Slow render times. Hardware problem?

[chrismonti]

Simple rendering images take 40-50 to an hour whereas in school, with really crappy dell Xeon with 6gb Ram workstations bought 3 yrs(or more) ago it renders much faster(20mins!!)

 

My PC:

Intel core i7 3770(non-k)

Asrock z77 extreme4 motherboard

650w Corsair PSU

8GB RAM

Gtx 460 overclocked 1GB

 

3ds max 2013 with vray

[Matt McDonald]

You might need to provide a little more info but I'll take a stab at it.

 

How many cores in the "crappy" xeons? at home are you rendering via Wifi or from a memory stick? Are they exactly the same scenes or just something similar, one modeled at home the other modeled at school?

[chrismonti]

Same scenes with the same settings.

Dual core xeon in the crappy dells.

They're being rendered from hard drives(memory stick).

My PC has an SSD drive(samsung 830) whereas the school's PC has a 5400 rpm HDD

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well those dells are not that crappy then

How many processor are in those dells? maybe 2x Dual core, that will be faster, it is hard to tell without having exactly the specs of those Dell's but if they are rendering faster, is just because they are faster to render. Maybe yours is faster to modeling and musty task but at rendering time Xeon take the advantage.

[Matt McDonald]

Have you checked to be sure multi-threading is enabled on your home PC? It is turned on by default so it's unlikely that it was disabled. It can be found under "customize - preferences - rendering". V-Ray also has the "low-thread priority" setting in the render dialog under "settings" you might check that.

 

Francisco is right that if the xeon is multi-socket it would be much faster than you think and the fact that it is a xeon suggests there is a good chance of that.

 

I'm still sort of questioning the memory stick. I assume that you are keeping your files on a memory stick, opening the files from the memory stick and saving your rendered images to the memory stick. If that is the case you might try moving everything to the local hard drive on each machine and see what happens there. Occasionally my PC gripes at me that a particular USB port is not the fastest one in the system. I assume that means its a USB 1.0 port rather than a 2.0 port (even though I thought all of my ports are USB 2.0). In your case, if you are plugging your memory stick into a fast port on the computer at school and a slow port at home that might account for a difference.

 

I'm not terrible sure what the answer is here, just some suggestions. Keep posting and maybe you'll get some better answers.