I also am at the verge of updating my render farm. I was thinking about getting 10 rack mounted computers with these specs:
DUAL OPTERON,244
ASUS,A7000/T/64,AGP
MICROSOFT WINDOWS-XP,PRO
2GB RAM
120 gig hard drive
floppy and DVD drive
For $1,600.00 a piece and $1,000.00 for the chasis to mount them in.
Seems pretty good to me but I’m curious to get your thoughts on that price…??
Andrius,
If you’re going the rack mount route, might I suggest taking a look at rackmount.com’s non-proprietary blade servers. If you’d be willing to step down to a single operton system, you could fit up to 50 blades in a rack. I called a rep and they said the dual opteron cases would be out sometime in March and would allow 40 blades per rack. Might save money/density/power in the long run.
have a look at this thread
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12220
244 are not dual core
for me the best quality/price render node at this time is athlon x2 4200
i’m waiting for the cutdown price of the dual opteron dualcore
andrius:
Dont get those mate, they are not dual core. Either get an X2 4200 or spend some more and get a 2 proper dual core opterons.
I’m curious. Did they put them together and warrant them for that price?
No warranty beyond the manufacturers warranty on the separate pieces. I’m taking a bit of a chance that I wouldn’t take if it were my main workstation. I’ll have to wait and see if the reliability is there…
That’s a great price. Did they assemble them?
They’re building them right now. They didn’t quote an extra build fee, but I’ll see the final bill on Tuesday when I pick them up. I’ll let you know… I have a good relationship with them, since I’ve puchased some other stuff.
OK final price for my X2 4200+ render boxes is $967 CDN = $840 USD. They talked me into adding a DVD since XP 64 bit comes on DVD.
With taxes it’s $2205 CDN = $967 USD.
They didn’t charge a build fee/shipping or warranty.
I installed them last night and it works fine.
The default max bench isn’t a comparison with vray (right?) - dual core = more advantage to the bucket renderer. That is why our test on this forum was important.
I was NOT satified with my Monarch purchase or service. They sold me a wrong size dvd drive for a no-so-small-form case. You would think they would know what size fits… The cheap MB they used shorted out the onboard sound and ruined 2 sets of headphones, and I was past the “return period”. Plus the “Hornet” case is a pile of dogshit.
The machine was not really “a bargin” and it took weeks on weeks to get here.
Now we put them together from newegg in Aopen XC cubes with all the bells and whistles for less than $1000. Machine is up and running less than 48 hrs after order. Although now we are running out of floor space, and I too was looking at 275s - but they are too much money. Time to go vertical…
Also, not that AMD vs. Intel is in question here - the dual core AMD run about 1/2 the ram the xeons do.
Sorry for dropping the question and leaving 
Back again!
I’m confused about the opteron 275 benchmarks relative to the 4400.
I have a 4400 and probably I would get a 10 x 4200 renderfarm but…I’m evaluating the opterons possibility.
These are some times taken from the “updated benchmark” topic
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12220&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
athlon x2 4200 → 5:22
Dual Opteron 275 (Win x64) → 3:08
DaForce said “Check out the scores of the opterons in the benchmark thread their render times are far quicker. atleast half the time of the x2’s”
My question is…Dual Opteren 275 means 2 dualcore cpus?
If this is the case one 275 cpu performs worst than one 4200
One 275 would have 6:16
Could someone correct me please!
Thanks
It looks to me like this is the case or it’s very close which is odd considering the price difference. It’s to bad we can’t get dual x2’s. It was always more cost effective to buy dual’s until now.
I can’t believe how cheap the Opteron 265s (dual core) are now. They are much cheaper than X2s! Plus you can get 24 GB RAM on the motherboards. And there are mobos that can take 4 or 8 Opterons too! I think it must be cheaper to build one of those than 4 or 8 X2 machines, but would the performance be the same?
Yeah the lower price makes them more feasable. I just priced a system out and a dual 265 was about $250 dollars less than 2 X2 4200’s. But I bet the 2 4200’s would be faster as render nodes.
for larger render farms you should take maintainability into account
less machines (being more powerful) are favorable over lots of slower nodes
just imagine the increased possibility of hardware failure (increases with each additional machine)
if one hdd has a mtbf of 50000 hours the chance of failure doubles for two of them (effectively lowering the mtbf to 25000 hours)
other factors include cooling, power consumption (at least over here electricity is getting more expensive all the time), noise and network devices (switches, cabling)
I agree, but on the other hand if a hard drive goes you would only lose one processor instead of two. Earlier in this thread I posted some information regarding power use of the two options.
“In terms of power consumption, GamePC’s benchmarks show the Opteron systems consume 282 Watts under full load, while the X2 only consumes 181 Watts. A 3-system Opteron farm is 846 Watts, while the 5-system X2 farm is 905 Watts. Thus, the Opteron farm will cost about 7% less to operate, which is also about a wash.”
7% is not insignificant but it would take a while to recover the extra cost. I also agree there will be a little more heat but the cooling requirements would not be that different between the two options. I’m sure for bigger companies with larger needs and more money duals are a better way to go. In fact that’s what I’ve always baught.
It’s important to note that these particular machines are as fast or faster than many of the dual machines on the market right now especially the affordable ones. Even now the only thing close price wise is the 265 and I still think two X2 4200’s would be more Powerful.
it’s not only the power the cpus eat
you have to add memory (10-20W for 2 Gigs),
ineffective power supplys (their degree of efficiency is 80% at best - so they use up 20-30% on top of their currently supplied energy just for heating the case)
Graphics Cards (up to 100W)
Hdd (25-30W)
Mainboard(25W)
Every additional component gets multiplied by the number of computers you have instead of a more or less fixed value for a multi-processor system
especially gigabit switches get extremely expensive if you go past the 8-port number of connections (i was surprised how dirt cheap some of the 8-port ones have become)
regarding the cooling: i was mainly refering to cooling requirements for the room itself (which scales up the more seperate machines you have)
in our old office we never had to turn on the heating with only about 8-10 (single-cpu) machines running
if you have a small room, maybe even without windows (not to forget a hot summer like the last one) you really might have to invest in air conditioning
That all makes sense. But it seems like 2 gigs of ram would use about the same amount of power whether it’s in one computer or two. I used a lower watt power supply (350 watt) it seems like most duals use at least 500. I suppose it comes down to how much each component draws and how efficient your power supply is. I’m using onboard video so there’s no video card although I don’t doubt power is used. I’m sure the additional hard drives will use more power but I bet a dual motherboard uses more power than a single. The question is how much each component draws and what it all adds up to.
At any rate I wonder how long it would take to make up the difference in price with saved electricity. There doesn’t appear to be significant speed increases for the duals considering the additional cost. I guess that’s the bottom line since you would be paying in advance and would have to reach the break even point to start realizing the savings.
I’m interested in learning more about power supply efficiency. It might be interesting to do a comparison between different machines under load. This could be a significant issue for render farms. I’ve just got a watt meter that I’m going to connect to my studio that will give me a reading of how much energy I’m using at any time. It even tells me how much it’s costing so I could measure the differences between different machines. I can watch it surge when I hit the render button! I’m designing a cooling rack that will force the hot air from my render farm into my house for heat and I’m in a fairly cool climate so that will be good for 7.5 months of the year. In the summer it will be directed outside. I do feel guilty about all the electricity I use for my work. Me and my wife are concerned. We run very few lights at night and try to be efficient in our electrical use. That’s why I got that meter so I can separate our personal use from business.
i have a recent review where they were measuring the efficiency of some testet power supplys at different wattage loads
there are vast differences between different brands
f.e. a coba vb-500x has an efficiency of about 65% at 100Watts, increasing to about 73% at 350W and going down when going to 500W
(it is the worst supply in terms of efficiency)
quick scan:
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2963/chart6be.jpg
nice idea to use the air for heating your house
a shame this only works if your office is close…
a lot of people living in low-energy houses have heat exchangers nowadays - i really wonder if one could water cool the computers and use the water to help heating and saving gas/oil
Thanks for the link Mike. I’m going to educate myself on this. I bet you could use that heat to warm water as well. Mabye design it such that the water cools your farm and then feeds the hot water heater. I want to wring every cent out of that electricity.