Mike Posted September 26, 2003 Share Posted September 26, 2003 Hello All at my arch firm, we want to buy a good machine to decrease render times... We were asking ourselves if the "renderfarm" system of all 3d animation firms (renderfarms) could be applied in architecture. We heard about a solution which seem attractive named rendercube, but it's the only on we know... Could someone help in our quest ? if you know url's, firms who propose those kind of systems, etc... Thank u very much Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted September 26, 2003 Share Posted September 26, 2003 1) Budget 2) Time Frame 3) Applications you use 4) Renderers you use Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Posted September 26, 2003 Author Share Posted September 26, 2003 Sorry for the lack of information budget ~ 15 000 $ Time frame : don't know what it means :???: Applications you use : Photoshop-3dsmax-Rhinoceros-FormZ-Cinema4D.and different other little app Renderers : C4D-Max-FinalRender-Brazil-Vray Thanxx [ September 26, 2003, 07:01 AM: Message edited by: Mike ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted September 26, 2003 Share Posted September 26, 2003 budget ~ 15 000 $ USD? Time frame : don't know what it means :???: How soon before the system needs to be purchased/built. Your looking at a 2U rack, either Dual Xeon's, Opteron's, or Athlons. Contact or check... www.boxxtech.com or www.racksaver.com Rendercube is nice, but a rack would allow for more expandability in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wiggy Posted September 27, 2003 Share Posted September 27, 2003 I've always built my own; I save a lot of money that use. I usually use 4U cases since they tend to be a little cheaper and have better airflow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Posted September 27, 2003 Author Share Posted September 27, 2003 budget ~ 15 000 $ USD? USA dollars yes..it's about 15000 Euros too... Time frame : 1 or 2 months maximum Your looking at a 2U rack, either Dual Xeon's, Opteron's, or Athlons in fact w already know the bi proc systems... We would want to have more than 2 proc in the same unit... Intel would be the best for us. I take a look to the url's Thanks Greg .. Hope to talk about this soon. Bye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joseph alexander Posted September 27, 2003 Share Posted September 27, 2003 Can some one verify if this is really cheap? Dual 2.4 xeon for $1,300 (us). Couldn't you buy a bunch of these? http://www.internetishop.com/product_detail.asp?main_cat_no=DT&sub_cat_no=01&item=SVXE24A -joe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wiggy Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 That looks like a really good price Joseph. I quickly priced all the components separately and got a slightly higher price. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Posted September 28, 2003 Author Share Posted September 28, 2003 Yes tou're right...that's a really good price ! but the problem is the way the proc are plugged together no ? if i have many machines whith 2 proc each, is it as efficient as a "many proc" purpose system ? like the "boxx" rendernodes per example... I think i have to read and look forward more and more before we can choose a good solution... But i found a Boxx rendernodes resseler near my home (paris (france))... i'll call him to have more explanations.. However thanks Greg and Joseph Bye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joseph alexander Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 I'm waiting for walmart to start making workstations. -joe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tcorbett Posted September 29, 2003 Share Posted September 29, 2003 If you're using 3DSMax, save some money and use the existing machines in your firm. The installation CD also contains a network renderer that can be installed on every machine you have. Just let jobs run overnight, during lunches, or when people are in meetings. Then take the money that you save and purchase libraries, software, or a nice new workstation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sawyer Posted September 29, 2003 Share Posted September 29, 2003 I am basically looking for a cpu update (sorry to butt into this conversation). I have been looking into the renderboxx dual xeon 2.8 drive. Seems price wise not bad but will I be better off with just getting a new cpu & farming out the work I need to to the old one? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
visual3d Posted June 1, 2004 Share Posted June 1, 2004 for 15 thousand usd i can get you 4 units of Dual 3.06 with 2gb ram. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kris Posted June 4, 2004 Share Posted June 4, 2004 If you are making machines yourselve than you can check thread on this forum: "Test your PC rendering speed" I think that you can make 8 dual Athlon MP 2800+ machines with 2 GB RAM for 15 000$. Ask your local suplier for pricing. You need: 16x AMD MP 2800+ proc 16 GB RAM 8x dual motherboards with video card onboard 8x gigabit ethernet cards ( maybe you can have that onboard ) 8x CD or DVD drives ( you dont need floppy ) 8 cases, or you can buy one or two racs for servers and have it all on one place 1x switcher ( so you can have only one monitor for all systems) 1x ethernet router ( that suports 8 or more computers so you can have network. Ask for gigabit and forget old 10/100 megabit becouse its faster and not so exspencive. ) 8x hard drives ( they dont have to be big but they are cheap now so you can go with 80 MB each ) 1x optical mouse 1x keyboard 1x discount for big purchase, and thats it. See the speed of that system on benchmark test for 3dsMax: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=5594&page=4&pp=10 I hope I helped you. I made my render farm using this system. http://www.VisualizationStudio.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted June 5, 2004 Share Posted June 5, 2004 I would no longer purchase dual athlons. The upgrade route is dead. The chipset is abandoned and over 2 years old. Instead I'd wait for the upcoming Nforce3 250 Dual Opteron boards, and go with that platform. Not only will performance be enhanced, but you'll have a top of the line chipset, without memory bandwidth limitations (or size limitations) upgradability to 64 bit programs/OS's, and expandability to faster chips later, as well as supporting new industry standards. (PCI-express, PCI-X, USB2.0, Serial ATA) As for the benchmark thread. You can't gauge a system on a single benchmark. Thats been the biggest mistake of the past 4 years. It takes an ARRAY of benchmarks to get an idea of system performance. For example...compare a dual athlon 2800+ MP to a dual Xeon in Vray, and the Xeon will slaughter the athlon. Its all about what your doing, and where your going. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
serpico Posted June 5, 2004 Share Posted June 5, 2004 Greg loves his Nforce3 boards! He's right, you will have a new future upgrade path instead of a dead end with those dual Athlon solutions. Remember 64bit, 64bit, 64bit... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kris Posted June 6, 2004 Share Posted June 6, 2004 I really dont know how much memory affects rendering theoretically but from my experience I can say not much. If you want more horse power for less money right now, Athlons are best solution, but if you want to expand your equipment in next few years than go with overpriced Opterons and hope for the best that 64 bit technology will have huge influance on rendering speed. I am 8 years in field of architectural visualization and I have never upgraded my equipment. Usualy I buy new one when I need more power. By the way I would really like to have benchmark test for Vray. Greg could post some scene here so we can see how fast Opterons are comparing to old Athlon technology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtutaj Posted June 6, 2004 Share Posted June 6, 2004 Greg, Would a Xeon 2.0 still be able to use hyperthreading in Finalrender? or could you pick up like a 2.6 xeon and add another later like in a month?? wondering if Intel is still like it was years ago, when you had to buy both chips at the same time. My last question would be, what board for those chips would you recommend. Thanks, Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 6, 2004 Share Posted June 6, 2004 Instead I'd wait for the upcoming Nforce3 250 Dual Opteron boards, and go with that platform. For example...compare a dual athlon 2800+ MP to a dual Xeon in Vray, and the Xeon will slaughter the athlon. Its all about what your doing, and where your going. Greg I'm sold on the Nforce3 idea...wait until when? I'm still sold on AMD chips, though I would buy Intel if it made sense. In the past, the cost of memory and MBs made it too expensive for me vs. AMD. You need: 16x ... 8x dual motherboards with video card onboard ...1x switcher ( so you can have only one monitor for all systems) 1x ethernet router ( that suports 8 or more computers so you can have network. Ask for gigabit and forget old 1x optical mouse 1x keyboard Can you explain the way that you control a farm of machines via one keyboard, mouse and monitor? I know this is do-able, just not how. I am very interested in doing this myself... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtutaj Posted June 6, 2004 Share Posted June 6, 2004 You could use a KVM Switch, or use a program like UltraVNNC. The KVM Switch is nice if you have a rack of systems, use 1 monitor, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse. VNC is good if the system is not close by (ie: another room, down the hall) Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted June 7, 2004 Share Posted June 7, 2004 Kris, You can't use one benchmark...You need about 5 to get a decent spread. I've been working on a vray set, but just haven't had the time. Most of the tests take 20 minutes to an hour and 30 minutes to run (on a dual 2.8 xeon) so I doubt many would want to run the benchmarks. It takes over 5 hours on my dual athlon to finish one of the test scenes...=/ I highly disagree on the recommendation to purchase dual athlons. I would instead in single processor XP chips...(nforce2) because at least they use newer motherboard technology and support industry standards (like usb 2) without add on cards. Its never wise to invest in chipset technology thats three years old. Thats just bad business sense. Does that mean that dual athlons suck? No, of course not. But they aren't the BEST choice for a NEW set of systems. 760MPX is dead. AMD killed it, its not coming back, its 3 years old and DEAD. It would be better to invest in a dual xeon system on a E7505 chipset or i875 chipset then a dual athlon, just due to the additional support found by such platforms. Think about it this way...you buy a top of the line video card. It doesn't work in the dual athlon...whose going to write drivers to fix that? Not AMD, they aren't supporting the platform anymore, their grunt is behind opteron. Not Nvidia/ATI, they aren't going to support a chipset which is now 3 yrs out of date (thats nearly dinosaur age in this industry). Hell, the 760MPX doesn't even have working USB ports on some revisions =/. Ernest...since info has started popping up, I'd hope siggy. Mike, All dual Xeon's after the 1.8's have Hyperthreading. If your buying a new Xeon, you want to get the SOCKET 604 variants. These start at 2.4 ghz and are denoted by 533 FSB and Socket 604. Good boards for these are Supermicro (X5DAL-G) which allows you to use PC2100 unbuffered DDR (so unbelievably cheap) http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/E7505/X5DAL-G.cfm Or the i875 asus board. (PC2700 and PC3200 support) http://usa.asus.com/products/server/srv-mb/pc-dl/overview.htm Though the i875 board has better features, it also wasn't initally designed as a dual xeon chipset. Artists using it haven't had any problems though, but I can't swing the same recommendation for it as a E7505 chipset (like the supermicro) which is heavily battle tested. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K-Mike Posted June 10, 2004 Share Posted June 10, 2004 Thanxx all, we finally bought single computers.... we wanted dell precisions, but we had problems dealing whith them, they were always making problems about the way they wanted to be paied... So we bought some computers of a local french "assembleur", called APY We bought 8 computers whith asus bixeon i875, whith xeon 3.06/fsb533, quadro fx1100 , 2Go DDR..... We spend 36 000 euros. Plugged whith finalrender and vray (using distibuted rendering), we're pretty satisfied of the time we win at each render whith each client, we calculate that we can "get our money back" in 5 months... after it's all bonus. So very good investment Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
plastic Posted June 10, 2004 Share Posted June 10, 2004 nice computers, BUT if its just render boxes, the quadro 1100FX will be doing nothing...it is as good as free onboard vga for rendering. graphic cards are not really involved in rendering yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K-Mike Posted June 10, 2004 Share Posted June 10, 2004 nice computers, BUT if its just render boxes, the quadro 1100FX will be doing nothing...it is as good as free onboard vga for rendering. graphic cards are not really involved in rendering yet. No, they are not only render boxes... we use them to work too (even if we are not 8 all the time). that's why they re set up whith video cards, hd's, etc.... whith maxtreme, quadro really rocks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luckytohaveher Posted June 14, 2004 Share Posted June 14, 2004 nice computers, BUT if its just render boxes, the quadro 1100FX will be doing nothing...it is as good as free onboard vga for rendering. graphic cards are not really involved in rendering yet. WOULD YOU LIKE SOME GELATO ??? I haven't tried this myself, but it make for some interesting hope and speculation... http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato.html http://film.nvidia.com/object/gelato_features_benefits.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now