Hardware Testing

[ted.vitale.jdk]

I think we need to put together some kind of master class "Building render workstations on a budget" lol

[ted.vitale.jdk]

Might actually have to give that a go. I'd love to start building some inexpensive small multi-system farms for around $5-6k you could build a little 4-5 machine 80 thread render farm. But I'll probably hold off and wait from Threadripper and EPYC.

[delineator]

Just be careful with the balance of more tiny boxes vs 1 large box (by size I mean power). Back in the days of free unlimited render nodes, this was OK and made sense (and at the time allowed us to pull in old crappy computers to bulk up the farm). But nowadays, I don't really think any rendering companies are giving out free render nodes (some are cheap, but still require a license). And even though SWARM makes things a bit better (a bit, not much, a bit - and yes bucket issues and all the other goodies that happened with v2 DBR can still happen on SWARM), managing a farm of 10+ is exhausting and really requires some sort of management and queuing software.

Because of this very recent change (like the last 2 years?) our whole mindset has to shift a bit from what it was. BUT the upside is lower licensing costs overall, if your farm is under 2x nodes, then you can use Deadline FOR FREE and if you have some beefy computers, you can take advantage of multiple nodes or even concurrent tasks on the same rig to cover multiple jobs, software, users, etc

[delineator]

Bit of a threadripper update: Its official, its awesome, its cheap, and will be available very soon. Boards haven't shown up on Amazon yet, but I'm hoping they are somewhat reasonable. Still, for all those pcie lanes, quad channel ram and with the 1950x being about twice the performance of the ryzen 1800x, this thing would make for a killer workstation rig.