3ds max + vray render farm

[danielnedelcu]

Hi guys,

 

I need to set up a render farm for my max/vray projects. Unfortunately, due to my combination of scenes / materials / lights that I cannot replicate in vray rt, I can't use gpu rendering, so I need to make a cpu-intensive render farm. I was wondering what you'd recommend in the 6-8k$ range

 

I can make 8 small boxes with an i7-5820k ea. for about 5k$ - each with its own PSU, small motherboard, hdd, and 16GB RAM for a total of 48 cores @ 3.3GHz. But I'm wondering now if I can get more performance from a couple of xeon-based systems in this price range - since some xeons tend to have more cores per cpu, and there are two-cpu motherboards out there. What would you recommend?

[glenpittock]

I will be in almost the exact same boat in the next few months. Will be keen to read what responses come back at this.

 

So many options out there, would be great to hear some feedback from someone who has already traveled this path.

[numerobis]

A used dual Xeon E5-2670 (2x8 cores) is by far the best bang for the buck at the moment for a render node. The "old" Sandy Bridge cores are a few percent slower than the recent Haswell or Broadwell cores but the price difference is so huge that this doesn't matter.

A 32GB sys would be around 14€/GHz and with 64GB ~16€/GHz in my calculation (excl. VAT)

Compared to a 5820K @stock speed with 32GB for ~46€/GHz

or a 5820K@ 4.5GHz with 32GB for ~35€/GHz

 

(i have build four of them so far)

Edited August 1, 2016 by numerobis