Home render farm

[canwood]

Hi

Just wanted to ask people's advice about a home render farm for visual effects and animation. I'm upgrading my setup to be faster and more space efficient.

At the moment I have an i7 3930k 32gb desktop as my workstation, 3 x i7 3770k 16gb desktops and a hp xe 8400 8 core Xeon with 16gb ram.

I kinda gathered this setup in a rush for an animation project which needed a lot of rendering. Now I'm trying to organise everything a bit better.

I just bought a qnap ts869 pro 8 bay nas for my storage, now I'd like to organise my render setup into a smaller space - ie a rack mounted setup. It has to be cost effective if possible reusing the hardware I already have and adding to it or if its cost effective to sell what I have and start again then that's fine I don't really want to spend more than another £1000 on render nodes, I've noticed some decent dell poweredge units
View item:
DELL PowerEdge C6100 4 Node 8x Xeon Quad Core 2.26GHz 32GB DDR3 Cloud Server VTx


But I'm aware I'd be using a home power supply and these things can be thirsty. Also ideally I need to keep the noise and heat at reasonable levels as ill be in the room with these machines.

If anyone has any tips or ideas on setups and hardware I'd really appreciate it I think I made the wrong choices last time around!

Thanks in advance

Marc

 

[canwood]

Thabks fir the reply Most likely will be vray although I am looking at clarisse ifx and Arnold.

 

[canwood]

I think that's probably the best route, anyone know any good guys/companies in London who could knock some of these up for me?

 

[canwood]

I don't want to overclock the render nodes as they'll be hot enough I have my 3930k watercooled and overclocked to 4.4ghz by yoyo tech London but I found it unstable over long periods of time especially when simming for several days I find out very frustrating losing work and have since removed the over clocking even though I paid a premium to buy it.