All in the tittle, it’s about workstations, I never know if I must buy/rent/make a leasing with hardware upgrade included.
please help me to choose the best way. 
It depends on if its your money or not. I have worked for companies that leased high-end workstations for me and they ended up paying 3x what they would have buying up front. Typical corporate american waste.
I leased my first (and last) personal workstation in 1997 and ended up paying twice what I would have up front. I felt pretty stupid.
All my subsequent machines have been built by myself and paid for up front. I have never had any regrets buying (the parts for) a workstation.
thx for answering this, this is my money and I have buy all my workstation in one time.
but like everybody IMO I have some computers which are totally obsolete and we can’t sell us or use us, with the option to make a leasing we have the choice to upgrade or buy, that’s my dilem.
Okay. Buy then. Leasing is always more expensive.
more than buy a new station? :shock:
I have buy a station 3 years ago around 7000€ and now I need an other around 7000€ a pretty better one eheh (it’s only to test the bench ).
but okay, I’ll take this into a count.
Thx Clifton
c’mon laurent, hehehe if you buy, you can get back that money so fast with your quality renderings… right?
i always buy one time, and sulk, and fight so i can get the money back in shortest time (a month), soooooo, for the next 11 month, it’s consider a free computer. hehehe… then i repeat the same pattern. hehehe
well, i am in a similar spot now, so if anyone wants to add to the previous comments, I’d love to hear different thoughts on pros/cons…
thanks
I always buy my machines, or have them built. They used to run me 12K each back in the day, but it’s much cheaper now of course.
Possibly a good way to look at it is this: if it was better for *you* to lease, why would so many companies be so happy to lease you machines? Money is cheaper these days, but you still have to pay for that borrowed money over time. Leasing provides minor temporal tax advanatages (that I am aware of) but really what it does it provide you with a cheaper entry cost (so you don’t have to save all the money up at once) but the long run total is generally more.
Anyway, the simplest way to work it out, IMO, is to calculate what your machines cost you per month. If you paid 7000 for it, then divide it by the number of months you have used it, and will continue to use it as a render node for a while to come I’m sure, and see how it balances out to the *actual* monthly cost of your lease - which must factor in all the hidden and front end/back end costs that will be part of it. Then your answer is easy to find.
/b
p.s you should also be able to build a pretty kick ass workstation for less than 7000 Euro IMO.
Brett, thanks for the insightful notes. I am looking at a system that would cost me about 6k purchased, and to lease it for 5 years, will only add about 200 USD to the total, so it may be worth it for me because the up front cost is the harder part for me usually. So I am in an unusual situation (for me) where I could afford to buy it outright, but then I’m still stuck with it later with no real re-sale value. (In case it matters, it is with Boxx)
Thanks again…
If the real total difference is $200 then I would say go for it. It’s a pretty small amount to pay for financing over 5 years, and any machine after 5 years is going to be of limited value even as a render node (although I do have one still kicking that is about that age, and one just retired at that age) 
One other thing I would add to the discussion: I used to be a big believer in going for super maxed out machines - buying the best I could get at the time - but I’ve really come to change my tune on that. Boxx probably builds great machines, but I am pretty sure you could have one built for close to half that and it would be far more than 1/2 the machine. The actual dollar payoff for higher end machines just doesn’t seem to be there in my experience. YMMV
/b
Again, thanks Brett…I have heard similar comments regarding Boxx, but have never gone that route and thought it might be a nice change from the crap machines I keep recycling
And, it’s not even the best of the best from them…The local computer shop is not an option as they have already proven their incompetence…and I am better working on cars than on PCs, lol.
Well, great, now I have more to think on this weekend, all the best
P.S. Maybe I’m too old, but what is YMMV?
It’s an oldie actually - you are probably too young
YMMV = your mileage may vary.
Oh, hehehe, I have heard that, just couldn’t make the connection, doh!
$6000 - $7000 per machine? I built my five i7’s, several years ago, for less than $4000.00 total. Unless one of those machines can process what all five of my can, why so much?
well, it is a E5-2650 dual eight core Xeon system and 16GB Ram…I think that is most of the cost…They also supposedly put them through series of tests before shipping out.
hoping to replace my current 2 weak systems, lol.
I couldn’t say whether it could out-process 5 i7s you built…
-just wondering, how long did you have in labour per machine?
-did any of them give you any problems within the first couple of years of service?
-ever get any BSOD on any of those?
Thanks for any input, Bobby, since building my own could definatley save some money, but I would need to do more research on PC building first, I guess.
If u lease u always lose.
For 6000-7000$ I can get such an monster that it will last for years… ud save a lot more if u spend 1 week learning about building pcs and then making ur own. EVGA is the way for dual xeons.
16 gb per 16 cores? Nice joke, ud be bottlenecked most of the time… Are they even OC to 4/5 ghz?
I read somewhere that intel released 10 core xeons. Just gotta see if EVGA can handle it and 20core/40threads 5ghz here I come =D
But if u want a render node then only single cpu socket.
DADAL, I clearly still need some schooling in the hardware department! Thanks for the reply, too.
So, for the 16 cores to not be bottle necked, you’d have to go with a lot more RAM? Like 32BG?
I don;t think they were overclocked at all…
About building PCs, I am going to start learning now, I guess!
I’d really like to make this affordable, so I really appreciate all these comments/questions folks are bringing up…
I just want to build a single machine for use as the primary workstation and rendering machine…
I think anything will blow my current Q9550 out of the water, lol.
Yea, just think of it u have 16 CPU and 16 gb of ram, thats 1gb per core and 8 gb per CPU. Now this is quite complicated but I’ll try to simplyfy it. U have 2x CPU and 16gb ram, each cpu got 4/8/12/16 banks of ram depending on motherboard. So each cpu has its own sets of ram that he fill with data. Now everytime u go above ur 50% of ram u spread the data unevenly throught the ram, there fore CPU1 has to ask CPU2 for ram data if he runs out of info from his ram data, at this moment CPU 2 has to deal with his own calculations as well as to send data from his ram banks to CPU1 for calculations… more or less. with 16gb of ram once u go past 7-8gb of ram this will start happening and all hell brak lose. I never did tested how much slower renders get (quite hard I run 48gb of ram) but they should get a little bit slower. 3 years ago when I was building my PC I had a nice diagram about how CPU’s works and how they distribute rams etc etc, I’ll look for it.
In any nace that was 3 years ago maybe something changed not sure… but still I’d get 64gb ram in ur place… After all 32 gb cost like 200£ so pffffffff
I’m in the same boat. Built a dual quad about 5 years ago and paid over 4500$, and that was with mid-end 2.3ghz cpus and 8gb of ECC ram. The higher clocked cpu were just out of my reach. So 5 years down the road, needles to say that it badbly fell behind performance wise. Cant even get that type of ram anymore (found some on Ebay, 600$ for 8gb:roll:). So as of now, I think I’m just going to go for a single socket build, problably the 3930K, overclock it to 4.8ghz, stuff 32 gb of ram inside, with a top tier geforce, all of this for around 2000$. Abuse it for 2 years, then retire it to the render queue, and build another top performing, consumer system. So about the same investment, but taking better advantage of the latest tech.
Mine are pretty much stock, with nothing special, and no issues. I don’t know what BSOD is. I think I built all 5 in one day.