Let me ask a “stoopid” question here.
I heard form a FR “freind” that when building a renderfarm you have to go with all Intels or all AMD’s. If not the two processors render scenes/buckets slightly differently. Is that an issue with Vray?
right now my office has all Intels, but I wanted to mix in some AMD’s.
Theoretically (and it happened moreso in the past than with recent generations of chips) because of differing floating point operations and random number generators, you could have differences in procedural textures that involved random generation.
However, I have never ever seen it, and I’ve been running a mixed farm for several years now.
I have a mix in my farm, and there is no problem that I can see.
Tony
That’s good to know, thanks for the quick response.
After following Percy’s thread on benchmarking, its tempting to look into the X2’s, I just don’t know if I have the time or patience to figure out the overclocking.
since I only did some real simple overclocking, it really wasn’t too bad. I used a utility that came with my motherboard to determine what cpu multiplier was stable, then just rebooted into BIOS and made the changes. easy as pie!
do it you wont be disappointed!!
percy, what was that overclocking app you used?
its called uGURU i think…came with my Abit mobo… which is cool so its specifically designed for my mobo…
X2! X2!
Can’t beat it for the money.
No probs here.
I must say i have never witnessed such a surge of CPU buying quite like what happened when the X2 came out.
They really are great arnt they 
The x2’s are really the first chips that are exactly what we needed and for a fair price. I’m a happy camper
Now, max and vray 64bit is all thats left to really make everything come together for us. I can’t wait!!!
Tony
I have p3’s, p4’s, Xeons and Opetrons in my farm.
No problems at all.
Yea my farm has AMD and Intel Critters in it also and so far so good for the last few years.
-dave
all ive got is a dual xeon, a dual amd2600+MP and a dual 64bit opteron and all 3 play nice together
We indeed had some problems with our mixed renderfarm. We have some older Athlons, P4 and a XEON. In the past we had some trouble with flickering shadows and different brightness.
Most of those issues have been detected while rendering with max scanline renderer. But I think we even had some trouble with vray.
We then decided to group our PCs in the Render Qeue. So we have a group of Intels and a group of AMDs. We can direct different scenes to different groups.
If I had to build up a render farm today I would make a decision between Intel and AMD at first and then build up the whole thing with CPUs of just one of both companies.
we just got a quote for 6 X2 4600+ systems compared to 6 intel 830 systems. The X2’s totalled 20k and the intels totalled 14k. IS there more than a 30% difference in speed between these two chips in vray?
oh about the mixing processor question. I vaguely remember there was a problem when we used maya and mental ray (one pc was intel, the other AMD) where the lighting and shadows for each would not match properly possibly something to do with photon mapping? having noticed a difference in vray though.
I wouldnt spend the extra money to get the 4600’s just get the 4200 if all they will be used for is rendering. The speed increase (200mhz) isnt worth the price hike.
And yes the x2 4400’s are just faster by about 33% according to the limited testing on the 830 that i have seen.
See pics and times below
RErender’s 830
My X2 4400
Plus i wouldnt be going near the intels, as Intel even admitted that they rushed them out to compete with the X2 and will be replacing them with something fast soon I believe.
Also can you show a break down of what that 20k is consisted of… seems abit steep to me.
Cool I dont have the component breakdown here but they were from alienware. Aurora 7500’s I think with 2Gb of ram and the X2 4600’s…they dont sell slower CPU’s than this for some reason. would be nice to go for X2’s but dont want to assemble them or buy from dodgy computer shops. I didnt realise the speed difference…thats fairly big! a nice row of red alienware cases would be cool though to go with our company colours 
ahh ok well that explains it.
Hoestly i reckon it would be worth while finding a local computer shop that can build them up for you… you would save a packet, and they may very well offer better support than alienware (heard bad things recently)
But yeah the x2’s are great 