hardware config for renderfarm

[rhshah]

Our office is looking into setting up dedicated renderfarm. Can someone please suggest hardware spec for renderfarm cpus? Would the dell rack cpus be ok?
also, we are moving onto XP64 in two months time.

thanks in anticipaiton of your help.

rahul

[thomthom]

Re: hardware config for renderfarm

Are you buying render racks, or do you put together normal computer hardware?

I took some old computers and work and set them up to a small renderfarm.
Another example of a DIY renderfarm with some numbers: http://helmer.sfe.se/

[rhshah]

Re: hardware config for renderfarm

Well, we are looking into buy dell rack servers, like this one. http://configure.euro.dell.com/dells...=SV3R200&s=bsd

so we are thnking to put them in the server room.
We do have some old Pentium 3s discarded in our IT room. As you said you used old computer to setup render farm, can you please let me know if connecting those old P3s would be good enough to do renderfarm. Please note that we are an architectural practice and not 3D Viz. service provider. So any cost effective method of renderfarm would be ideal in our case.

By the way i really liked the DIY link that you sent. Its amazing how that fellow has built the renderfarm rack.

look forward.

regards

[thomthom]

Re: hardware config for renderfarm

I'm not sure how great the old P3 will be. Not sure if they're worth it.
I used five old P4 of various configs. 2.8GHz to 3.2GHz, 1-2GB RAM, single core, one Hyperthreaded. Not great hardware, but it sure do help when deadline looms. I'm also working at an architectural office, hence the bodged setup.

After seeing that link I posted in the last post I checked out some prices for hardware and I would get a nice setup for under £2000 with at least 5 Quad Core computers.
Another point worth noting, I got the DRSpawner running under Ubuntu, meaning that if the DRSpawner is the only thing that'll be running on the machines then you don't have to buy a set of Windows licenses. It does require that you know how to set up a Linux box. But with Ubuntu that's at least as easy as a Windows box provided that the hardware is compatible.

I'm not familiar with rack servers. Can't say much about them straight up without looking more into it. I'd think there'd be people here more qualified than me to reply to that.

[rhshah]

Re: hardware config for renderfarm

Thanks very much thomthom for your quick and kind response to this matter.
look forward to hear other experience in this.