The Render Farm Budget

[EricCamper]

Ok....The time has come to not only get a new office, but to build a noice little farm, instead of using the other user's computers after hours. I have a $2500 budget and I want to build 10 computers. What operating system should I go with, processors, Ram, etc.....Any suggestions are helpful

Later

Eric

[percydaman]

you have a $2500 budget for 10 computers? $250 a piece? your not going to get much of a farm with that im afraid. Be better to go with 5 and spend $500 apiece...at least you'd have a mediocre farm instead of a nonexistant one. You do realize that windows xp pro costs well over $100 apiece right?

[EricCamper]

Well...Let me rephrase.......Forget price.......What would you guys do? BUILD a farm. Or buy 10 ready made Dells or whatever.....What would your system look like? Pentium.....Linux......etc......Just looking for some ideas.
Thanx

Eric

[RErender]

Hard to say without shopping it out, Dell etc. have some pretty good deals from time to time but often you are are paying for stuff you don't need for a farm machine.

I think right now the best value is the AMD X2 procs with MB's available for under $100 and 3800+'s at under $400, then you just need some memory, a case, os and a smallish HD, should be able to get it done for about $650 per system

[Da_elf]

heck. just get a cupboard with AC and rack the mobos. hehe who needs a case

[dennis]

i have to join the X2 praise (never thought i would buy AMD ).
i've just bought a 3800+ for home use. it is very fast compared to the pricetag.
I couldnt resist overclocking it as much as i could and do almost get identical times as my dual xeon 3.6 workstation alltough the extra money spent on cooling and proper ram would have been equal to buying a 4400-4800+ instead i think.

ohh and have to add its very silent at full load compared to my dual boing747 xeon jet.
i guess thats irrelevant when talking about slaves as they can be tucked away but im seriuosly considering buying an X2 to replace my current workstation just because of the noise.

[Syclone1]

EricCamper, I would go for the AMD X2's as they would be the best bang for the buck. But trying to get 10 servers out of $2500 even in the us will be almost impossible as the cost of the OS seats alone would eat up alot of the budget for each machine.

LOL Elf I was just thinking about that yesterday, I was at costco and saw a wine cooler about the same size as your average server cabinet and thought with a little modding it would be perfect :P also came with wood slotted shelves lol. Although it prob would not be able to keep up with the heat output of the servers

Dennis, on your Xeon. If you dont mind tinkering a little I also could not stand the noise from my xeons so Iended up buying a couple cheep 60mm to 80mm fan adapters and put nice quiet 80mm fans and its been working great for close to 2 years. have a look HERE for a pic of what I did. They fit kinda tight but work verry well

-dave

[RErender]

That looks like a good solution dave, I think I'll try it.

[Syclone1]

That looks like a good solution dave, I think I'll try it.

Yea at the time the coolermaster neon led fans were the quietest with the highest flow. Im sure there may be better fans out there now but I liked these fans for the performance so I use them in almost all my workstations and servers.

-dave

[dominiquelaksmana]

hi guys!!

i am also about to set up a small renderfarm, like 4-5 slave computers (is that how to call them?)....... is there any tutorial (in detail) how it suppose to be done. i mean like:
- requirements for hardware (i saw some of you mention that above)
- network setting for this small renderfarm and the hardware

thanks guys, i need to ask you this question because i am totaly blind to networking stuff.. is it possible to do it ourself or we need to call for expert to set up these things.

thank you
Dominique Laksmana

[redi]

Render Farm

Hi Eric

I know it's a bit late, but I just have to say that we have had great results from AMD x2 processors. We recently bought 6 new machines for our mini-render farm, all with AMD 4200+ 64bit x2 processors. They have ASUS A8N-SLI (MG 330) motherboards, all with 2Gigs of RAM. So far there performance has been awesome. On a recent animation these are the rendertimes we were getting (compared to other machines in our office):

AMD 4200+, 2Gigs RAM - 14min33secs per frame,
Dual Intel 3.06Ghz Xeon, 2Gigs RAM - 18min04secs per frame,
Quad AMD Opteron (rack mounted server) with 8Gigs of RAM - 9mins00secs per frame.

So as you can see, the AMD x2 processors offer a great performance/price ratio!

[Da_elf]

@ dominiquelaksmana
for the networking side of things make sure you get 10/100/1000 network cards and the same for a switch (advanced hub which lets data flow in both directions properly) and make sure your tcp/ip addresses are all setup

[Tom B]

I have to echo the "never thought I'd buy AMD" post, I now have dual Opteron 265s. Now what do people think about stream processors and the cell processor in particular in connection with 3d rendering?