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Proliant 4 x CPU server for rendering?


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  • 3 weeks later...

I am in a similar situation and what I have discovered with my old tech might help you.

 

I have an HP ML350 G6 with 2x Xeon X5672 at 3.2GHz, 56GB DDR3 RAM 1333MHz, 6x 149GB SAS HDD in a Raid 5+0. We are using Cinema 4D rendering at 1920x1080. We tested with every render option available turned on and it was taking about 2.5 hours a frame. Im not sure what settings we are using now, but it's down to about 30 minutes a frame. I am thinking about a video card now to improve performance.

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It all depends on the price, as mentioned by Leonardo, they usually are very loud and has a more complex HDD system that we really need.

But if they are cheap enough, it may be a good option.

Now regarding price and performance, I always use this website to compare CPU performance.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

Of course, you need to take those scores with a pint of Salt but they are usually very close to our demands.

 

There you can see that the Xeon X series are very old. and even though their performance may seem OK, with today latest from Intel and AMD I would not spend any money on them unless they are dirt cheap, and that for me here in the USA would be two digits.

 

I just built an AMD 1700X with some spare parts and new parts, for under $800 and that machine performance is way better than Old Xeons X series, even two or 4 of them.

 

Take a look at the website above and do your homework before investing some hard earned money ;)

 

 

From 2,5 Hours to 30 minutes that is very impressive gain, but you meant that with the Xeon X series you are getting those 30 Mins???

I can't imagine what even older CPU you used before.

 

Video cards won't do any good unless you are using a GPU oriented render engine. FYI

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  • 2 weeks later...

A few years back autodesk created a post which outlines CPU use among various rendering engines, so you might check the area or the documentation to see if you can find it.

 

You probably also need to look into Windows. As I recall a pro or enterprise version of Windows will support up to a two socket motherboard. I think you have to go to Windows Server if you want to run four sockets. Windows server is quite a bit more expensive than pro.

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I saw the same thing and pulled the trigger on it (mine) so I should be receiving my server at end of next week and can potentially give you some feedback after I get mine going.

here is what I already know: in order to use more than 2 cpu cores - you will need to use winserver (such as win server 2012 standard) and not win10/7/8. You -can- probably install your software on winserver but you should at least test in a virtual machine first since your software is probably only for win7/10.

It will be loud and probably also output a nice amount of heat. I'll be putting mine in a back room where I can have a window open during winter.

Also, some programs may have problems running more than 64 simultaneous threads as this is a windows logical processing "group" so if code isn't set to handle this then you strange things may happen like only half the threads get activated. if I have this problem then I may default to turning off 1 core in the bios which would put me down to 30cores/60threads as opposed to 40/80.

Edited by johnlopez1
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