Best Hardware Setup and Config

[Thox]

Hi guys,

 

I would like your opinions on our office setup for max. But first a little history...

 

I work for an Architectural Practice, producing the 3D visuals. When we started up the 3D side, we bought a HP dual xeon 3.2 HT computer, which has been upgraded to 3GB of memory, running windows xp pro sp2. We originally used this machine as the modeling workstation and render machine, which was fine to start off with, but as more jobs came in and deadlines got tighter and tighter, it was time to invest in another machine.

 

We therefore put together our own machine, which now consists of Dual 5320 Quad Core Chips with 8GB of memory and running windows XP 64bit. This is our dedicated render machine.

 

Therefore, we have the dual xeon HT machine as the workstation and the dual xeon Quad core as the render slave, which work well together.

 

Now, we are running 3ds max 8 on both machines with Vray 1.5 RC3 32 bit, however when I send a render from the workstation to the render slave, it only see's 2gb of physical memory, before it starts going into minus memory. What I mean by minus memory, is when it reaches say 2.2 gb of memory the render dialog starts going backwards in memory and shows it as -1890 going down towards -1200 memory. This happens on the workstation machine as well, it carries on rendering fine, but is this normal?

 

So the render machine is only using approx 2gb of memory the machine has 8gb of memory, it has windows xp 64bit, so therefore why does it not use more memoery before going into minus figures?

 

How can I setup the render machine to see more of the memory and be more efficient?

 

Next..

 

The office is currently in the process of buying new CAD stations for the office, so that means a number of the older machines will become available and I was hoping to add these to the render machine to create our render farm. The old machines are dell Pentium D's 2.8ghz with 512mb of ram, so they are all 32 bit machines. Would adding these machines to the render network create any problems, considering the main render machine is a 64bit computer?

 

Thanks for reading and any assistance would be grateful.

 

Kind Regards

 

Nick