Looking to buy Render Servers

mothermachine

mothermachine

mothermachine

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8 Oct 2004
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Hi folks,

I'm about to receive a Supermicro 1u render node on rental (should be here this Friday) but I'm looking to invest in a couple of 1us or one 2u purely for use as a render node.

Will need to be dual xeon quad or ideally hex core with 12GB RAM.

The only major concern is noise from the fans. Are there any well-known chasis/makes/models etc that are fairly quiet? I'm probably going to be running at least one, possibly 2 of these things in a small office not far from where I sleep.

Or would it just be cheaper, quieter and easier to build a dual xeon workstation in a regular PC chassis?

Any recommendations would be great.

Cheers,
 
Oh and while I'm at it, if anybody has a spare dual xeon node or two they'd like to rent out to me for a few weeks starting next week that'd be fantastic! More than happy to pay of course.
 
I think any 1/2U server is going to be very loud. You'd be better off getting pedestal servers as they are generally quieter.

As for building your own, what does a render server do? i'm assuming some kind of rendering of 3d scenes etc? What is this operation bound by? like CPU, GPU, Memory etc? I'm assuming its CPU by the amount of cores you want. I'd be tempted to ignore multiple CPU's and instead spend the money on lots of cheap dual's instead, quantity over quality etc. Depends how the application scales...
 
cheers,

it's 3ds max so it scales very well :) more cores, more CPUs = more power, as expected.

I would be tempted to agree that fewer cores but more processors would be cheaper but would require more chassis therefore more cooling + more noise. would like to stuff as much power into one chassis as possible really.

i'm going to google pedestal servers. that sounds interesting!

cheers
 
I have about 20 render nodes at work. Ill reply in the morning once I am back at work with a little more info.
 
We currently have 10 HP DL380 G5's, 2 x 2U Quad nodes and 4 x 1U nodes.

Ours are located in the server room with the rest of our server equipment. However, the 2U Quads nodes seem to use a massive amount of power and these sometimes push our UPS over the limit, which isn't ideal tbh. All the 1U servers are a little bit too noisy to use in a office environment to be honest but they done generate much heat. However, the 2U Quad node machines produce a massive amount of heat and noise.

If they are going to be used in a office environment, id be looking at a desktop machine personally. I can recommend you a few but I don't know if they would be classed as a competitor.

If you need any more help let me know. :)
 
Hi mate - very helpful, thanks!

I'm on to a supplier now to see if I can rent a couple of regular dual xeon workstations - i think they will be the best in terms of heat, noise and power consumption core-for-core.

Servers just don't seem all that practical in a small office environment!

Please do e-mail me @ [email protected] if you want to recommend any good uk-based rentals. would really appreciate it!

Cheers,
 
have come to the conclusion that servers are utterly pointless.

my i7 970 workstation is the same as one of the two nodes inside this thing. it cost about £1400 in total. so 2 of those = £2800. this ONE server on it's own (it's 2 nodes) costs about £3500. and it's about 5 times louder.

yes you save space but meh....
 
just an update in case anyone was interested: i ended up renting 2 x workstations (one is a dual quad core xeon and the other is a dual hex core xeon), both fly like crazy, and a stupidly noisy quad xeon server. one of the two nodes in that server died on me for no reason, just won't power up.

i also went with a render farm uhp narth who have been outstanding so far. got rendered frames fresh from the farm hitting my drives right now in fact :) couldn't be happier with their service and considering the outlay for hardware i think i'll just be using them in the future rather then going down the server route.
 
If you don't need the render boxes on 24x7 you could look at Amazon ec2 vm's. Might work out well for you as you could scale the rendering machines to as many as you need to get the job done quickly and then shut them all down.
 
accod said:
If you don't need the render boxes on 24x7 you could look at Amazon ec2 vm's. Might work out well for you as you could scale the rendering machines to as many as you need to get the job done quickly and then shut them all down.
Click to expand...

that's actually pretty interesting.. i've heard that there are some cloud-based rendering services popping up but most of them seem to be basic CUDA farms rather than CPU-based render farms. worth looking into though cheers!
 
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