New render nodes advice please

[stevesideas]

We currently have a small farm of only 10 nodes. These are only CPU systems, varying from i7-920 - i7-980s. We require 10 more nodes and were considering adding 1080GTX cards so that we can utilise the new hybrid rendering mode. Could anyone advise as to what types of CPU or systems would be good value for money whilst being quick. Would 1080gtx cards be suitable for rendering? Would you get blades/rack systems ? Any builder services that you would recommend?

How are people finding the hybrid mode ? Is it consistent and usable for production / intense scenes ? Does it speed up rendering substantially ?

Sorry about all the questions but any advice is appreicated.

[AlexP]

Whats your budget?
Consider the cooling implications of doubling your farm also, depending on your setup.

[stevesideas]

We do have a server room with a large industrial air con unit. It's always very cold in there even with the render farm and the servers for the rest of the studio.

Budget is between 15-20k.

[AlexP]

At 2k per node. 1080 is roughly ?500, so ?1500 for the rest of the node. Personally, I would only bother with i7 / i9 setup as for that sort of budget you wont be getting super xeons.
Alternatively, get less machines with top end xeons and forget the gpu.

Its going to more expensive to try to cater for cpu AND gpu.

IMO

[Morbid Angel]

We currently have a small farm of only 10 nodes. These are only CPU systems, varying from i7-920 - i7-980s. We require 10 more nodes and were considering adding 1080GTX cards so that we can utilise the new hybrid rendering mode. Could anyone advise as to what types of CPU or systems would be good value for money whilst being quick. Would 1080gtx cards be suitable for rendering? Would you get blades/rack systems ? Any builder services that you would recommend?

How are people finding the hybrid mode ? Is it consistent and usable for production / intense scenes ? Does it speed up rendering substantially ?

Sorry about all the questions but any advice is appreicated.

In hybrid mode the cpu is running the gpu code, so it has all the limitations of the gpu. I did not have any success with this method, generally having more grain and longer render time.

About the farm, I like a more practical approach, while I do feel gpu is coming along, every time I encounter limitations which prevent me from using it in production on full scale, and more over commiting a large $ value to a gpu farm, because also gpus get old really fast.

You may consider getting some used cloud servers, available on places like ebay. You can get rack servers 2U format with 4 physical machines in each node, housing 2 cpus per machine. I have such setup totaling 16 machines 32 cpus 6 core each cpu and 48 gb of ram.

look up "Dell PowerEdge C6100"

I think you can get one 2U node with 4 blades in it for about $3000, not including hdds, software like windows etc etc. Those nodes are not new, about 3 years old so the cpu is not the fastest but in the case of the farm quantity is more important. Its better to have many slower machines then few fast machines. So with this number in mind you can buy 3 such nodes and get about 12 more render systems for about $9000, and on top whatever costs for software / hdds.

You will not be able to get gpu installed in those however, they are really small and compact.

[stevesideas]

Thanks for the advice. I had to put the farm on pause for a bit but we are looking again now. I'll take a look at those used nodes.