Creating a 3d render farm

[Banzai_Joe]

Hi all,
hope someone can help with this.
I'm looking to create a render farm with our existing hardware. Here's the dealio;
we have a 6-core worksation (on a gigabit network) that runs Archicad. Our technician wants to render but using a farm to speed things up.
Now, we also have 23 x Dell desktops, all identical, running w7 pro x64, i3, 4gb ram.
We were thinking when most users bugger off for the night that these Dells could form the render farm and eat their way through any work the 6-core workstation hands out to them.
Reading up it seems that you can either render using CPU or GPU cycles. Well seeing as these Dell's have onboard GPU's the cheapest option is to use CPU power.

I have no idea of 3d/cad design software, i'm just the I.T. monkey charged with sorting this out.
The network is put together with cisco managed switches, so i could always look at trunking up the farm pc's to give the maximum throughput, if indeed it needs it.

Currently we have spent £27k in 6 months on sending our renders to a 3rd party (averaging approx £320 per render). That money could pay for our own in-house renderer to do all the work. Or at least train our existing guy up to top standard then get on with ourselves.

Can anyone advise please?

 

[Banzai_Joe]

The dells are i3-2100 with 4gb of ram (not 4gb as i mentioned in my op).
All data, although not on a san is on a ML370 with SAS 10k disks in a raid 5 array.
I can created a 4gbit trunk on the switches and dedicate it to the render nodes (i think).
These Dell's are in use daily by our regualr office staff, so they would need to utilise what is already on there. Only at night would they really be used in the render farm, or possibly if some users are out during the day, but then that would likely create network overhead for everyone else.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

Ok...post #5 onwards........shot straight over my head like an arrow.

As i mentioned in my op, the potential nodes run win7 pro x64 and are used daily by our office staff, BUT only bluebox seemed to pick up on that.

The renderer uses Archicad 13. I assume (or hope) that it has some kind of plug-in to allow for the setup of a render farm.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

Ok, post #5 onwards shot over my head like an arrow.

As my OP says, the potential nodes run win7 pro x64 and are used daily by office staff, but only bluebox seems to have borne that in mind .

Our renderer use Archicad 13 and i would assume (or hope) that it carries a plug-in to allow for pc's to be setup as render farm nodes.

I have to be looking at the cheapest possible option first, then maybe turn towards a dedicated farm setup if need be.