how much rendering power?

[metro_digital]

Hi we are in the process of setting up a studio mainy for architectural visualisation, and we will be using VRay and 3dmax 7. Majority of our work is high quality stills, and every so often we will be required to do flythrough animations lasting between 1 & 2 minutes. I'd just like to know what a reasonable setup would be to be able to handle a workload like this. We would ideally like to get an animation of about a minute done in under 24hours. There would also be 3 3d artists working fulltime, so most of the rendering would be done at night but some would also happen during working hours. Would you guys reccomend getting rendernodes like those from boxx, or would three well speced workstations that we use be enough to handle this type of workload. Workstations like dual opterons, with 4 gig ram each. Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks

[percydaman]

I cant recommend enough purchasing the biggest renderfarm you can afford. It will speed up your animations immensely and allow you to not sacrifice quality so much to speed things up. I just dont what we did before we had our 20 machine farm.

We went with 20 dell dual 3.0 ghz w/2gb of ram. They were about 2grand apiece.

[DaftPunk]

Dells = Horrible, their customer " support line" is someone reading from a script in india who DOESNT know anything about the computer itself. If its not on the script *badly written script btw* then they cant answer any questions. If you have a problem, tell them it caught fire from the inside or something so they can send someone local to check it out.

[Da_elf]

boxx boxx boxx boxx boxx boxx boxx. maybe if i plug their name enough ill get a free system hehe boxx boxx boxx
i dont actually have one but ive heard only good things about them

[czoog]

For render nodes, we went with these guys:

http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

They were reasonable, and the support is excellent. We had a hard drive throw some minor errors in one node, we called them up and they overnighted a replacement drive that day, no questions, no BS.

-Z