Need advice on a new rig

[phildlight]

Thanks to a new client, I'm about to leave my job and work as a consultant full time from home. As such, I need to buy a machine for my home office. I'll be rendering a TON of HD animation frames over the next year(s) so I need some decent performance. I almost bought a Boxx 7600 http://www.boxxtech.com/products/3DB...sp?prodid=7600 today but I thought I'd stop by here and see if I could get some advice. I configured the Boxx 7600 with Dual Opteron 6272 (2.1 GHz) (Sixteen-Core) and 16GB ram. I have a second machine for photoshop and light compositing, so this new workstation will be primarily 3ds max and vray for rendering though I think the config would be much better at compositing (AE and Premiere).

My question(s) is/are, I've been reading some threads here and it seems there is a decent base of forum members who build their own systems. I've also read a few comments suggesting building several smaller machines as render nodes. I've built several machines in my day but haven't in a few years. I'm fully open to building a machine if it makes sense. The Boxx machine is appealing because it will come ready to roll. The timing on this is fairly important as I'd like to walk out the door at my current job and start working from home right away.

I do have 3ds max (no vray license at home yet) on my current home machine and I plan to model and do a lot of animating on the current machine. So the new machine(s?) will be primarily for rendering. I'd like to keep the hardware cost in the $5,000 range.

Can you guys give me a quick pros/cons on:

1.) building vs buying
2.) single high power machine vs several less powered machines
3.) any experience with the Boxx workstations?
4.) best bang for my buck

I hope this isn't too vague. Thanks!

[joconnell]

1. Building means much lower costs and only paying for the things you want. For example with the boxx machines you're paying for a very good warranty which is nice, but also paying for a big quadro card that you'll get no major benefit from. You get no backup if anything happens when you build, but you can often fix your problem quicker than the manufacturer would anyway.
2. If your one machine goes, you're screwed. If you've 3 lesser ones, you drop to 66% capacity. If you've a main machine and two slave render nodes, you can keep working away with renders in the background, on a single rig you can't as easily. I'd buy one main big machine with a decent geforce and lots of ram (24 gigs) then get two tiny mini atx rendernodes with only a cpu, ram and a cheap hard drive using the on board gfx.
3. Yep - generally good, pricey but solid. HP workstations are similar.
4. Top spec core i7 2600 (or whatever the current best OC machine is) and 2 x mini itx render nodes.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

If u can builb - build U will save LOADS of money and get 50% faster systems.

I wont go in to details but

Home build workstation 48 gb ram is cheaper than mid range BOXXX.

Home build slave u can get probably 50% more speed for 1/2 price than BOXXX.

About HP/Boxx/DELL - they crash alot and give blue screen - prepare urselfs for wrath of bluescreens - as far as my experience goes with them so far...

[phildlight]

Thanks for the help guys! joconnell, I like the idea of redundancy. I think that's the way to go. Any suggestions on the slave configs? I'd like to get as many cores as I can without going too far near the $6000 mark. I've still got to buy my own license of 3ds max and vray too. What I might do is build a main rig and then add the 2 slaves later to spread out the cost impact. Now I'm off to newegg.

[joconnell]

Take a look at any good tech site's mini itx builds. The new i7's are good with heat and power so you can build a mini itx system with an external cpu that won't take up much space. Should be able to spec it for about $1000!

[super gnu]

yep i recently specced up a little personal renderfarm.

1x tower case with 4x miniitx boards, each with a nice i7 2600k, 2x 8gb ram sticks, a nice fast 64 gb ssd, and a nautilus watercooler. one 1.2kw 95% eff psu to power all 4 with power to spare - 5 boards should be doable too with the same case and psu.


total price for the parts came in around the £3000 mark, including vat, for 16 cores and 32 threads. with those coolers you could also dabble in some overclocking too..

of course youd need 4 copies of windows too though

[phildlight]

Thx super gnu! Yeah, the multiple copies of windows is one of the downfalls of the multiple machine solution.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

yep i recently specced up a little personal renderfarm.

1x tower case with 4x miniitx boards, each with a nice i7 2600k, 2x 8gb ram sticks, a nice fast 64 gb ssd, and a nautilus watercooler. one 1.2kw 95% eff psu to power all 4 with power to spare - 5 boards should be doable too with the same case and psu.


total price for the parts came in around the £3000 mark, including vat, for 16 cores and 32 threads. with those coolers you could also dabble in some overclocking too..

of course youd need 4 copies of windows too though

for 3000£ U can have 2x Xeon(on 1 motherboard dual xeon quad/octo) OC to 4/4.5 GHZ + 48 gb ram and much more... In my opinion u wasted a little bit money there :s

edit: I read u had 16 cores so argh ! U actually saved a lot money hehe nice config ! What mobo u used?

[super gnu]

yes the only advantage i can see to the xeon system is it is a single machine, having access to all its ram. my setup would only have 16gb max per node. (mini itx have max 2 dimm slots.) mini atx would be more flexible, cheaper, but more bulky. i love the smallness of the miniitx boards.

[joconnell]

Which boards did you go for gnu? I love the idea of those portable render boxx machines as an itx - type of thing you can throw in a bag and bring with a laptop as a background renderer.

[super gnu]

mobo is one of these:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/zotac...(x16)-mini-itx

[super gnu]

i must add, i didnt actually build it yet. its "on the drawing board" like so many other things. i did do all the necessary caculations regarding power heat and space requirements and i see no reason it shouldnt work as im hoping. seems to me the cheapest way to get a decent power density and efficiency.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Include OC to 4ghz. See how much power u would need then...

[Morne]

hmmm but then if you have 1 tower case, with 4 mini motherboards inside, dont you then also need 4 hard drives (1 for each motherboard) to load the os?
how does that work?

[super gnu]

ive checked the power usage using this excellent page:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp


even with a decent overclock, 100% duty cycle on all components and 100% cpu load i still have bags of headroom. without gpu's the load doesnt go above about 220w per node.

i dont remember my exact oc settings, not sure if id push em to 4ghz.. thats about the limit for these miniitx boaards.


dvp3d: yes each board would have a 64gb ssd.