Renderfarm - is it worthwhile?

[Rens]

That's for you to decide. I don't know how much money you can spend and how much money you will save by buying a render farm.

Three PCs rendering will go three times as fast as one machine rendering, but also take into account time and cost for setup and maintenance, which will also increase.

[BenDstraw]

edit: sorry basically repeated what he said.

anyways its up to you.

[blakboks]

Hey, I don't know if you've already made your decision yet or not. I was just checking out Dell's website, and it didn't seem to me that the P4's are that great of a deal. At least if you're talking about the PowerEdge 850's, anyway. IMO you'd probably be better off going with the Pentium D setup. You get 2 cores at 3.0 Ghz instead of 1 at 2.8, 4x the RAM and 64-bit capable (correct me if I'm wrong, though). I like the way we have our renderfarm set up here--althought I don't know how other people have theirs set up. We have a main server that does the render management and hosts the files. The others are just workhorses, basically processors and RAM in a box with some fans--no GPU, small/inexpensive harddrives (you could probably even get away without CD-ROM although they're dirt cheap now, anyway).

As far as recommendations on the P4 and whether it's worth the money or not, best way to decide is to start pricing things out. Set yourself to a budget--set up an excel sheet or something. Try to figure out if 4 P4's are going to be faster than 2 Pentium D's or Xeon or Opteron 64 dual cores, etc. Then figure out which one is going to be faster in 2 years--the D's, Xeon's with EMT64, and Opteron 64's give you better options for when everyone switches over to full 64-bit (they also allow you to just add more computers to the render farm instead of replacing the 32-bit ones). Then, of course, you have to figure in the render licenses--depending on your program of choice. 3DSMax allows you to render on an unlimited number of machines with only 1 interactive license (even with Mental Ray), although XSI you need to buy more batch licenses--sorry, don't know about Maya or Lightwave/Modo. Obviously, if you buy half as many super-powerd machines as regular machines then you need only half as many licenses. Either way you go, buy something. Even if you get only one more computer that's comparable to your workstation, you cut your render time in half.

I'd be curious to hear how you decide to go about it.

[mixermanic]

I was taking my price from a catalogue the company I'm doing a bit of work for at the moment got through. I think the deal is over now anyway...

The decision I have come to (not final, but working :) ) is to get 2 more workstations machines (Pentium D 930s with 4 GB RAM each) and relegate my current workstation (Pentium D 820 with 3GB RAM) to storage and an additional rendernode.

One of the new workstations will have my main graphics card in, and I'm going to get a medium spec NVidia card for the second workstation.

My current machine I'm going to gut, rackmount, and stick 4 300GB drives in (and use it as my "office" computer with MS Office and email etc etc on). It will also help during rendering.

Then, I can have 1 workstation which I'm working on, one (for example) solving dynamics or something in RF, and the storage server, er, storing things :D and rendering...

If I get a decent network switch the system is also then expandable.

Cheers!

Martin

(I'm a musician too so the first workstation will be my audio workstation, the second my gigastudio workstation networked in, and my storage machine can be dedicated to reading/writing files)

[kirigoi]

Man, I'm getting serious box-envy from the sounds of that. Hope it works out for you.

[h2o]

Power saving is also important for a company. I would say P930, 940 with C1 step(B1 is old & cannot save power in idle) is good for that in a lower price now.

If u don't need GPU & hardware render, onboard graphic chips are enough. Put more money on better & durable HDD, minimum 2GB Ram for each machine. I believe u need 2GB ram for 2K render:buttrock:

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