UPDATED BENCHMARK (ITS FASTER I PROMISE)

[jacksc02]

hellllllllllllllo hardware!

[timmatron]

This is one of our new rendering blades. We purchased the rack and built them in house. 10 blades in 8u of rack space with remote management. Staff can now login from home and turn them on and off remotely.

What do you mean by 'turn them on and off'? Do you mean backburner server, actually powering on/off? I'm just wondering what the advantages of that are. Can you share any specs. on the 1u render blade components?

[lukx]

back on topic I would love to see two tests: One done on E6600 and another on E6700 I'm not sure which one to get

[TomC]

This is one of our new rendering blades. We purchased the rack and built them in house. 10 blades in 8u of rack space with remote management. Staff can now login from home and turn them on and off remotely.

What do you mean by 'turn them on and off'? Do you mean backburner server, actually powering on/off? I'm just wondering what the advantages of that are. Can you share any specs. on the 1u render blade components?

I think he actually mean powering them on/off. I do the same with our render-farm. Prevents me from running to another floor and back to startup some machines to do the rendering. With one double-click I can also shutdown (or startup) the entire farm. Cool feature you know

I'm very interested in how you build those blades too and at what cost. Was considering doing something similar myself.

Very nice workstation btw!

[gilpo]

Lucetius: What blade chassis are you using? Also, what case is that for your tiny workstation? How the heck can you keep that little thing cool enough for dual procs?

We've been looking for stuff like this but haven't had any luck. Any info you can provide would be great.

Thanks in advance!

[lukx]

Okey we got E6300 test
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=16154

[Sawyer]

Ok I finally got to this and it seems like I should be faster on my puny boxx. I have 8:43 for rendering time on my dual 2.8 xeon ht with 3 megs of ram. Now is there a set of things that could speed up the cpu that I am overlooking?

Thanks

[Ryan_Chiong]

maybe its 3 gigs of ram.

[Sawyer]

Ahh yes the 3 megs would have explained it though.

[Lucetius]

Sorry for the delay in responce, I've been in meetings all morning.

We've had several request re: the blade servers so I'll detail them below. In the long run, we've saved over $15,000 by building them ourselves vs. purchaseing from a vendor. They also take up less rack space then 1U servers so there's another plus.

This is the Chassis we started with from Rackmountmart.com.



It will hold 10 Blade servers in 8u of rack space. We researched several other vendors and pre-mades systems but this turned out to the be best solution for us. One of the key items was the power and the ability to connect to a UPS. Each blade has it's own power connector so we could use; standard, rackmounted, 120v UPS. This has allowed us to get as much bang for the buck as possible.

The rest of the build is as follows:

Motherboard: Tyan S2881 nerds.com
Processors: Opteron 275 Monarch.com (good prices, sloooooow delivery)
Ram: Corsair 4 x 1gig ddr400 Newegg.com
CPU Cooler: Cynatron A75 Newegg.com
HD: Raptor 36gig Newegg.com
O.S. XP64 (coorporate licensing so we only had to install on one machine then ghost across all the others. )
Management card: Tyan M3289: Monarch.com
UPS: Opti-UPS PS3000rm

The Remote management cards are pretty sweet. They operate at the hardware level (under the O.S.) and allow you to power on/off the computer as well as boot in to the Bios remotely. Even if the server is completly locked up, you can remotley re-set it. We occasionaly power down the servers on the weekends. If a staff want's to work from home and needs to submit something to render, they can turn them on remotely. We are probably going install the cards on the workstations as well.

We are running them headless, (no keyboard, mouse or video cables). The only cable is the gig ethernet. If you need to service the blade, just slide it out.

Total cost for 10 x fully built blades with UPS and remote managment cost us $31,000.00.

[Lucetius]

The little workstation on my desk is an Iwill box. So far it's performed pretty nicely. I don't get to do as much production work as I used to but I'm happy with it.

The chassis can be purchased from Iwill.com

Power and heat are obviously the two biggest issues with a build like this so I opted for the 275HE processors. They only run at 55w which helps alot. Heat hasn't been to bad here but I'm also in an air conditioned office which averages 75 degrees (F). It's fairly quiet most of the time but if I start doing a lot of rendering, the fans cycle up and can get pretty loud.

[lukx]

my test with vray 1.5 demo. Slower than before verison and something weird with reflections is going on.

[Paul Oblomov]

Almost forgot this test
Used sub-pixel mapping, to get rid of these overbrighted edges.
And yes, slightly slower...
Still can't understand why "VRay" part from stamp gone.

I think test must be reworked, to match VRay 1.5
edit
found the reason for stamp to be incomplete...

[Paul Oblomov]

Well made new scene with VRay phys. Camera and slightly different settings. Rendertimes roughly the same (multicore monsters won't notice any difference I suppose)

Link to scene (max8sp3 file)
http://rapidshare.de/files/29166811/...w_1.5.rar.html

[natty]

You may have to rework the QMC... for 1.5