what to buy

[Sindala]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm planning on buying a few systems (very small renderfarm) for the sole purpose of rendering images and the odd animation. i put aside a budget of about € 4000 for this.

What would you guys recommend?

I have about as much knowledge of hardware as i do of the innerworkings of my girlfriend's brain so i really need some help here.

[AJLynn]

Renderfarms are all about CPU and RAM, and you'll probably find that the best value is dual-dual Opterons with 4 GB of RAM. I'm guessing you might get three of these on that budget. Don't worry about things like good video cards, large hard drives and DVD burners.

[Brian Cassil]

I have about as much knowledge of hardware as i do of the innerworkings of my girlfriend's brain so i really need some help here.

 

I take it you don't plan on building these systems yourself then?

[Sindala]

I take it you don't plan on building these systems yourself then?

 

Nope, that would probably be similar to the faulty towers episode i watched today.

 

what about my windows version? would the home edition do? or do i need pro. it's for use with cinema4d.

[ludens]

I agree, the best way to go is dual opterons. Dual systems help you save in RAM and pre-rendering time.

However, the best is to build it yourself or you will be spending a lot of money in components you don't need, provided with "trademark" computers. As posted below, for rendering farms, you only need cpu and ram.

In case you also want to use the computers as workstations, then I would go alienware.

[Sindala]

hey guys thanks for the quick replies.

 

However, the best is to build it yourself or you will be spending a lot of money in components you don't need, provided with "trademark" computers. As posted below, for rendering farms, you only need cpu and ram.

 

I suppose building myself would save me a lot of money. I'll have a look into that, otherwise i'll probably have to find someone who could build them for me. the dual dual opteron looks good from what i could find.

 

thanks loads, tomorrow i'll get on my bike and see what the shops here can offer me.

[beestee]

Renderfarms are all about CPU and RAM, and you'll probably find that the best value is dual-dual Opterons with 4 GB of RAM. I'm guessing you might get three of these on that budget. Don't worry about things like good video cards, large hard drives and DVD burners.

 

It doesn't hurt to have a stable and fast HDD either, as paging will be vital in network rendering.

[AJLynn]

If you're doing a lot of paging you don't have enough RAM and that's seriously impacting your render times - e.g., upgrading my Core Duo laptop from 1GB to 2GB more than doubled its speed with complex scenes in fR2. That said, a fast HD is good, it will cut your load times, and depending on how you're working you may have to defrag regularly.

 

Oh, and with multi-cpu systems with a lot of RAM, XP Pro will definitely give you an advantage. If you go the Opteron route and can get the drivers etc to work out, Windows 64 could be good - you can get 64-bit C4D and iit's got some speed and memory management advantages..

[Sindala]

Windows 64 could be good - you can get 64-bit C4D and iit's got some speed and memory management advantages..

 

I read about this, 20 to 30% faster i believe, and i'll be using c4d with AR mostly, so that should work.

But i also don't want to give up on Final render just yet. the output is great, but the last project i did with it had a lot of problems so in the end i had to stay up all night to see if it didn't crash halfway the rendering of the 6 images, which was wise because it did. and i had to shop out a lot of artifacts. So maybe i need both pro and 64? again more costs.

 

I sent out a lot of requests, i hop e to have them on monday, i'll keep you posted.

[AJLynn]

Yeah, fR2 still has its issues, and I hae no idea what makes it crash. It's random but consistent. Same file can crash computer A 90% of the time but be fine on B, then a different file crashes B but is fine on A. fRustration works on even days under a waxing moon. No idea what Windows 64 does to all this.

[STRAT]

as it stands with the AR, it's a nightmare, if not impossible, trying to get a gi animation to render over a render farm. FR2 will do it, but it's too unstable for my liking.

[Sindala]

as it stands with the AR, it's a nightmare, if not impossible, trying to get a gi animation to render over a render farm. FR2 will do it, but it's too unstable for my liking.

 

really? why not? do you mean ernest's horrorstorie on cgtalk?

 

fr is to unstable for my liking too.

[tecton3d]

the dual-dual core opteron route is probably the most logistically feasable, but you get more "bang for your buck" if you got several AMD Athlon X2 systems. You can build one for under $600 and you don't encounter scalability issues you get with multi processor machines.

 

the obvious downside is that you have more machines, space, heat, etc

 

the bonus is... you have redundancy... if one of 5 X2 systems goes down you can still operate at a reasonable pace, like having a stubbed toe. If one of two dual - dual core opteron systems goes down, you loose half your farm and then you're trying to run one legged. If you can build enough dual opteron systems to achieve a certain level of redundancy then that would be best but with your budget, since you're not building yourself, such a thing may not be feaseable.

 

If it were my money, I'd buy more x2 systems and go for the redundancy... but there is something hedonistically fun about having a farm of dual-dual core opterons:D :D

 

good luck!

[tecton3d]

as it stands with the AR, it's a nightmare, if not impossible, trying to get a gi animation to render over a render farm. FR2 will do it, but it's too unstable for my liking.

 

bummer for me since I'm building several dual xeon nodes as we speak for just this purpose. Is that using the integrated max/FR dist. render interface or Backburner?

 

is there a plug-in renderer that is stable... vray, brazil, ??

 

thanks

[AJLynn]

AR is the Cinema4D render engine. With Max you have a lot of options for doing this stuff, the specifics would depend on what you're trying to do.

[tecton3d]

AR is the Cinema4D render engine. With Max you have a lot of options for doing this stuff, the specifics would depend on what you're trying to do.

 

... good to know I was freaked 'bout nothing.

 

Cheers

[STRAT]

really? why not? do you mean ernest's horrorstorie on cgtalk?

 

 

Ernest's job just backed mine up. me and a couple of fellow CGA members just finished a humungously large job which ideally required some c4d advanced render gi animation which could only be rendered over a farm due to time.

 

we found out from an early stage this was not possible. we faked the gi in the end, and still as yet are to come up with a workable gi rendering over a network solution.

[Sindala]

we found out from an early stage this was not possible. we faked the gi in the end, and still as yet are to come up with a workable gi rendering over a network solution.

 

This sounds a bit strange to me. Cinema4d with net render can't render Gi animations...Isnt that what the software is made for? why else call it 4D??

 

the project i'm about to start is quite a big building 165 x 85 meters, but there's a lot of repetitions, and i can bake a lot of it. And some parts i think i'll get away with faking, but really prefer a good gi render. We do have a couple of weeks to render it.

 

I'm probably getting 3 or 4 of these:

 

2x Opteron 275 (2,2GHz - 2x 1MB)

1x Asus K8N-DL

4x 512MB DDR400 ECC CL3 (Kingston Value, KVR400X72C3A/512)

1x ZM460B-APS met EPS12V stekker, 460 Watt

1x SilentMaxx ST-11 Big-tower (E-ATX compatible)

1x Asus DVD-ROM

1x Peak Radeon X300 SE 128MB

1x WD Caviar Special Edition 160 GB

 

what do you think?

[AJLynn]

You might want to up the power supply and RAM but otherwise good. Unless that ATI card has "Hyper Memory" - that subtracts from the memory available to the OS.

[mahorela]

check out boxx technologies render nodes, or is it universally agreed that they are too expensive or something?

[AJLynn]

Boxx has a lot of upside, which you pay for, depends what your priorities are - a lot of people will pay more to get a well-built machine with good service.

[Sindala]

Boxx has a lot of upside, which you pay for, depends what your priorities are - a lot of people will pay more to get a well-built machine with good service.

 

I've considered this, but as it's coming out of my own pocket i'm trying to get 'it' as cheap as possible. Also as things just keep on growing here maybe next year i can put in a better videocard and then i'll have some ok workstations where all the staff i dream about can work so we don't have to work so many nights. but i'm probably getting ahead of myself now..

[STRAT]

This sounds a bit strange to me. Cinema4d with net render can't render Gi animations...Isnt that what the software is made for? why else call it 4D??

 

net render nicely renders frames over a net work. just not gi frames.

 

or put it another way - if you render your animation in stochastic mode, or use normal mode but with your accuracy set to 100% with high samples then it works fine, but even over a network these methods take forever, hense the reason single camera animation was invented.

 

the single camera animation gives uber smoother gi rendering on a single computer, but NOT over a network. the cached gi file isn't utilised properly buy either c4d or the network and will give a flickering resultant animation.

[Sindala]

the single camera animation gives uber smoother gi rendering on a single computer, but NOT over a network. the cached gi file isn't utilised properly buy either c4d or the network and will give a flickering resultant animation.

 

Oke, i think i understand now, it's just that you'd expect things like this to work. But i'm very sure if you know it doesn't that it doesn't.

Thanks a lot for explaining, i think i'll have to rethink some aspects of the whole plan of buying 3 systems.

[AJLynn]

Strat- were you using a mix of AMD/Intel boxes? Or Intels of very different architecture?