pursue? Right now, Geforce 650 ti just came out (at least here) and they seem to be pretty cheap for what they offer, I am also weighing GTX660 and GTX660 ti but they are twice as much. The have 760, 960, 1344 CUDA cores respectively. Would it matter if vrayRT for sketchup came out? And if so is there a significant differce in preview time/quality between 760 and 1344? How much size of GPU’s memory matters? Is 1, 2 or 3gb enough?
So the bottom line is that I will probably come down to either taking better CPU at a cost of GPU or vice versa.
One last thing is that I’d rather leave my computer to work over the night or even for 2 straight days but I would hate it if after 6 hours of rendering I noticed something isn’t how I wanted it to look. I don’t have enough experience to always know how rendered image will turn out so I really like the idea of GPU preview.
Please help.
Thanks in advance.

I'm upgrading my computer focusing only on 3d modeling and rendering. I'd like it to run SU+Vray and 3ds+vray as optimal(fast) as possible. So far I narrowed my choice down to
geforce 580 3072mb gddr5, amd bulldozer 8150 or fx-4170 and 8 gb 1600mhz ddr3 RAM. Since sketchup uses single core I'm trying to have as fast clock on single core as possible and as many cores as possible for 3ds. Does Amd work well with SU? Did anyone have similar dilemma and maybe found better solution?

Also I found Geforce 550 TI with 3gb ddr3 and 450 with 4gb ddr3 Axle3d gpu's really cheap. Does anyone have any experience or heard reviews about those card. Would they be significantly slower than 580?

Please help, I would appreciate any info that would help speed up my work flow hardware wise.
Thanks.

Hi CPhillips.
Great to have you back. I wasn't sure if your valuable work on SP was abondoned, either. I'm glad it isn't.

Right of the bat, may I suggest fixing emitted objects and entities created using "splitme" so they that would apear on SketchyReplay. It would help a lot of people in animation and since new Vray version is to come out it may become an ultimate animation tool for sketchup users.

Thanks.

Great Idea. I'm in as well.
Email sent. Look forward to see this come to life.

Okay, I managed to move entire array of groups however my project didn't save and because I did it after days of trial and error I can't now recreate my snippet but maybe someone knows how I can move that array of groups to another place (if I could get this first step again i should be able to get the rest). I'm pretty sure I used tranformation to get destination but can't figure it out.
Please help!!

I have 2 almost identical (visually) bodies, however one is a component and the other is exact same component but exploded->cut into pieces->which were than grouped (using method split()) so now I have the same shape but instead of 1 piece it consist of 256 groups now. I'd like find those groups (I can name them easily selecting them and using Entity info for multiple objects), put them into an array then locate 1-piece component erase it and put my shape consisting of 256 pieces in a place of a that solid single-piece component so I can then create some sort of a shatter effect.
I'm trying to work around an issue that Sketchyreplay has with entities that are created during simulation and doesn't include them correctly into output animation like split or emit.
I'm stuck with this problem for a week now and I need it for my project almost now.
If you could help me I would apreciate it. Please:)

I'm trying to replace component by it's previously split array of groups stuctured to have the same form and dimentions. For more universal use I'm give all pieces[entities} the same name then I locate them using by given name and put them into an array using script from Lazyscript

def entityByName(entity_name="", ent_array=Sketchup.active_model.entities) #will look for entities with entity_name in ent_array, if entity_name is string it will return a single entity, if entity_name is an array of names it will return  an array of all found
    if entity_name.class==Array
      x=0;
      entity_list=[];
      ent_array.each{|ent| 
        if (ent.typename=="Group" or ent.typename=="ComponentInstance")
          entity_name.each{|name| 
          if(name==ent.name); entity_list[x]=ent; x+=1; end;}
        end;}
      return entity_list;
    elsif entity_name.class==String
    	if entity_name=="FindText"
    		x=0;
    		entity_list=[];
    		ent_array.each{|ent| entity_list.insert(-1,ent) if (ent.typename=="Text") }
    		return entity_list
    	else
      	ent_array.each{|ent| 
        	if (ent.typename=="Group" or ent.typename=="ComponentInstance") and ent.name==entity_name; 
          	return ent;
        	end;}
      end
    end;
  end;

Now.. I checked UI and it finds those groups but I can't move the array using tranform! move! or transform_entities.

Ideally, i'd like to move all elements(groups)of the array simultaneously into position with rotation adequate to siluhette/eclipse the component. If it's not possible I could deal with some minor sacrifices.
Thanks in advance

I apologize in advance for posting in not the most accurate section, however, Sketchyphysics section is pretty dead and I think my question could fit this sections as well.

I'm trying to make entities created during simulation in SP apear during animation saved by SketchyReplay. I tried to walk around my problem destroying and emitting objects, dividing objects using split()command as well as exploding groups and components and I can't grasp anything that would be generated or changed during simulation on SketchyReplay.

How can I make it visible. API is pretty new to me so I'm just guessing I need to make an instance of those entities before running simulation? If so how?

Thanks
Lucas

Edit:grammar