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View Full Version : mini render farm help

swedestralian
02-25-2008, 05:52 AM
I am looking into putting together an economical option to rendering high quality images. I am not sure if it would be better to get one single powerful computer or to get several smaller and less expensive ones. I am really only looking at a budget of $1000 max. I have several older computers that I would like to wire together also, a 3.2ghz P4, a 1.3 Celeron, and a 700mhz Celeron. Is it a good idea to wire those together and then add a more current model to the mix? Can that be expanded every few years? They are all going to be architectural renderings, and I am currently using Kerkythea. Any advice is welcome!
dontgvadamn
02-25-2008, 09:37 PM
Look into clustering. You can link multiple PC's together and have them work on the same process. Clustering was used for the rendering in the movie titanic. Clustering wont speed up how fast your PC runs necisssarily. It can however speed up rendering by useing the processors of all PC's in the cluster. But normal activities like startup and opening of aplications will still run off the base cpu. So that will determine the speed of normal activites.

$1000, isnt a whole lot when building a new system. Depending on what you get you can eat that amount up very fast. Especially if you get into the quad core processors. Just one core 2 extreme is 1000 dollars by itself. Then you ad a mobo ram and graphics card ontop of that...plus a hard drive a dvd drive...and a video card. Not saying youc ant build a good system for 1000, but you can easily hit that amount very fast. Look at what you want to do with the computer and what capabilities it needs.
PanzerMKZ
02-27-2008, 12:39 AM
there is a big difference between a render garden and a cluster. At the moment with that few a machines I would say look into some of the prebuilt render farm packages. Dr queue and farmer joe come to mind.

Oh and if you really need to render the next big 3d movie then by all means look into a custom cluster. But they can be an admin nightmare.

Panzer
biliousfrog
02-27-2008, 09:22 AM
Be careful with mixing intel, AMD, 32bit and 64bit machines for rendering. Certain things will get processed differently such as procedural textures and you can get nasty flickering in animations.

Also bear in mind that a slow machine could hold up the entire job...or it could just save the day!

Personally, I'd get a new machine. $1000 isn't going to get you much but it will be better than your P4 and miles ahead of your Celeron's. Perhaps you could even sell them and add to the new PC fund?
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02-27-2008, 09:22 AM
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