I’m looking to build a render node and I’m comparing a setup with a 4mb L2 Cache and a chip with 2mb L2 Cache. My question is would there be a significant profomance increase for overclocking with 4mb L2 Cache vs the 2mb L2 cache?
thanks for any advice
The cache doesnt make a huge difference in rendering..(more so in games) what you want is more mhz.
Overclocking will give you marginal gains. But you also risk ruining your hardware if its not done properly.
Sometimes CPU with less cache overclocks better. But if you look at this from another point of view, you can go for maximum power. You can buy most expensive and fastest CPU and overclock it to get maximum speed of that CPU platform.
If you are going to mix price/performance, overclocing can help a lot, but always at aditional price for more quality motherboard, memory and cooling.
neoVISUAL
Marginal gain, I’m not agree…
I’ve got a Core2 6600 (2.4Ghz) and it’s running at 3.5Ghz… I don’t think 1.1Ghz increase is marginal…
All you have to do is buying a good and strong aircooler… And it’s done.
We have 6 Core2 6600 in our renderfarm, all working between 3.2Ghz to 3.6Ghz.
All P5B Motherboard, and corsair Twinx 6400…
Best regards…
While I see no problem with overclocking a workstation by a little, do you not get some serious heat issues with overclocking a farm by that amount? Is it rackmounted?
You always get some heat when using powerfull parts in your farm. You can state that more power=more heat. There will be increase in power when you overclock and consequently generated more heat. It is simple.
If you have time to overclock and solve stability issues on large farm, you are lucky. Because unless you have all nodes from similar components, you’ll spend a lot of time configuring different computer architectures in overclocked nodes.
Winter is great time for overclocking, but during summer air conditioning is required in most cases.
neoVISUAL
No rackmount…
22 renders, in normal case… rackmount not enought cheap
You’re right… It takes some time to setup each machine… and we are using air conditionning…
But with large renderfarm air conditionning is necessary… without overclocking or not…
Eatch time we buy a new machine we setup the overclock and test it during 2 or 3 day… with heavy render… that’s it…
But I’m a geek… 
Best regards
Ah, that works then. Render farms just sound like a rackmount thing to me, haha.