Render Farm - Few Questions - Anyone? :)

[THINKTANK]

Hey guys,

 

A few of us at this architect firm we work for are trying to persuade the Directors to get us a Render Farm, We have been looking at a few solutions but we Don't really know ton's about the technical Side, So we were wondering if you guys could suggest a few?

 

We have a quote for one node at £7500, it's got 4x Quad Xeons, at 3.2 GHz and 32GB of RAM,

 

Is it wise to have a node like this? Or to be less powerful but more of them?

 

The other question I have is: I'm trying to find some comparisons of render times to Processing power… Basically we want to show the directors that more power = fast renders, (so we can have there budget) but we need to show them proof / evidence of this. If anyone knows of a website / info of that it would be very much appreciated.

 

That’s pretty much it

 

Thanks for reading!

[sedus69]

Quad core xeon 32 gb ? only one node. damn it is a HUGE node.

questions Do you have very huge scene ? Does you workstation have so many memory ? Do you calculate still image or animation ?

 

 

My render farm consist of 6 Quad core Q6600@2.4 ghz + 8 Go + 2 Western Raptor Raid + Win Xp Pro 64 By node . Price per node about 650 € ex VAT.

for a total of 6*4 cores = 24 cores I paid 3900 €uros.

 

You system 4*4 cores -> 16 cores 7500£

 

Ok my system is only 2.4 ghz, but a rather prefer add 5 mores quad core ! than you system.

 

hope it gives you a path of thinking about getting a HUGE node rather than many few.

Ps processor life time is very limited, I prefer changing pc every 10-12 month than every 4 years.

[THINKTANK]

Thanks sedus69 for the reply, it's given me some food for thought, Can you send me a link to where you get these Nodes?

 

 

Any more idea's will be greetly appreciated!

Cheers!

[Trevor Tizard]

Have a chat with someone like escape studios in London who deal with boxx render nodes. Very knowledgable people. Just been thru a similar excercise myself, no decision yet, but learned alot.

[andreg]

Sedus is right about the render nodes... you are better off having many small ones than buying one big powerful node. Besides 32G RAM is waaayyy overkill. I have scenes that average 5 million polys and rarely seen RAM get higher than 7G. We have 4 quadcore render nodes and 2 dual quad workstations (they should call them octocores.. would be less confusing) and their service is top notch.

 

With that amount of money you could get at least 3 rendernodes. Good thing about it also is if one node goes down, you production doesn't come to a grinding halt.

[Devin Johnston]

Agreed, the only reason you should buy a beast like that is if it's your primary workstation and you need all that power at your fingertips. Otherwise buy more smaller less powerful systems and use distributed rendering or BB to take advantage of all that collective power.