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View Full Version : Strange render times between Xeons....please help

acelegna
07-24-2012, 01:28 AM
Hi there (first post),

OK, so at my office, I work on a workstation with the following specs:

Workstation (PC 01)
Xeon E3-1220 3.10 GHZ
16 GB RAM
Quadro 2000
Windows 7 64 bit

I mostly work and render with Maya, 3D Max and After Effects (mental ray, Vray). So, my bosses were generous enough to buy a bigger, more powerful PC in order to assist my renders. They ended up buying the following:

Renderstation (PC 02)
Dual Xeon E-5 2620 2.0 GHZ
32 GB RAM
Quadro 4000
Windows 7 64 bit

I was so thrilled until I tried a few renders.....and I realized that PC 01 was rendering (animation, batch) at twice the speed of PC 02. Which is just WEIRD!! Granted that PC 02 has 2.0 GHZ instead of the 3.1 GHZ that my PC 01 has....but it has much more cores and threads and yet it still renders very slowly.

So I'm calling an S.O.S. for anyone who maybe has greater knowledge of hardware than I do and can tell me, why is this huge (and expensive) PC 02 rendering at half the speed of PC 01?? Any help/advice would be great. Thank you
olson
07-24-2012, 02:39 AM
There are a lot of variables to consider. Network bandwidth and latency, queue manager latency and configuration issues, BIOS configuration issues (like disabled second processor socket), stuck processes in the background, overheating or failing hardware components, and probably a thousand other things that could go wrong. Isolate the different factors and start with your gut feeling or whatever is quickest to troubleshoot, then work your way towards the less likely and more difficult to troubleshoot.