I need advice on 2 machines

[Fermi Bertran]

Originally posted by Brian Cassil:

...Like I stated earlier, it seems to me that my "workstation" really doesn't need dual procs. So what about getting the p4 EE for that.

Personally I'd prefer my interactively working system to be the Multiprocessored one, Fed up with Ram (2 gigs seems a nice figure), with best possible video card and if Multimonitored better than singled... So you can truly multitask, even have one Max rendering session assigned to one processor while interactively working with the other on another scene, you won't notice provided you have enough RAM. I'd look into Dual Xeon for this one (better video performance than AMD becasue of wider Bandwidth).

 

While for the render slaves what matters is the brute force processor power, depending on pricing, of the systems, May eventually be sinlge processored systems to be more efficients because you ensure 100% processor performance for all kind of tasks... 1 ~ 1.5 Gb of RAM looks nice to my eyes for Render slaves (They are goning to perform only single taks (be them single or multithreaded)) The Render server choice is simply a matter of Price/Processor-force ratio, perhaps single or Dual AMD but I am not updated with prices...

 

When I say single processored, I mean perhaps you can have 2 single systems instead of a a Dual processored, or why not 3 singles? simply fill up your budged with as much processor power as possible

 

 

my 2 cnets. of Euro

[moshenko]

Originally posted by FB:

Personally I'd prefer my interactively working system to be the Multiprocessored one, Fed up with Ram (2 gigs seems a nice figure), with best possible video card and if Multimonitored better than singled...

I would have to say that I agree with Fermi on this issue, although there are many factors which may persuade otherwise. I would prefer that the system that I spend all of my time on be the fastest possible, because my time is valuable (at least I like to think that it is!).

 

When it comes down to a renderfarm, it's not as simple as buying the fastest machines available, but analysing all of your personal factors and making the correct decision. Is space an issue? What are the power demands? Do you need extra software licenses for render nodes? We went through a thorough analysis of all kinds of processors and platforms, how they ranked in benchmarks, what their relative costs were, etc. From a price/performance standpoint, single processor machines won out in all cases, even when factoring software licensing and all associated costs. This is, of course, a very local decision, meaning that things like price, availability and service will play a large role (i.e., for those not in the US).