Hello guys,
I am helping my room ate with an issue he has. He is a 3d artist who primarily works in Maya, 3DS Max and After Effects. He wants to get his renders done much faster. I am a pretty computer savvy person, who can build computers and fabricate things. I want to help him out. He constantly builds projects, he works in Maya literally every day. He has $2000.00 for a solution to this problem.
I was told that today, graphics cards actually help render in CG programs. I did not know they did that, and thought it was all done by the CPU. I looked at building a render farm, and a link I came across said to buy the motherboards with onboard graphics, processor, a smaller hard drive and a good power supply. This set up was a network render farm, which used blender. I suppose what I am wondering is if my roommate constantly renders, would it be more cost effective for him to outsource his renders to renderrocket or to build this system? He does get paid for freelance as well. So this would be an investment to him.
His current system: dual quad core 2.26 processor, 16 gigs of ram - ddr3 1066mhz. Ati radeon HD 4870 graphics card (512 mb ram)
Another option is, my other friend said he could sell me two Mac Pros for a total of $250.00
They both have Intel Xeon dual core 3.0 ghz processor (woodcrest), 4 gigs of ddr2 ram with 32 gig capacity and a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics cards. (256 mb graphics cards)
Can I just buy those two computers and hook them all up to help render? And if I were to upgrade anything what should I upgrade? Any help would be greatly appreciated… All of this gets a bit confusing. If you need any more information, please let me know. My roommate would be more than happy to answer any questions. I’d also love to show some of his work to you guys.
Thanks,
Dan