Building A render machine...thoughts?

[imported_waldo]

Hey there, I need a workhorse for my animation renders, and am looking to spend about $300 for the CPU and Motherboard...any thoughts on what I should go for? An old dual Xeon setup, or maybe the Athlon XP's....thoughts?

 

[MobileHulk]

What software are you using?

I suggest you create a simple test script and get a few people with different processors to benchmark the script to see which processors render your software of choice the fastest.

That being said, in general rendering eats cpu cycles so get the fastest cpu you can afford. If A64 is more efficient with your software go with higher clockspeed and smaller cache, ie 2.4/512 over 2.2/1024.

 

[imported_waldo]

I'm running two apps actually - 3d studio max and a program called poser (it is just too easy!!) I know 3d studio max runs really well on xeons and the A64, but it isn't usually tested on the others, because on the whole, it isn't meant to run on them. Poser you will never see benchmarked...too lowend. but thanks for the thoughts on cache and speed

 

[The Stigenator]

its been a while building a render farm.. but your talking about one machine.

I had built 2 render farms (second one was prebuilt to my specs). The first had the P3-600EB Coppermine's. They were using NT4.0 and Maya 3 initially 4 later, and Softimage as render apps. They were dual procs, 16 machines 32 processors each with 1gb ram. The controlling machine had 512mb ram and loads of space. All machines had SCSI drives in them. This was back in 2000.. ide drives didnt have the sustain speeds.. so we used Atlas 10K drives.

I suggest go for the processor with the most cache and computing power. If one does better than the other in number crunching (like a benchmark of how it crunches prime95 or maybe how blocks it can crunch in S@H).. that processor that does more will be better at rendering..

We found that the P3600E katmai processors were about 25% slower than the EB versoin of copper mine at the same speed. Turns out the differnece was that the copper mine had 256kb full speed cache and the katmai had 512kb of 1/2speed cache.. that made a big difference in the number of frames it dropped.

We benched marked it with one standard render on differnt processors.

The later generation ran the AMD MP processors at 1.4ghz. They were about 2.8x times faster than the previous generation of the P3600EB processors.

I have since left teh company so i dont know if they upgraded since.. but ya.. the 2nd gen had 32 machines and 64procs and one control machine.

 

[jbond04]

Hey waldo. I was in a similar situation as you back at the beginning of May...I landed a big 3D animation job (approx. 8000 frames) and needed a couple render slaves to help me out with my 3ds Max/Vray rendering, but was on a limited budget. Here's what I built:

3.0C GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor
Intel i865G based motherboard (Biostar SFF PC)
Biostar iDeq 200TB small form factor PC
1GB Corsair PC3200 CL2.5 DDR RAM
80GB Western Digital WD800JB 8MB 7200rpm hard drive
Lite On 52x CD-RW

~$720 each from newegg.com as of early July

no keyboard, no monitor, no graphics card...they were purely for rendering.

I picked the P4 for several reasons: first, 3ds Max LOVES hyperthreading. I don't know if you use any 3rd party rendering software (i.e. Vray, finalRender, or Brazil), but 3ds Max benefits greatly from Hyperthreading. Second, the 3GHz processor is a great price/performance value right now. Compared to similarly priced AMD products, it offered more rendering performance per dollar. You can check some of Anandtech's 3ds Max benchmarks, they show the 3.0C GHz P4 in pretty good standing. Finally (this can now be had for both platforms), the P4 had plenty of options for SFF PC cases, which was very important to me. I absolutely love how much rendering horsepower you can cram into those cases.

Without a doubt, I would recommend a similar setup to you. Buy two or three of these things and network rendering will fly!

-Scott Fehringer
3D animator

 

[thirdlegstump]

Fast P4 with tons of memory. Nothing else is needed for rendering. As Scott says, Intel is faster for 3DS. Xeons will rock.

 

[Czar]

like people have said, a fast p4 will do the job nicely, if you want to save money then you might want to buy used computers

 

[jbond04]

Originally posted by: deathkoba
Fast P4 with tons of memory. Nothing else is needed for rendering. As Scott says, Intel is faster for 3DS. Xeons will rock.

Xeons will rock...but only if you get the newer ones. For price/performance ratio, the Pentium 4 is superior to Xeons. Also, waldo, don't bother with dual processor computers, since they're pretty expensive. Just get a bunch of fast computers and network those badboys together.


Oh, and just to give a little comparison, my workstation computer:

2.53GHz P4 (533MHz FSB)
Intel i850E based motherboard
1GB PC1066 RDRAM

was only 76% as fast as one of those rendering slaves.

 

[imported_waldo]

Hey guys thanks for the thoughts!

Well in the end, or in the middle really, I have decided to hop on that cheap dual xeon processor thing that is flying around, and am going to OC them....since they both have hyperthreading, and apparently, eveyrone is saying they oc to between 2.6 and 3.2....which I found hard to pass up on. 2 1.6ghz CPU"s running at 2.6 or 3.2 for $120, I thought it was a no brainer. Picked up a Fire GL X1, well, because it was $150 (need I say more?) And now have 2 more things to buy (I have a monitor, would like a second, but so goes it.) A motherboard, (which is the expensive part) and some good memory(the other expensive part). Any thoughts or recomendatios with these? And I am really looking for price performance ratio, but I realize that with these two items, I am looking at some of the most crucial for the systems integrity, which is why I am thinking of biting the bullet and hooking up with a NCCH-DL, but memory, I really have no clue what I need...so anythoughts would be really welcome. SOrry for the story!