I am considering building myself a renderfarm (once my credit card is out of debt), and I am considering what CPU and or system might give the best bang for buck.
Any thoughts by those already renderfarming out there?
VueD & Mover 4.22

Generally, figure a 20 gig HDD, 512megs of ram. You only need basic video, no audio. gigabit ethernet is hot right now, but either 10100 or wireless will more than suffice. I use Athlons and Win2k Pro on my garden machines, but P4's will do as well. For that matter, so will used P3's. With the rendergarden boxes, unless you are planning to use serious software at some later time, cost is pretty much the governing factor. My 4 boxes have between 20 and 40 gigs of hard drive each; 512 to 1.25 gig of ram ranging from PC-133 to PC-2700. The slowest is an XP-1700, the fastest is an XP-2500+. I frankensteined all of them, and they span a pretty wide spectrum of parts (Mobo's are Gigabyte, Chaintech, ECS, and Shuttle. Video ranges from Jaton 4 meg to a GF2mx550. Power supplies are 250 watt compusa specials; since I keep the add-ons to a bare minimum, they suffice for stable operation, and don't generate a lot of heat). One thing you will want is a KVM switch that supports the number of boxes you have (and you can find a 4 station switch on pricewatch.com for cheap), so you only need one monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Do some close shopping, as the changeover in hardware standards are going to make some good buys. My AMD setups run fine with Vue and VuePro, with Mover 4 and 5. I really need to sit down and put all of this together in a coherent manner, don't I?

But Dale, if you put this in a coherent manner then we will understand what you are saying, and where will you be then? You will have no secrets, everyone will be building render farms, and we will all be happy. How boring wouldn't that be? Lol.

(blink)(blink) I never said I would tell -all- my secrets, did I? O:) Oh, one thing I forgot to clearly state is to save your credit card balance and don't plan on getting the latest and greatest bleeding edge anything, unless you are planning to get into professional, for actual payola work. The Athlon 64 and Opteron are the hottest chips at the moment....but that is pretty much all they are. MS is dragging its heels on XP-64 until Intel manages to field something akin to a 64 bit processor. Until that is released, there won't be a 64 bit port of the RenderCow or Vue, which could =really= go to town with the extended addressing. Now, if you got a good deal on them, that would be one thing. But for the dedicated render boxes, stable is more preferable than bleeding edge. It saves you no end of render issues....

Yo Dale,

I'm in the process of setting up a render farm too, and for CPU specs I found that the latest and the greatest in CPUs is not. For renderfarm operation, you'd want the fastest CPUs you can afford w/o the latest advancements (ie Athlon64s).

This is because when rendering, the CPU is strictly using CPU cycles. The faster the CPU cycles, the faster the image is rendered. That means that an Athlon 3000+ would probably render faster than Athlon64 2800+ (and be cheaper to boot). You can go to any major hardware review site (I use Anandtech.com)and compare the rendering performance on CPUs.

BTW - for a renderfarm, if you can pick up a mobo with built-in graphics you're a few bucks ahead, because all you need from Win2000/XP operating system is a text screen/DOS window to run the boxes. No heavy-duty graphics card required.

Cheers,
JoeK

Message edited on: 08/07/2004 17:02

Oh, definitely. Well, almost. What I was getting at was the fact that the Athlon XP's are being moved over to Socket 754 in the next stepping. Under that circumstance, you could obtain good old 32 bit Athlons and have the -motherboard- to move up to 64 bit when the OS and apps become available. And since the socket 754 is being considered 'value', the boards are starting to reflect that in $$. And it will be around for a bit, as the maps have the Athlon 64 stepped up to a 4000. Right now, I would recommend either a 2 gig P4 or an XP2500+ and up (the Barton core is noticeably faster), although -any- extra processor cranking out a frame is a timesaver(the first box in my rendergarden was an original Athlon 700. Slow by comparison, but it helped). Now to be utterly fair, the Athlon 64 =does= have some advantages; namely the on-die memory controller and the Hypertransport linkages on the motherboard. I can say that an XP64-3000 would kick the gluteals out of any straight XP chip, just due to the lack of latency messing with the north bridge for memory access. Having the controller clocking at the same speed as the core -does- make a difference. And the memory bandwidth also helps. I couldn't recommend it for hobbyists, but if you were assembling a 25 node farm for professional applications, the 64 or the Opteron would be the way to go, as the expansion capability would be sitting there waiting, and in the interim, the 32 capability is outstanding. I try and steer clear of the onboard video schemes, actually. There are so many Jaton and Mad Dog 4 and 8 meg AGP and PCI cards at the computer shows to be had for $10-$20 that I find it easier to use them. All the onboard schemes co-opt part of the system memory, and I get twitchy with that, considering the amount of texture info that gets shoved into the box. Just to name one factor. Probably the easiest to start with are the 'lunchbox' do it yourself units that you can get for between $200 and $300. All you need for them is memory, cpu, and hard drive. One CD drive to install the OS, and you can remove it after that. They all have at least 1 USB port, so a 256 or 512 meg flash drive would be the easiest way to get new programs or data into the renderbox. Almost all of them have 10100 Ethernet in the south bridge, and AC-97 sound to turn off and not bother installing the drivers for. Of course, the one thing to keep in mind is that with a slightly overpowered renderbox in the farm, you could use it as a browsing computer while your main comp was tied up being the distributed network controller. The GUI-less render engines in the distributed components tend to be a lot more forgiving about there being other activity going on....