3 X Q6600 Renderfarm VS 1 X Dual Quad XEON Renderfarm and Server

[Morne]

Hellooo Everybody!

OK so I have some spare cash and was thinking of getting some pc's for a renderfarm. I'm working on an Intel Q6600 with 8Gig Ram and Vista 64bit as my current workstation with HD2900 Ati graphics card.

I'm looking for some suggestions on which equipment to get, and also your reasons for your decisions. I'll be doing high-res stills and also animations.


Which do you think will give more immediate benefit and long run benefit:

1. Get 3 X Q6600 machines as renderslaves with 8Gig ram each running Vista 64bit and also doubling up the purpose of one of these machines as a fileserver.

2. Get 2 X Q6600 machines with 8Gig and Vista 64 as renderslaves, and then 1 X Core2Due bottom end with maybe 2Gig ram and Vista 64 purely as a fileserver

3. Get 1 dual quad core XEON with 8Gig Ram running Vista 64 and using it as renderslave and also fileserver.


Any comments or different suggestion will be greatly appreciated!

Kind Regards,
Morne

[Fekta.studio]

I was in the same dillema, and I do this, 4x quads q6600, and one 8core server for render slave and fileserver as well. Works verry well.
hope this help.

Best regards:
Andro

[Morne]

Thanks Andro

I'm concerned about the price of the XEON machine and thinking if its really worth the price, or for the same price rather get 3 X Q6600 as I'm quessing 3 of those will render faster than 1 dual quad XEON, or am I wrong?
Plus do you need a super pc for the fileserver so you can also use it to render, or will that slow it down?
OR
If you get a cheap pc for fileserver will that be a waste since then you can't use it for renderslave?

Kind Regards,
Morne

[Fekta.studio]

I tink if u can to, go for dual quad xeons, to avoid DR problems as mutch as possible and have reliable and fast fileserver, but if u need more workstations go for q6600. We need here 4 workstatons and one fileserver. And decide to make file server powerfull too, and participate in rendering.

example:
3x quads q6600 = 28.8ghz
1x 8 core xeon E5420 = 20ghz

As u can see u will get more power with with q6600 and the price is good.
But server have good raid configuration and thats we need. So u must consider this as well.

Best regards:
Andro

[Morne]

I tink if u can to, go for dual quad xeons, to avoid DR problems as mutch as possible and have reliable and fast fileserver, but if u need more workstations go for q6600.

Best regards:
Andro

So what you saying is that I'll have less renderslave problems with XEONS than with q6600? Am I understanding you correct? Or you just saying the XEON has more power in the punch so less machines equals less problems?

[Fekta.studio]

Yes.. but we have increase the render slaves here and the problems grows too
One octa core server is far more easy to admin.

[siliconbauhaus]

if your buying quads just to use as part of a renderfarm you certainly dont need 8gb of ram on each of them

[Morne]

siliconbauhaus, are you sure about this? I reckon I need more than 8Gig but 8 is all I can afford. On my workstation alone when rendering the usage shows over 7 Gig's at times, and I'm not even using plants or anything and this is small scenes. What will I do for a 20 block city animation with trees, cars and people moving all over the place?

[kimgar]

ye is there a reason not to give your rendernodes the same amount of ram as your workstation? i would think that various weirdness can be avoided if the amount of ram is the same, no?

[ene.xis]

On my workstation alone when rendering the usage shows over 7 Gig's at times, and I'm not even using plants or anything and this is small scenes.

yieks!
i d say something is wacky in there! just this afternon i knocked down the 6gb usage to a mere 2.2gb with a single adjustment! wich made a 4h render became 3h30minutes faster!

mind u, it was my mistake....ofcourse, but my point is maybey u are overlooking some important settings and u might be oversampling!...then again...i can be easily wrong
nontheless i d say take as much ram as u can...u can t go wrong specially now that ram is way too cheap!

What will I do for a 20 block city animation with trees, cars and people moving all over the place?

This is a completely diferent work set where one should break it all up into different passes to deal with it...otherwise not even 16gb would be enough!

[siliconbauhaus]

Generally speaking, if you have nodes that you are rendering to, then they aren't running anything that uses much in the way of resources so they shouldn't need as much as your workstation.

If your using up 7gb of mem on small scenes than something sounds wrong ???

[jujubee]

Siliconbauhaus is right. Stick within the 2 gig (or even 4) for your slaves. But 2 gigs and if you notice memory issues than add more later.

I've been running some pretty complex scenes on my dual quad xeon 5355 lately - the slaves (all with 2 gigs) handle them just fine.


-The other option if you have time - buy a dual quad and make that your main machine so initial processing goes faster. Knock your q6600 to become both file server and slave.

[RErender]

RAM's pretty damn cheap these days...

[Rt3]

second jujubee... I haven't seen a need for more than 2gb of ram for the render nodes even on big animation projects. Workstations @ 4 and 8gb of ram. Not a rule by any means but just what I have experienced.

[RErender]

Guess it depends what you are rendering but we have a bunch of 32 Bit boxes with 2 GB that routinely crash trying to render the stuff we do on our 64 Bit boxes with 4 GB.