most energy efficient rendering.

[super gnu]

im looking to purchase some rendering capacity, but the apartment where i live has a circuit breaker that cuts in somewhere between 2.5 and 3kw. so im extremely interested to know how much rendering juice i can squeeze out of this power budget.


im open to any crazy ideas ( huge pile of very low spec machines, laptop cpus, one huge machine... whatever gives me the most power for the least..err.. power, whilst still supporting large scenes in full-fat vray.

i understand some of the newer arm chips are/will be 64 bit, and windows 8 will support arm. however i have grave doubts if anyone would bother porting Max to the arm version. so probably those cpus would be a step too far.. atom maybe?


any thoughts?

[plastic_]

I would expect that the efficiency improves with few very high speced machines, instead of many low end ones.
Atom is certainly crap for rendering. I'd look at fast corei7 running at the sweet spot (= not overclocked), with efficient parts, like expensive power supplies, no graphics card (for cpu rendering), as few components as possible.

However, you can easily override the kW limit on a single electric line by bridging the poles and bypassing the fuse.
Just kidding

[instinct]

Definitly fewer High-Spec machines. PowerSupplies are a big energy eater. You could prolly save a lot in a custom setup without a power supply per machine and instead get them the needed Voltages directly from a central "transformation room". Also mind ACs and temperature levels. There's a LOT to tweak, but also a lot to be done wrong in that field hehe.

Regards,
Thorsten

[super gnu]

well ive been doing my research and my current concept is a single tower case, containing 4 mini itx boards, stacked on spacers through the screw holes in each board. each would have a 2600k in it, and 2x 8gb ram sticks. since they have an onboard gpu i wont need graphics cards (i toyed with getting them, as the rendering would be fast, but they eat loads of power and gpu rendering is likely too limited for me for the time being.. certainly as the cards max out at 3gb. if i could buy gpus with 16 gb ram for a reasonable price hehe.... )

each would have a corsair nautilus water cooler (nice low profile head so i can space boards closely) and a nice fast small ssd.


and im planning to use a 1kw 94% efficient psu with a 4 way splitter to power the whole thing.. its been done before sucessfully.


according to this useful page:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

each node will draw a maximum of 205 watts with everything flat out. this will give me circa 180w of headroom in the psu.. will it be enough? there are always bigger psus.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Xeon low power high end cpus/mobiles maybe + OC u have to do match how much high clocked xeon will eat power and how much OC will eat... xeons eat 50% less than i7 2600k / depends on model...