Archiform 3D

I rent 2x 56U high racks in a data centre 2 floors down. It works out as less money and better facilities. I suggest checking what is in your area.

Are you certain that Tesla cards will help you? Do your research there as you may be wasting your money. Most render farm boxes are lots of CPU grunt and RAM, nothing more. I still stick to my old formula of "if you cant buy it off the shelf then leave it alone". I also do comparative analysis between all ideas I have and work out bang for buck based on the latest Cinebench results. Right now I am getting the best value building 1U 6-core Phenoms with DDR3 RAM. The parts are available anywhere, and the hardware combination works out well. Ultimately Xeons or multiple Opterons would be faster per machine but the cost per box vs processing power reduces their value and neither can be fixed in-house after a quick trip to Tiger Direct. i7s are a close second because they run faster but unless you use the old socket type you cant get onboard video, therefore you need a card, you impede cooling in the 1U case, etc. I tip towards i7s a lot but still end up doing the Phenoms. I have found that the new SSD drives are a MUST. They make everything smoother and cooler again.

That is a fast machine, but your RAM is way too small. Double the RAM as that could be the only hardware slowdown I see. Otherwise you will just need to reduce the complexity of your scenes as those processors are fine.

Being a die-hard Mac guy I would get a Mac Pro: Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 16GB (8x2GB) 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB One 18x SuperDrive Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel) Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel) Apple Magic Mouse Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User's Guide AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card with 802.11n Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro - Auto-enroll Total price including those twin 30" screens is $11 015. I treat myself to something like this every 2 years.

This site: http://www.3dfluff.com/mash/cinebench/top.php ... is all Cinebench but that is an awesome benchmark for all processor intensive applications. You will see the Xeons are up there with the i7s hot on their heels.

It looks fine with me. I never seem to go wrong with Asus boards and the 2.66 i7 1366 socket seems to be the best deal for now.

Boxx dont have any magical tricks up their sleeve to help them out-drag other computers, so you could probably always build something that will beat their systems. You buy boxx because: You cant build your own You want high quality with little headache You need an immediate fast solution Otherwise I could build a faster machine for any purpose any day - but do I always want to... Or do you want to? An example is I need speed, stability and quality for my workstations and they are all Mac Pro systems - fast, very reliable, pricey. But I build all my render clients myself as 1U or 2U rack mounts and upgrade them as I need to, which saves me a bundle of money and I always get the best "bang-for-buck" CPU on the market.

I bit my tongue all through that... A MacPro might have cost less too....

They arent particularly hard to make. I used to have a ton of them until some dill in my office went and deleted half of my library as well as the backup. What I did was get photographs and map them onto different shapes, which was perfect provided the focus wasn't actually the food - sometimes it was actually completely perfect. For example, some of my favorites were plates of cheese and pre-dinner snacks. Every time I would see a good one I would take a few photographs.

....Hence my "off the shelf" policy.....

Oh, I dont mean go and buy a PC from Best Buy, I mean components. Cases are easy, they dont break down and you can reuse them for years, but drives, MBs, RAM, etc. For example, as soon as I could get away from SCSI RAIDS I did because I could never just walk in and buy a new drive if something went wrong.

Hey Jeff, Mac has a very cool thing called Time Machine. It backs up every few minutes if it has to and you can recover from any point or the whole thing. It is VERY safe. I know you are a Windows guy but maybe you should see if there is something similar. All my workstations have their normal drives PLUS one big one that is just for Time Machine, so and can be resurrected quickly and with only a few minutes or an hour of work being lost. Big drives a cheap now... Now, more advice.... I always make sure that any Windows box I build has off the shelf hardware. OK, that sometimes means I forgo the very latest stuff but I can have a broken PC running again in an hour - and I have about 50 of them so I need things to be fast and easy! You may want to consider the notion.

Back in those days I used water colour pencils and a paint brush..... Honestly, you may be better off doing that one the old fashioned way.

I think he was hinting on a Hackintosh... a very tempting prospect if you arent running Max....

Loving my Mac