8 core machines and VfR

[pickinboy]

guys... moving from the 3DS Max days and animation, we have now got substantially better rendering and no translation.

Has anyone else seen a marked improvement with multi core machines?

this is the type of machine we're thinking of investing in to get back some speed....

2 x Intel® Core®2 Extreme Quad QX9775 OverClocked Water Cooling @+-3.60GHz-1600FSB 12288KB L2 Cache Quad-Core VT EM64T (req. S5400XS MoBo & Cosmos case)
4096MB DDR2 800MHz FB-DIMM ECC 2x2GB Dual Rank Interleave heatspreader (req. 1600FSB CPU & MoBo).

Thanks for any advice or comments.....Glenn Johnson at B/E

[Micha_cg]

Re: 8 core machines and VfR

For the same money you could get more CPU power per DR and cheap Q6600 based slaves. My slaves are working at 3.4GHz slowest, quiet air cooling (big Zalman) - price approx. 600,- € each machine incl. XP64. The slaves needs less RAM than the Rhino.exe at the master, so a simple XP32bit and 2GB RAM could be enough too.

The biggest advantage of a single extrem power machine I see for rendering animations, because DR bring most speed up renderings with rendertimes of a few minutes. If you like to speedup fast rendered frames around a minute, than the DR dosn't help so much, because the communication between master and slave need some time.

I ask me, since Q6600 are so overclocking friendly, could it be possible to build a Xeon system with low cost, low speed Xeon CPUs and overclock it?

[pickinboy]

Re: 8 core machines and VfR

Thnks Micha - yes it seems the strong machine is best for keeping the naimation 'together' losing texture maps and odd reflections was always a hassle using DR (on Max) anyway.

[Micha_cg]

Re: 8 core machines and VfR

DR works like a dream at VfR. Daily I use it here and it works easy and stable. ;D

[dalomar_cg]

Re: 8 core machines and VfR

Yes...DR is so much better in the new SR...now all I need is a dozen or two 8core nodes and I'll be in render heaven and maybe a part time IT guy

[pickinboy]

Re: 8 core machines and VfR

Yes...DR is so much better in the new SR...now all I need is a dozen or two 8core nodes and I'll be in render heaven and maybe a part time IT guy

yes that's my point - I REALLY_REALLY don't want to go back to managing a set of machines. Was spending days getting them all to be friends and render correctly in the MAX days.

I'd rather max out a PC and set it to go ....