Hi all,
My rig broke down 2 days ago and since I need to order new components I thought this could be as good time as any to buy some renderslave machines. I've never done this before so I have a few questions and would appreciate it if someone could help me out.. I have no strict budget, I'd be looking at investing in 2-4 rigs with approximately the same efficiency as my current 2 year old Xeon5355, 8 gigs RAM.
1. I was looking at a thread on general section here: http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ad.php?t=44069 and was wondering would I still get the best value for my money buying slaves with i7 processors? if not, what would you recommend? I usually build my computers myself but TBH if it was an option without being to expensive I'd rather buy ready made builds this time around.
2. Many times when working on my current workstation, dual Xeon 5355 with 8 gigs of RAM and a Radeon 8800GTX, I managed to make 3dsMax completely unresponsive and eventually crash and cause excessive harddrive swapping when I tried to, for example, create closeup trees with very high polycount (around ten million) so I'd like to know is this something I could work around by buying more RAM or a better graphics card? or is this a software limitation? working on 64-bit Windows and Max.
3. Say RAM really was an issue here and I'd invest in a workstation with 16 or 24 gigs of RAM and worked on scenes that actually needed all the RAM available, to be of any use my renderslaves should have roughly the same amount of RAM, right?
4. For renderslaves I should look for processor/memory speed and get as cheap graphics card, monitor etc as I can find?
5. Setting up renderslaves like this is really nothing more than connecting computers through LAN?
6. Apart from the hardware, to get this to work am I overlooking something here? I need Windows for every comp but any other software I'd have to be prepared to invest in?
Thank you in advance, I'd really appreciate some help here!
My rig broke down 2 days ago and since I need to order new components I thought this could be as good time as any to buy some renderslave machines. I've never done this before so I have a few questions and would appreciate it if someone could help me out.. I have no strict budget, I'd be looking at investing in 2-4 rigs with approximately the same efficiency as my current 2 year old Xeon5355, 8 gigs RAM.
1. I was looking at a thread on general section here: http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ad.php?t=44069 and was wondering would I still get the best value for my money buying slaves with i7 processors? if not, what would you recommend? I usually build my computers myself but TBH if it was an option without being to expensive I'd rather buy ready made builds this time around.
2. Many times when working on my current workstation, dual Xeon 5355 with 8 gigs of RAM and a Radeon 8800GTX, I managed to make 3dsMax completely unresponsive and eventually crash and cause excessive harddrive swapping when I tried to, for example, create closeup trees with very high polycount (around ten million) so I'd like to know is this something I could work around by buying more RAM or a better graphics card? or is this a software limitation? working on 64-bit Windows and Max.
3. Say RAM really was an issue here and I'd invest in a workstation with 16 or 24 gigs of RAM and worked on scenes that actually needed all the RAM available, to be of any use my renderslaves should have roughly the same amount of RAM, right?
4. For renderslaves I should look for processor/memory speed and get as cheap graphics card, monitor etc as I can find?
5. Setting up renderslaves like this is really nothing more than connecting computers through LAN?
6. Apart from the hardware, to get this to work am I overlooking something here? I need Windows for every comp but any other software I'd have to be prepared to invest in?
Thank you in advance, I'd really appreciate some help here!
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