HP Z400 Render Farms

[Christiansltd]

Hi, just a quick question.... Has anybody set up a renderfarm usiing HP Z400's, i have 2 with W3520 Quad processors and 2 with W3680 processors.

 

I am using a nas storage and an unmanaged network - OS windows 7 64bit.

 

I want to use it with 3DS Max 2011 and Vue 8.5 Xstream....

 

My main question is does it matter if i have different amounts of ram in each and different graphics cards, i have heard different things from a range of sellers saying that it is purely cpu power that will speed up render times and ram is not that important and graphics cards are even less important as the software does not currently support cuda.

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as would any other pointers or common issues i may face.

 

Thanks in advance :-)

[Dave Buchhofer]

It shouldn't make a difference if they are different cards/ram/processors, we have quite an array of different machines that we've accumulated over the years working just fine here.

[AJLynn]

Just throw it all in. The ram only matters if you run out of it and the video card has no relation to rendering unless you run a GPU renderer like Octane (and even then some mixed environments can be used).

[Christiansltd]

Wonderful, i have a couple of xw 8400's and 8000 that i might add on as well.

 

Thanks for the reply's

[Christiansltd]

Hi again, I want to speed up my z400's, does any body know if I would really notice the difference if I was to upgrade the w3520 processors to w3680's, bear in mind it will cost roughly £700.00 per machine an I could get £ 100 back selling on the second user chips. Would I just be best selling the machines and going for z600's with a bit higher spec.

[AJLynn]

IF the machines can handle the 6-core CPUs, you have enough power supply, the MB is cool with it, etc., the W3680 would render 80-90% faster than the W3520. (W3520 is a 4-core i7 2.66GHz and W3680 is a 6-core i7 3.33GHz).