For those who don’t know me; I can’t stand to wait, I have the attention span of a two year old and am all about instant gratification. (I suspect a few others here feel the same. 
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Results from our newest workstation.
The original benchmark
The newer 1.5 benchmark
And no, this is not DR, OC or any other trick.
Suffice it to say, I love AMD!!
Not bad for a $10,000 Box? 
Paolo spill the bean already.
Why are the colors so different? I suspect some changes in the file…
This is a beautiful thing.
for that time i thought it was a fourway, seems like an octa should be faster. I wonder if it hits some threading limit? Are all cores at 100% when rendering? As it is it’s only a little faster than a dual xeon.
The first test is the older benchmark that was abandoned for taking to long.
The cores are all pegged. I had to change the passes in LC to 16 for all of them to be used. (this is something that’ll have to be taken in to consideration as the quad cores come out.)
At first I agreed with you as I thought it would be faster. After further testing and running some heavier projects/scenes through it, we saw that it screams as expected. Seems that if a project doesn’t have enough complexity to it, it performs not much faster than a dual/dual. These are 875 opterons so compared to 275’s, it’s pretty much as expected.
When we first brought it on-line, we only had 4 processors installed. it was rendering our projects almost twice as fast as our duals. (ex. 40min for the 2x2, 22min for the 4x2.) I haven’t performed the same tests with the 8 proc’s but I expect it to be similar. I think we just need to get a more difficult benchmark.
for those who are interested:
8 x 875 opterons
8 gig ram
4 x WD raptor 150 striped.
1 x Geforce 7950 Gx2 video. (not a bad card for the price)
Win 2003 Enterprise server. 64bit.
Cost to build, approx 10k
to use a line from fast and the furious part1. “not a bad way to spend 10 thousand dollard”
you should try to optimize you bucket size
Now we know what Vlado’s bringing with him to next year’s siggraph… :shock:
Since adding the other 4 processors, I haven’t had a lot of time to test. The guys have promptly snatched it out of my hands and are throwing pre-calcs at it. When it slows down a bit, I’ll run a few more tests.
you just blew my mind… thats awesome :shock:
So much processing power in a box.
you could just do all your renders as PPT from here on in.
I’m pretty sure this kills the Renderdrives
Can you render a PPT version of the benchmark after 10min?
Also can you render a larger view so we can see the noise levels.
And how much did you exactly spend on the box? I buy all my equipment wholesale so if it cost 10,000 it means about 8-9 thousand for me
Oh and can you also post:
Your address
The time no one is looking after your computer
Any security codes
and if you have more?
oh and if you dont mind… the address of your rich boss?
haha, that’s just insane man, love the task manager screen!
heh, yes, please post your adress, my uncle nasty wants to deliver you a pizza
OMFG I think I just got an adrenalin rush from looking at the task manager. Sweet box buddy
RePlay,
We’re burning some frames on it now for testing, I’ll try to run a PPT over the weekend. If you have suggested settings/size, let me know.
I’m running a short animation on it at the moment. 1800 frames averaging 10sec per frame. I’ve got the same animation running on 6 - 2x2 Opteron 275’s. They are averaging 45 sec per frame. The performance seems to really depend on what you throw at it.
As for the cost, it was way below wholesale. The cost of the processors are the killer. Cheapest place I’ve seen is Monarch at $1,200 ea. I took a huge risk and purchased them on Ebay for $500ea. I was very lucky as they all checked out / passed rigorous testing.
Actual costs are as follows:
Case:
This was tough and there aren’t many options for an 8way setup. I ended up using tinkertoys for grownups and built a case with a Lubic set. It’s a little hokey but it works. I had to custom quite a bit.
Cost $110 Newegg
Plexiglass: $75 USplastics
PowerSupply, again not easy. you need 2 x 24pin & 8 x 8pin power connectors. I ended up using 2 x 850w Zippy/Emac’s
Cost $700 Antron Electronics
Motherboard S4881 & M4881
Cost: $2,426.61 Ebuyx.com
Processors: 875 6 from ebay, 2 from Monarch
Ebay: $2,981 (this is where I really saved)
Monarch: $2,028
ram: corsair 1gig x8
Cost: $1,160 Newegg
HD: 4 x WD Raptor 150
Cost: $796 Newegg
Video: XFX FX7950 GX2
Cost: $500 Newegg
Heatsinks: Cooljag. (only side flow setup I could find that would fit) BARELY!!!
Cost: $280
Fans, Misc
Cost: $100
Total around $11,000.
If you can build one for less, I highly recomend it!!
As for the rich boss, he’s not that rich and he’s me Only reason I built it is because of the deal I found on Ebay and work as been pretty good this year. I don’t get to do much production work any more so I try and have fun where I can. Usually it’s building up new gear. Fun for me, great for the guys when they get to use it.
I’m building a new storage array now. 8Terrabytes with 1Gbs througput. Cost to build so far is 10k. Were sorting out some driver issues but when finished, it should speed up our disk access quite a bit. (especially since our current storage is barely pushing 150Mbs.)
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Lets see some pics of this power house
-dave
I’m curious too :shock: