Okay, okay, we've both made general statements when the other guy was making specific ones. I was thinking of the general multithreading problem space vs. the general "distributed over a network" space. Sorry for doing that.

The power/heat/space issues are the ones most likely to cause people problems with a farm solution. I'd love to do some measurement to find out what setup costs more in power though. 150W per machine seems a reasonable estimate under load for a single spindle machine (perhaps a touch on the high end, but that's so dependent on the specific components chosen that I won't quibble), so it absolutely is a concern. A hobbyist isn't likely to run them 24/7, however (in my case, I spin them up for final renders and hibernate them otherwise). The single machine, of course, uses less power over wall clock time, but runs the render job slower. Since you're likely spinning at least one extra spindle, and running more fans and higher-draw video, it seems quite reasonable to me that the single box could end up costing as much or more per render.

One of the interesting things that might come out of this is that if the machine the original poster has now is reasonably adequate outside of render times, it might be worth building a single dual-core/big RAM machine with low-end video to act as a pair of render nodes. That keeps the original computer under low load (and at that point, if games aren't entering into the equation, it could continue to be valuable as a "secondary render" machine for tests and whatnot while big jobs go out to the big box). At some point, the bigger box could get a second spindle and a good graphics card and grow into the "main box". Kind of a Hermit Crab approach to machine upgrades. ;-)

Message edited on: 10/20/2005 00:17