render box idea

[super gnu]

ive been looking at the mini itx sandy bridge motherboards.. they are tiny!

you could fit a pile of them in a box, maybe with a shared watercooling system and it wouldnt cost very much.

at the moment the available ones use the h67 chipset which doesnt support overclocking, but p67 varieties are coming soon, and the idea of 4 or even 8 overclocked i7's in one box really appeals.

only real problem is 2 dimm slots per board.

i was then thinking about gpu's.... for me at the moment its not so essential, as i tend to use the cpu version of rt due to its support of more features (and memory), and i find the speed ok.

however,ill definitely build with the idea of adding them later if necessary, and i was wondering about low profile gpu's.

best ive found is a gt430 with 2 gb of ram, or a gts 450 with 1gb.

how do these cards work with rt? not worth bothering with? even with 8 of them? the ram is a bit low i know. anyone have any better suggestions? probably just a tall box with room for full size cards.

[super gnu]

also, sandy bridge has an integrated gpu.. can this be tapped for rt too? or again, not worth the bother. .?

[3LP]

Hey

could you please tell us a little more about your idea of putting severals motherboards and i7 in to 1 xu case? 1u or 2u ?
in the mean time, just take a look to that motherboard : P8P67-M-V3 from asus, it's the only motherboard I could found that allowing over clocking and is in mATX...

I also though about all that so if we could share our though, would be great!

thanks

Stan

[joconnell]

Definitely - I'd love to look at a small system that's only a few inches in each dimension as something I could bring around to act as a render slave to a laptop - very handy for freelance bits in companies that don't use max. http://www.boxxtech.com/products/ren...o_overview.asp from boxxtech looks really interesting too - not a hope in hell I'd afford to buy one though!

[Morne]

problem of how you gonna get it in the case is not the actual problem. Once its in, how do you get power to all boards? Also the heatsinks and fans are massive, I'm geussing you need a 2U case at least

[super gnu]

depends how nerdy u wanna get. its quite possible to run multiple boards from one psu if you are handy with a soldering iron (just splicing cables not touching components!) and also watercooling is much more space efficient than whacking great heatsinks per cpu. (my workstation is watercooled.. zero problems and the block on the cpu is about 2cm high.)

i envisage say 4x micro ITX motherboards, sharing one 1500w psu.. a daisychained watercooler for the 4 cpus, and a big quads 120mm radiator on the top / side whatever.

with approx 380w per board you could -either- oc the cpus /or put a decent gpu on each. (the sandy bridges take 95w at stock speeds)

since the mobos cost about 60 quid and the cpus about 200 ish, it could be extremely cost effective.

main problems are to get a decent amount of ram per node, youd need 8gb dimms, which cost about £150 each, and the oc'able itx boards are not out yet.

id bet you could build such a system for the price of -one- of those (admittedly stlish) boxxx machines... (which do seem to basically be a single renderbox in a small case.. not hard to do yourself..)

to cut costs further use micro atx boards.. youd need a much bigger case, but you could use cheaper 4gb ram modules.

[super gnu]

actually looked closer at those box things.. apart from looking cool im not very impressed (unless they are quite cheap) they have a 300w psu and no space for a gpu.. means theyd be quite quiet i guess. but i have a feeling they will be a lot more expensive than they should be.. get yerself a little shuttle pc or one of the other tiny pc options and save a packet. sure you can fit 2 6 cores in there, but id bet you could buy 3 i7s for the price.

[super gnu]

hmm ok well biggest problem i can see now, is with only 2 dimm (or so-dimm) slots per mini ITX board, you need 8gb dimms... but you can only get 8gb dimms that are buffered and ECC.. and these mobos dont support ecc ram. anyone seen non ecc 8gb dimm sticks anywhere?

[IVOR_IP]

For size and power and cooling, its probably not worth the trouble to do all soldering, just spec your power supply to the minimum required per node. You actually save more power if you profile them correctly and do power saving. You are basically building big blades. We've been running shuttles for many years for ease of install, but other wise you can grab a bunch of mini itx boards mount it on silverstone or on ply. And if you don't care about gpu rendering, you can even power them with pico psus, it'll look ugly and messy, but its cheap and gets the job done.

I have no comment on boxx. its just silly.