Render Farm

Tythus · 31 Mar 2011 at 21:58

I'm looking for a small, cool, power efficient way to get as much CPU smash for the money for a render farm I want to do so I can more effectively render my 3d all they will need to do is run the render utility so hard disk,GPU,Optical Drive etc space is not a requirement.

Tythus · 31 Mar 2011 at 22:26

beavis said:
What are tools are you rendering with?
Is noise a consideration?
How much money are you looking to spend?

well atm I have 3700 for this farm atm...noise isn't a large consideration as long as its not equivalent to a jet taking off.

Tythus · 2 Apr 2011 at 19:18

Ideally 3dsMax / Maya With Mental Ray / Vray

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 19:17

Qu3 said:
Its probably more efficient to buy/rent Ghz on a render farm rather that set one up yourself..

I just put my last render in and that would cost me an 8th of my Farm >_>

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 19:58

hmmmmmm.......now all I need to do is find loads of cheap Quads does he say how much this project cost him?

A starting thought? all I would need to do is case them? But now I really need to look at rendering software >_> does anyone know a package that works on linux that can take 3ds MAX?

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 20:16

Delete

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 21:31

J.B said:
I tried to do this when my missus and house mate where rendering out their dissertation projects (with the idea of helping loads of 2D/3D people who were all struggling to get decent render times off their mac books).

The biggest problem was throughput, you need a fast network and very fast central storage! Was a fun little project but was of zero use to my GF!

This was before the days of cloud computing!

I could add a gigabit switch for them and go from there what do you mean by very fast central storage?
I found a 3ds Max render manager for linux

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 21:46

droyden said:
I would try to obtain some benchmarks on what type of cpu requirements are best, also if things like L3 cache are required.. such things will probably decide for you.
also I assume the rendering is CPU based and can't use GPU based encoding etc?

Some of the software can but its all a bit iffy I would rather I had 1 that can do everything.

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 22:05

droyden said:
ahh right, you may want to look at an i7 based system rather than amd. should check MM to see if you can source 2nd hand cpu's.

This isn't to make an awesomely powerful setup more how much can I get in terms of CPU power for the smallest amount payed.

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 23:23

droyden said:
I understand that, but there is no point in buying 4 cheap x3 AMD chips that actually may actually provide less speed (as far as encoding is concerned) than a single chip. not to mention 3 more sets of ram/psu/mobo etc etc.
just my two cents.. as mentioned previously I would check benchmarks not only price tags

their x6 chips

and on anandtech.com a x6 is practically a 920 with it varying slightly the main diff is more ram sticks required and more expensive MOBO's unless there are 30 pound MOBO's with inbuilt gfx and gigabit LAN port?.

Also when is bulldozer due out?

Tythus · 3 Apr 2011 at 23:40

any news on a bulldozer release though?