Noob question here that I'll try to ask as clearly as I can.
If I have a gaming PC the most important part is the GPU, I can have everything mid/low tier and still get great results if I have a beast of a graphics card but if the GPU is shit then gaming performance is dragged down massively too, no matter how good everything else is.
Is there some similar type of thing with rendering videos?
Like can I have mid level cpu and gpu just so long as I have 64gigs of ram for example?
Basically what part has the biggest effect on reducing rendering times?
CPU - you need a big, beefy gorilla to crunch all those bits and bytes quickly and effectively.
RAM - what slows you down the most is writing to physical cache. More ram means more time working smoothly. (This is more of a workflow necessity than an export necessity)
Proper disk setup: you mix your OS and media drives with your cache folders its going to gum up the works when the editor needs to read and write onto the same disk every few moments.
GPU - The thing with the GPU is that it helps but not as much as you'd think. Its there when you export for sure these days, you might see it helping rendering previews in your sequence window and definitely in your filters but not much else.
The unlocked haswell i7 cpu´s are faster in rendering, but i would not botter to much about that at the moment. i would wait with upgrading for haswell-E X99 6 core 12 Thread cpu´s.