Render slave

[VanWijnenVR]

Hi,

I'm currently working on a MSI GT75 7RE Titan SLI (Intel Core i7-7820HK, 2x GTX1070 8GB, 32GB RAM) laptop and I'm starting to reach it's limits. We've had some large, Forest Pack / Railclone heavy scenes that caused a lot of crashes. It did render in the end but it took a lot of time. Long story short, we're looking to expand with a render slave. We'd prefer to have everything ourselves instead of using a Render farm. We're using 3ds Max 2020 with Vray Next. Render times are up to ~20 hours for 360 panoramic renders at 6000x6000px so we can only render at night / in the weekends. We'd like to able to continue working while rendering.

Any tips on what we'd need / where to look for a good setup? Since we're expecting to expand we'd like the system to be able to as well.

[Digital Magic]

I feel your pain. Several threads on here about asking for hardware advice. I was going to use some laptops as render nodes but finally decided to shell out for another desktop. My quadro laptop with 64GB RAM was taking several hundred hours to render just one animation scene.
I will also be using Forest Pack/Rail clone in future animations.

So now I'm going to use a threadripper as my main workstation and a few other lesser computers (including laptops) as nodes in my small render farm. I hope so anyway, if I can figure out how.
You'll need to buy extra render node license of V-ray Next for each node.
I think the RTX cards will eventually be a good choice for V-ray.

[VanWijnenVR]

I've contacted a well known expert in the Netherlands and they've offered me these two configurations;

System1;
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
ASUS PRO WS X570-ACE ATX
Noctua NH-U14S Silent CPU cooler
32GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR4 2666MHz
256GB Samsung 860 PRO SSD SATA600,
EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 2GB
be quiet! Silent Base 601 Silent ATX tower,
850W Seasonic PRIME PX Modular 80+ Platinum PSU

System 2;
AMD Threadripper 3960X
ASUS PRIME TRX40-Pro ATX
Enermax LIQTECH II 360 Liquid CPU cooler
32GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR4 2666MHz
256GB Samsung 860 PRO SSD SATA600
EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 2GB
be quiet! Silent Base 601 Silent ATX tower
1000W Seasonic PRIME PX Modular 80+ Platinum PSU

They're setup to act as render slave to my current system. We mainly use CPU rendering and we'll probably opt for atleast the 64GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR4 2666MHz option they've given us.

Any thoughts on the above?