Making a mini render farm

[Deluxe78]

Hello, we are considering making a mini render farm at our company. The farm will consist of 3 machines, one will be the main computer and the other 2 will be slaves. We are making some very big sketchup models with 3D people and furniture, so the files are quite large (130 mb).

This is the setup we are looking at:

Motherboard: Asus Z8NA-D6 server board
CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon Quad E5504 2GHz S1366
RAM: 2GB Kingston DDR3 PC3-8500 – 309,00
Harddisk: WD Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA-300


Is this a good set up? And how is it with Vray and HyperThreading, 16 virtual cores per computer.

Hope for some help Thanks

[Deluxe78]

Re: Making a mini render farm

Enyone ???

[dkendig]

Re: Making a mini render farm

Sounds like a decent setup. Our render farm here at ASGvis consists of 30 rendernodes with these specs:

Motherboard: SuperMicro X7DWT
CPU: x2 Intel Xeon E5420 Harpertown 2.5GHz 12MB L2 Cache LGA 771 80W Quad-Core
RAM: 8GB DDR2 800 (not sure what brand)
Harddisk: x1 Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 80-GB Hard Drive

[thomthom]

Re: Making a mini render farm

In my book, anything goes. Whatever your piggy bank can afford.
At the office I've grabbed hold of all the old computers as they upgraded the computers. They are a mix of various P4s, 2.8GHz - 3.4GHz - single core. Not great computers - but got six of them and they do help when it comes to crunch time.
But I have been looking at a home brew system - where I could get hold of a set of all-in-one quad-code motherboards and mount them on a rack. For the price of a high-end computer system I could set up a pretty nice renderfarm with a nice set of CPU cores.

[dkendig]

Re: Making a mini render farm

I can build a supercomputer for $10,000. Which, if you ask me, isn't bad for a legit super computer with 1000 cores or so. Just don't have the cash, or version of V-Ray that works with CUDA.