Render Hardware: Intel i7 970 with 6 cores or 2 AMD Opteron Quadcore?

[RobPhoboS]

It certainly does help me Dmitry !
In fact even one sales guy I spoke to today said pretty much a similar tale, and what was nice is that the parts were significantly cheaper, so he wasn't trying to 'push' anything my way.
I'm almost tempted to get one of those little cube/bare bones type of thing at a later date to help with rendering, based on the same CPU. Just messing around on a configuration site, comes up to around £650 with 16Gb, although if it's rendering in DR mode, would it require that much ram ?
Well, either way, I think that could also be very, very useful to have.

p.s
What water cooler are you using ?
I've got an old Zalman but I'm thinking if I get an entire new system, I may get a new cooler and start again.

[Morbid Angel]

Im not sure, I think its this one: Coolit Systems Eco CPU Water Cooling System
But maybe a different type, when I was building the systems there were three of them, for different loads I chose middle one I thought it worked both price and performance wise for me.

[KAKTUSDIGITAL]

Just another nod to the 2600K. Recently purchased and o/c to 4.2ghz on an Antec 620 kuhler (ready made watercooling). A cheapo system with 16GB ram for under 1K AUD just can't be beat

[add101]

Anandtech have quite a few rendering benchmarks (no v-ray benchmark though, and no Xeon benchmarks. the spaceflyby is mental ray). i7 2600 and 970 seem to be pretty close across the tests. Mostly the 2600K is fractionally faster, but the 980 is faster on some of the tests.
They've done quite a lot of benchmark tests for 3d rendering, and it's nice how they can be viewed by benchmark, or comparison between 2 CPU's.

For price/performance for render machines the Sandybridge is hard to beat, but it depends on what price you can get for the 970 or Xeon's, and the other hardware in the system/total system cost. Looks like the 970 is more than double the price of the 2600.

For a workstation a slight increase in performance on an individual machine can show more benefit, but for render machines the price/performance is more of a factor than fractional increases on individual systems.

[pg1]

I am completely out of date when it comes to hardware but am interested in getting some info for a friend who is looking to buy some more render power.
Morbid Angel you said you are very happy from buying 3 cheaper machines instead of one super computer, do you know if there will be a big difference in electricity bills over a year from using one machine or 3 machines?
This might not be a big deal with one machine vs 3 but could become a deciding factor with 10 vs 30.

[Morbid Angel]

well its all about what power supply for those machines. I never measured what the power consumption is, but since my main workstation is a server with a powerful video card, I'd expect it to naturally eat more power, since your render boxes do not have display so they dont have the hunger for the power of the video card. In terms of rendering performance vs price, they are definetly better then xeons. We use them at our current facility, where we have about 25 xeons and 35 i7, and those i7s while slower still perform really well along side the xeons.

[pg1]

Thanks Morbid
I passed that info onto my mate and looks like he will go with the i7 2600k cpu.