Building a render farm

[Eezo]

So I'm building a render farm for use on freelance projects at home. I've come accross this build and was wondering what you guys think of it?

 

http://blog.digitaltutors.com/building-a-home-render-farm-without-breaking-the-bank/

[stefanostrika]

3.200$ and only 1300 points in Cinebench15? Doesn't look a good deal to me. I've builded my 4 nodes 4930K based for about 4.000$, the overall score is about 5000points in CB15.

[Eezo]

What was in your build? I'm trying to figure out the best deal for my money.

[Eezo]

By the way I have £2.5k budget, maybe £3k if it's worth it. I mostly work with still shots but I do a couple of architectural animations a year as well.

[Scott Schroeder]

Build one high power render box for your stills. Don't break it up into 3-4 okay power boxes.

 

If you have an animation then just use the Amazon EC2 to throw more power at it than you could ever afford on its own. You get a year free of micro boxes on there so you can perfect your setup. Then when you need, instance them onto the mega boxes.

[braddewald]

@Scott - Are there any tutorials on setting that up? Is it useless for stills? Does it work with Vray DR?

[Dimitris Tolios]

By the way I have £2.5k budget, maybe £3k if it's worth it. I mostly work with still shots but I do a couple of architectural animations a year as well.

 

 

Assumptions:

 

 

Assumption #1: $1.55/£, your budget should be in the $4,500 region.

 

 

Assumption #2: we are talking 2P Xeon E5 V3 (Haswell-E, s2011-3)

 

 

Assumption #3: we are allocating around $2,000 of those for mobo (2P s2011-3 ~ $650), 64GB ECC DDR42133 (~$900) and the rest for a small SSD, Case, PSU, coolers, basic GPU. Rest is ofc for the 2x CPUs.

 

 

Then:

 

 

Your budget allows you to go either really lower than that, below $3,400 (£2.2K) for a 2P E5-2630V3 = dual 8C/16T, ~ 2*38.4GHz aggregate & $44/GHz

 

 

or go all the way for a E5-2660V3 duo and $5,000 (£3.2K), buying you a dual 10C/20C, with ~2*52GHz aggregate & ~ $48/GHz.

 

By comparison, going single i7-nodes you would get:

 

 

Assumption #4+hidden #5, base cost for i7 s2011-3 node = Mobo $250 + 32GB* DDR4 $400 + $200 for PSU, Case, basic GPU & such = $850)

 

 

i7-5820K node ~ $1240: aggregate 39.6GHz, $41.16/GHz

i7-5930K node ~ $1430: aggregate 42.0GHz, $47.8/GHz

i7-5960X node ~ $1900: aggregate 48.0GHz, $61.46/GHz

 

 

* 32GB for the 1P system is not "cheating"...I am aiming for roughly 32GB per CPU = assumption #5, distributing the job to more threads, requires more ram = the 2P system with virtually 2x the threads, should use more. perhaps now 2x, but considerably more than what the 1P would.

 

 

 

Unfortunately the jump is big, as the 2660V3 is considerably more expensive than a 2630V3, but in the bigger scheme of things it boils down to how many nodes you want to micromanage. You can get roughly the same performance per $ spent for the same price going 2x i7 vs. 1x 2P, with the i7 offering the potential for overclocking, higher redundancy (assuming 2x the nodes, if one goes down, its less % of your farm's output) and lower initial cost for each node, but penalizing you with micromanaging more nodes, producing more heat & added soft costs for Vray & OS licenses.

Edited December 5, 2014 by dtolios