VRay Render Slave Requirements

[guenther Malek]

I am planning a small Render Farm. (4-8 machines)

For the render slaves do i need lot of RAM or

does only count CPU speed?

Any hardware suggestions out there?

Thanks for helpful tips in advance!

[numerobis]

The amount of RAM depends on your scenes (the same as you need on your workstation to render the scene). The CPU speed depends on your needs and your budget, the more the better

I think an i 7 4930K with 32GB would be a good starting point... or, if you can wait a few months you could get the first 8-core i7 5960X - maybe 5930K will get 8 cores too (Haswell-E)

Edited April 28, 2014 by numerobis

[Scott Schroeder]

A general rule of thumb that I follow is that you want your render slaves to be at least as strong as your workstation, if not faster. You don't want to have to wait for a slow farm to spit out your renders.

 

RAM is fairly inexpensive, so load up on it. You can never have too much of it.

 

So to answer your question, both RAM and your CPU (and CPU cooling) are where you want to spend the bulk of your money when it comes to a render farm.

[paneli]

My workstation is 3930K with 32GB ram, and one render node is exactly the same, and the other one is 2600K with 8GB ram.

The 2600K never caused any issues and all projects renders great.

 

A while ago I was planning on getting myself a small renderfarm but ran into budget problems:

i7 4770(not K, im not a big overclock fan)

CPU low profile cooler Noctua NH-L9i

16GB LP RAM 1600Mhz

Gigabyte GA-Q87M-MK - Because I think vPro feature is a must have in a renderfarm.

Some 300W-360W Modular Gold PSU (I like Seasonic)

And some MicroATX case (Fractal Design/Silverstone)

 

In my country I can get each node for 800$ including Windows OS.