well, typical solar thermal collectors just heat up water in a closed circuit on the roof (to about 40°C) and use heat exchangers to transfer the energy to the houses internal water circuit (heating, warmwater)
i bet the temperature of a render-farm’s cooling circuit would be higher than 40°C in average. (and also even when the sun doesn’t shine)
btw: these systems are used in zero-energy houses (i.e. they normally don’t use anything else to produce warm water/air)
ps: the exact power-supply’s names for the chart were given in the article (which was in german):
Be quiet! BQT P6-520W (won the test, 120€)
Ultron UN-550 PFC (budget recommendation, 80€, 30-45dB(A))
Amacrox Frei Erde 550W (best efficiency, very loud even at low watt usage - 35-45dB(A)!!, 100€)
Coba VB-500X (low efficiency, 65€,)
Sinan-Power VP-530W (35€, loud, lowest efficiency)
we got some more intel 840D’s from Dell. Good value, easy to get and no need to go to some small dodgy cornerstore. The dell machines are also very quiet and in a small room without aircon, 12 of them barely heats it up. The older AMD machines in there are like electric heaters and are very loud in comparison
I know the X2’s are better but its about availablity where you live and selection of companies you can get the machine from. In our case we stuck with dell because of leasing agreements and other discounts etc but they only make intel machines…
anyway hope that adds a couple more things to consider beyond pure performance.
well they are in a super tight contract with intel to only sell intell machines. so if their contract is up then we can see some amd, but untill its over there wont be an amd dell at all
Sorry to switch gears here but will XP Pro64 run all the apps like maya, rhino, photoshop, illustrator, after effects… Or do I need to upgrade those to a special 64bit version?
None yet. Autodesk hasn’t released a 64-bit compiled version of 3dsmax, although using 3dsmax on an XP64bit system will give you the same advantages as you get from turning on the /3g switch in Windows XP.
There is deffinitely a build of Max 8 that was compiled for 64bit, it’s been seen at tradeshows and screen captures. It hasn’t been made publicly available though, and Autodesk has not announced anything about its release. My guess is that if there isn’t a 64bit version released for subscription users, there will be for Max 9 since Windows Vista is supposed to be out by then, and will be 64 bit.
just curious about building a new machine myself for home. thinking of going the dual Opteron 265’s with windows 64.
I wonder if i buy max9 now if there is an option for the 64 bit version and also how vray will work with this version of max. would i need 64 bit vray?
Ok guys.. its been a long time since anyone could say this but:
now is the time to go INTEL not AMD.
the new “woodcrest” Xeons and “conroe” Core 2 duo chips have just been released and absolutely walk all over the opterons and X2’s in performance, price and power consumption, particularly for rendering (although ive yet to see a vray bencmark…)
like the amd chips they are essentially the same as each other but clocked and packaged differently.
Another great thing about these proc’s is that since they’re still LGA775 they will be able to work in ‘some’ older boards. :!: I’m hoping mine is one of them!
can somone please find a list of all the old mobo that we can still use with the new Conroe procs ( we have 7 intel lga in our renderfarm) could be a be a nice boost
gili
Id love to go for one of these but if they arnt out yet in the US then we are more than likely a long way away from seing them in shops here in australia and i’m guessing about 12 months away before thay are actually affordable.
really cant wait as long as i think its going to take :(.
vray benchmarks would be interesting though. If they are going to be so much better and also affordable then its worth just renting some PC’s for a while and waiting
an unrelated bit of info for ppl thinking about saving space on their renderfarm without going to a rack. Check out the Ultra small form factor Optiplex DELL cases. If they will be able to take the conroe chips and enough RAM i think they would be great for those of us setting a farm up at home. I saw one on the weekend and think i could fit about 10 of them in the space that i have set aside for 5 normal cases. They look cool too!
