Render Farm recommendations

[Michalis Fountouklis]

Hello people of the forum, my name is Michael.

I would like to ask if anyone has experience with render farms to help me out. I am currently trying to setup our office farm, something small probably but i would like some feedback by some more experienced users.
Do you think a setup of multiple nodes that have lower core count (but higher speed) is better, or fewer nodes with more cores is optimal?

For example would it be best to setup two nodes with the Threadripper PRO 3995WX which has 64 cores (so two nodes like that total of 128 cores) or would it be better to go for the threadripper PRO 3975WX which has 32 cores
and buy 4 nodes? The cost will likely be a bit higher with the 4 nodes but would that make a much more efficient render farm?

Is it generally better to have more nodes that are less powerfull or fewer that are stronger assuming the total core count is more or less the same?

Any general tips you might think would be important please let me know! Thank you!

[Tom Bussey]

Probablly depends what processes you're planning to send to your farm and whether they're multithreaded. Vray and Corona tend to utilise multithreading so higher core count is probably best, but expenct there's probably diminishing returns once you start getting to the very high end processors.

If it's Vray or Corona jobs you're sending then I think both have benchmark tables that you should be able to compare processors on. Just work out the cost of each node per benchmark unit and there's your value system.

[Scott Schroeder]

In general faster per-core speed is usually better, IF you are doing bucket rendering with Vray/Corona/etc. We have a few monster nodes where I work that have oodles of cores, but our setup of 6 year old i7's blow past those monster nodes within about 20 minutes of rendering. What happens is even though the monster nodes have hundreds of buckets going on in Vray, they are slow per bucket and get caught up on reflections, highlights, glossies, and other high intensity rendering. Where as the i7's have less buckets, but faster bucket speeds, they can chew through those high intensity buckets faster and catch up quicker.

If you are doing more progressive style renderings, maybe the overall speed is better versus per-core speed? I don't do much progressive rendering, so I can't speak to that.

Another advantage to having 4 machines is that you can split work up if needed. If you find yourself in a deadline, you can put 2 machines one one job and the other 2 machines on another job. The major disadvantage to having more machines is you are going to have more licensing costs in windows and vray render node licenses.