Render nodes / box / farm

[enygma]

Hey... just in case you missed it, I did reply to your thread on 3D Buzz.

http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=107441

[peterhus]

Hahaha

post it on more than one site to get diffrent ideas,

Thanks anyway dude

[i601254]

In actuality render nodes are pretty simple devices. Quite honestly, and with all due respect to other opinions, my company builds render nodes and we use AMD Opterons exlusively. With it's Integrated Memory controller, Hypertransport technology and low latency, the AMD's just outshine anything Intel for rendering. Your application doesn't really dictate which CPU to use. Lightwave, Maya, 3Ds Max, we've built render farms for all of them. Just so you don't think me an AMD fanatic, we do build and sell a number of Pentium 4 and dual Xeon workstations but for rendering Opteron all the way.

The next item you need to consider is dicated by your 3D application. Each particular application handles remote rendering differently and will have different requirements. For instance, 3Ds Max uses Backburner Manager which distributes and manages the rendering job. With Backburner Manager, for anything over 10 rendering nodes BB Manager must run on a Windows Server product. Additionally, BB Manager cannot be running on a rendering node. If Manager locks up or crashes for any reason, the entire job is lost. However, with 3Ds Max, you could run BB Manager on your workstation alongside 3Ds Max and send your job to an XP workstation.

Obviously if your budget doesn't permit a dual processor system, you can still get by with one Opteron. Just max out the memory and get yourself a small gigabyte switch and a couple of gigabyte ethernet cards to maximize network throughput. And since you really don't need a large capacity drive, I'd get something like a 36 or 72GB Western Digital Raptor (10,000 rpm) again for performance.

I guess if you had the time and initiative, you could piece together a bunch of older Pentium III's and use them to render. It would really depend on your particular application and how it handles remote rendering. In the long run it usually ends up costing you more in time and effort for very little gain.

You could save a little more here and there with things like the enclosure. There's no hard, fast rule that states a rendering node has to be in a 1U rackmount enclosure. These enclosures are typically more expensive than your average tower case. You can easily find a large Enermax, Antec server case for less. But when your talking about $1,800 to $2,000, a hundred dollars saved on a case is really negligble.

[enygma]

I believe for 3DS Max scaline rendering solutions, or any other SSE2 dominant rendering solutions, the XEONS and P4 will outshine the Opterons, simply because SSE2 is more clock cycle dependant. A 2.4GHz Opteron 250 won't perform as well as a 3.6GHz XEON in terms of SSE2 hungry code. I do believe though that the Opteron is a better all around processor, but if you want to get the most out of 3DS Max rendering performance, XEON is your best bet.

[i601254]

While the Opteron's do support SSE-2, Intel's implementation does seem a bit "tighter" hence the slight advantage to Intel in this case. However, in general we believe the Opteron to be a more efficient platform for rendering. In the case of Maya, the Opteron's really shine. Of course, most of the Opteron vs Xeon benchmark comparisons I've seen usually pit the Opteron 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4GHz cpu's again the Xeon 3.2 and 3.4GHz so 3Ds Max could just be benefit just from the higher clock frequencies. I'm sure it's a subject that will never be settled.

[enygma]

I don't think it is about tighter implimentation as much as it is about SSE2 being more dependant on the actual clock speed rather than clock speed efficiency. I do agree that Opteron would be the best all round processor to go with though, otherwise I wouldn't have built myself a dual Opteron 250 system. I also recently built an Athlon64 FX-55 system for the office, and a couple other Athlon64 based systems. Then again, I use Maya as my application of choice, so there is no other processor choice... :D

[peterhus]

Thanks guys

Would it be best to have a lot of RAM of just a bare minimal 1GB etc.. and also the graphic card?

I would like to build my own and buy all the parts from ebay whish I could get a good deal and put them all together.

[i601254]

Although rendering is CPU bound, I would use a minimum of 2GB of RAM. I always like to use 2x my baseline entry point, in this case 1GB. 1GB would probably be fine though. As far as the video card, depending on what you're doing an nVidia Quadro FX with Gelato should help accelerate your rendering times.

One item of interest concerning our discussion of Xeon vs Opteron, I did find this benchmark (http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlon64-x2/index.x?pg=8).

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