Please help me to build budget render farm

[sathyanarayanan]

hi friends

I need to build low budget render farm for rendering vray in 3dsmax

I already owned i7 system and looking to build render slave on following configuration

 

Processor: AMD FX 8350 4.0GHZ

Ram : 2X4GB kINGSTON

Motherboard : Gigabyte Ga-78LMT-usb3

PSU:Coolmax zx-700 700w ATX12V

 

Is this machine able to Sevres as render farm?

AMD is good for 3d Rendering?

Any other AMD CPU better than this?(AMD is my choice for budget)

Can i buy 2 machine in this configuration can work more than Intel i7 3970k extreme edition(6-core) machine?

and

My Budget is $1000(I've cabinet and hard disk etc)

Please Help am on big confusion?

[Smile of Fury]

Yes, I think AMD is good for a budget render farm. My whole system is a few years old now, but I have an i7 workstation and two FX-8120 render nodes just like you want to do. I built each one for less than $400.

 

You need more parts than you have listed, you should probably get 16GB RAM and you don't need a 700W PSU. There are plenty of existing threads on here to help you choose some good components.

Edited July 28, 2015 by Smile of Fury

[sathyanarayanan]

Thanks for reply friend

This is my inital Setup for render farm further i will rack up more ram and GPU also.

[Nikolaos M]

What is exactly the i7 system you already have?

 

You might as well keep the old i7 system as a render node (it would probably be a lot faster in rendering compared to a AMD FX) and build a new system around a modern i5 and a good gpu. 1000$ are enough I think.

 

In your place, I would probably wait for the new skylakes to come out (1-2 months at the most). A 6500K would fit nicely inside budget.

[sathyanarayanan]

Hi Nikolaos

Thanks for suggestion

Am having i7 3770k as a workstation. Many say AMD FX8350 is best for budget render farm so only i pick that processor, and for skylark 6500k I can't wait for a couple of months!

[Nikolaos M]

A 3770K would perform far better than 8350 in rendering and a haswell i5 system would be faster than a 3770K system in modeling and viewport use in general. So, the best choice, in my opinion, is to build an s1150 system as a workstation and leave the 3770K to do the renderings. A FX 8350 needs to be highly overclocked in order to be somehow competitive in rendering performance. To give you an example, a 8350 (or a 8320, it's the same) overclocked to 5.0GHz (with water-cooling of course) has hardly the same performance in rendering with a 3770K overclocked to 4.2-4.3GHz. To achieve a 4.2-4.3GHz oc with a 3770K is very easy using a decent 30-40$ air cooler and draws far less power than an FX processor (I used to have a 3770K system in the past, and I can assure you for that).

[Dimitris Tolios]

I agree with people above in most points, but I would not worry about FX8350 being slower than a 3770K, especially as a render node where parallelism is great. It will actually match and even surpass it @ VRay.

 

That said, a couple of 3770K nodes would also be a great option if you were able to get a 2nd set of mobo+cpu used. I would not fear to look into this option too. Even tho speed gains won't be important, energy savings will.

[Nikolaos M]

I agree with people above in most points, but I would not worry about FX8350 being slower than a 3770K, especially as a render node where parallelism is great. It will actually match and even surpass it @ VRay.

 

Hi Dimitri. This is something I've never came across up to now. 8350 is faster than 3770K in Vray? You mean, at stock speeds? Because, in most tests I've personally seen (including Cinebench, the well known old "hummer" test with the Scanline renderer, etc) the 3770K is "clock for clock" almost 25% faster compared to a 8320/8350. I haven't seen tests in Vray, but the way these cpu renderers use cpu cores/threads is similar (as far as I know).

 

If you have more info on that, or real tests you've personally ran with both processors, please share. I'd be grateful.

 

Cheers from πατρίδα!

Edited August 2, 2015 by nikolaosm

[Dimitris Tolios]

Cinebench is notoriously intel friendly.

[Nikolaos M]

How about the default scanline renderer? Because the old hummer test is based on that. Clock for clock, the 3770k is almost 25% faster in this test.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34471095&postcount=19

[Dimitris Tolios]

There is no doubt that an i7 with HT is a "safer" bet for all-around workstation stuff, but it was the case with the FX8350 being just as fast if not faster than the 3770K in Vray...I cannot find more sources, but it was discussed in this forums in the past.

 

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/880-7/rendu-3d-mental-ray-v-ray.html

 

Especially for a render node, where lots of the stuff is pre-chewed and just given for the FX to finish off, I think the 8-cores can give their best despite the single-threaded performance paling vs. the equivalent 4C i7.

[Nikolaos M]

Thanks for the link Dimitri, but as I said, it is for stock clocks, i.e. 4.0GHz with 4.2 Turbo for FX 8350 and 3.5GHz with 3.9Ghz turbo for 3770k. And no one shlould leave a 3770K work at stock speeds, when a 4.2GHz oc is easily achieved with stock voltages.

At the same frequency (4.2GHz) there is no comparison between them. Beside the "weak" buldozer cores, the main reason for FX's inferior performance in rendering is their module architecture, because despite having 8 logical cores, they only have 4 floating point units (one for each module), with each one of them shared between the 2 cores of each module. As I understand it, it is like FX cpus process the render with 4 phisical cores and not 8. Their 8 cores may perform better in other aplications or tasks (ex. multi-tasking etc).

Edited August 3, 2015 by nikolaosm