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capsulegraphics
03-05-2003, 09:37 PM
My small company is in the process of going from mac maya to PC maya. We are going to build a small renderfarm. Our IT guy is recommending that we go with Dell units with Celeron processors.

Since I'm new to the PC world, what is the ideal processor to use on a maya box specific to rendering only? Does it matter with a Maya render farm; celeron, xeon, pentium, AMD? Or are there certain issues with each chip? Certain speed advantages with other chips, or is it just raw Ghz speed that matters?

Help would be greatly appreciated as I don't want to end up with something substandard.

-Thanks

Capsule
mark_wilkins
03-05-2003, 10:03 PM
You can't directly compare core clock rate between different manufacturers' processor lines. In many cases, larger cache sizes can make up for slightly slower processors.

Avoid Celerons, as they are deliberately limited in order to be a low-cost alternative. Pentium 4 Xeon processors generally have larger on-chip caches, and are thus probably the best bet for performance, although any reasonably high-clock-speed Pentium 4 will probably be satisfactory.

AMD's high-end processors are also very good, and a year or two ago they were far ahead in floating-point performance, but now it's much closer, and AMD might be slightly behind.

Honestly, all this is splitting hairs. It's probably more important to pick a system for quality of support than anything else, as long as you're near the high end of any of these processor lines. Probably, your best bet is to go for Xeon systems from a reputable manufacturer of complete systems like Dell. The extra that you spend in buying the systems will be more than made up for in support.

Incidentally, while you'll probably find these systems somewhat faster than the Macs with which you're familiar, don't expect them to be that much cheaper.

-- Mark
capsulegraphics
03-05-2003, 10:32 PM
thanks mark! We are actually looking for speed mostly. Just got done with a project rendering all maya stuff on a dual 800 G4. Was a nightmare. This is why we are going to a pc farm.

-capsule
Signal2Noise
03-05-2003, 10:34 PM
Mark's comments are a good 'go-by'.

I just want to stress the fact to AVOID CELERONs at all costs!

Also, tell your IT guy to don't scrimp on RAM. Load the machines up with as much memory as it can handle.
lazlow69
11-17-2003, 05:47 AM
Just read this slightly older post...
Don't know how things turned out for you, but my vote for processor base would be athalon xp 2000+ range, with a microATX motherboard. The price point is absolutely amazing, and the raw power is quite good.

Good luck, and let us know what worked out for ya!
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