What CPU is best for V-Ray rendering?

[biglolly]

At the moment we have 6 nodes with 4, 3ghz Xeon processors in them giving us 24 cpus. We're considering adding more power to this set up, but want to know what in people's experiences are the best CPU's for rendering with vray?

We're open to single, dual and quadruple systems - just whatever is the most powerful.

[tdarcy]

Hi Biglolly,
This insn't in connection with your question but I saw the name and was wondering if you are the Biglolly as in Belfast Biglolly ? Just curious as I'm from Belfast myself.

Cheers,
TD

[biglolly]

Yes, that's us!

[tdarcy]

Cool,
All of a sudden I don't feel so isolated here in good old Belfast.

Cheers,
TD

[biglolly]

It's good to see that there are other locals on here too

Still wondering about the CPUs though.

[RErender]

Here's some thoughts

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...ic.php?t=10560

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...ic.php?t=10391

[tom182]

100 miles down the road in Dublin
(but lived in Belfast, did the QUB thing, ahhh they were gr8 daze)
Tom

[cybling]

Im from dublin too yay

[biglolly]

Cool

I was silly earlier. I thought we had 4 cpus per node becuase I saw 4 buckerts operating each time. D'oh! Wrong.

I worked in Dublin for a while.

[arobbert]

Those 4 buckets are a big plus for Xeons.

[DP]

how is the hyperthreading stacking up on the new version of vray?
We're a bit loathed to turn it on after it turned out to be the cause of our animation renders randomly crashing. Has anyone tested it out on systems that used to crash?

[ShaunDon]

Not sure this answers your question, but I render with the latest VRay to my Pentium 3.4 laptop with hyperthreading on almost daily and haven't had an issue.

I tie it in with my dual Athlon 2000 workstation and interestingly enough the speed varies -- when processing full renderings, my Athlon is faster, though when rendering quick matte passes (no lights, GI off, black scene with white self-illum material applied to the objects I'm matting) the P4 is faster. The laptop has 2g RAM while the desktop only has 1g, but I'd expect that would give it the edge in renders with materials and such...

Shaun

[DP]

the issue only cropped up on one still, the rest of the time it was animations that threw it out...i would like to explore it more, but usually when we're sending animations to the farm you kind of want to see them completed without babysitting...if you know what i mean

[biglolly]

Would our dual Xeon 3.06ghz processors have HT? If so how do I turn it on or off?

Also why do we have 4 buckets for 2 cpus?

[czoog]

Would our dual Xeon 3.06ghz processors have HT? If so how do I turn it on or off?

Also why do we have 4 buckets for 2 cpus?

You can enable and disable HT in the bios. But if seems you already have HT enabled.

2 physical processors with HT enable= 4 virtual processors = 4 buckets