I need to set up a small Poser6 RenderCondo. I need two workstations, preferablly identical, to do nothing but render Poser6 animations around the clock. May I ask contributors not to post about using other net-render products or apps; there are many strong arguments to NOT do this project in Poser with these two PoserNodes, but for a LONG list of reasons, I need to go this way. Here's my component list and rough budget: 250 CPU 120 Mboard 90 Case with power supply 180 1.5 Gig RAM 100 VideoCard 25 CD-ROM 80 CPU Cooling Fan 80 Hard Drive Total: $925 each, not including OS, Poser License, sales tax, delivery. 1) CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Processor is my leading candidate. It has 1MB L2Cache and is fast. The other items below? I am completely open to suggestions. 2) I don't need a big HD. Even 30Gig is laughably large. But do I need two HDs so I can distribute the swap file, OS, Poser.exe, Runtime folder and output file on different CPUs? I am not sure raid-0 would help at all here, but two different HDs might be important. However, to keep price down, one decent drive would be great. 3) RAM - When I perform massive Poser renders on my current working computer, which has 4 gig RAM, the highest usage peaks at about 1.2 Gig. I figure I need 1.5 Gig to cover that plus other active processes. Apparently Poser does not even know what to make of a second Gig of RAM! But what about the QUALITY of this 1.5 Gig. Anyone think it's worth it IN THIS SCENARIO to buy the very best? 4) Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum MS-7125-010? Asus A8N-E? I don't know! 5) Video graphics: wish I could get this included on the motherboard. I don't need to do any color comping or viewinsg. Just need it to drive a simple 19" CRT. I really wish I could save money on it. Any feedback, red flags, product suggestions, gotchas? Thanks, ::::: Opera :::::

I realize that another attack might be to build REALLY inexpensive nodes and get four for the same price as the two above. But would that get me the same number of frames per day? Good question! :: og :: P.S. [remember I have to purchase an OS and Poser license for each node. Might be able to get the extra poser nodes from EF for $129.]

Attached Link: http://www.tigerdirect.com

I don't count myself among the hardware gurus. My particular estimation is that you have a good plan. Fast CPU, decent ram. Some notes: Poser lets windows control RAM access. So this is going to be controlled by the size of your virtual memory space (which should be set to a bit over 2 gig per machine, fixed, not controlled by OS). Assuming XP or win2K is used (both are still NT base), you'll want to use two drives in each system for best performance (server style set up). THese are physical drives -- one for OS, one for all temp and swap file operations. SInce they are rendering systems, add a third drive for storage if you are going to render to the system. Raid won't do you a damn bit of good insofar as performance. Go cheap. Either board will work. Kinda pricey, though. For something that just chugs, all you need is somethign that works, not that gets fancy. The multiple drives thing is strictly for squeezng the most performance out of the system possible. Since they are strictly renderboxes, a single drive partitioned would like do ok, and yeah -- you should get an integrated board if at all possible. For what you are describing, the only things that matter are CPU, RAM, and system set up. Everything else is dumped.

What Ynsaen said. With my opinion points added. 1)RE: Video card vs integrated. Mobo makers are in a bit of a transition at the moment, getting out silicon that plays nice with Shader 3 and PCI-E, so anything you get is going to pretty much be version 1 hardware. Probably more importantly, the onboard video grabs a section of your system ram for display purposes. I've gotten to where I prefer the video card approach; I can go cheap as fancy effects aren't needed, and it keeps almost all the video work segregated. And if a card blows, it's an easy task to swap out, load new drivers, and keep going. Sometimes getting a system to forget that the integrated video chip it has isn't needed anymore is....annoying, shall we say? 2)Drives. With the current speed of hard drives, about the only thing RAID would be good for would be to create a mirror in case one of the main drives goes boom. Nearly all new motherboards have both PATA and SATA ports. PATA is still the most compatible, so putting the OS on a drive on the primary parallel port is the best. But you could use the first SATA port for a drive dedicated to the swapfile (you can get 40gig SATA's for relatively little $$$, and the parallel equivalent would be an ultra 150. Not a lot of increase, but enough to add a couple of percent to performance). And as many of the boards out there have some RAID function built in, you might want to consider using that to create a mirror of your -data- drive; that way a drive going boom won't trash your runtime (don't even think about putting the resource data on the boot drive; the less there, the better, and the easier it is to create a disc image to DVD). The only issue with SATA drives I've had is heat; they run hotter than PATA drives, and being jammed against another drive with no air circulation will kill one pretty quickly.

I knocked this set up together for 1500 euros and it works perfectly for me - amd x2 dualcore processor 3800 2 gigabytes ram 200 gb hard disk GIGABYTE nvidia geFORCE 6800 GS graphics card. nvidia motherboard with 4 slot SLI ice pipes then overlock the bugger to 60 degrees Celsius. Best thing about the graphics card that I have is that the 6800 gs works amazingly in tandem.

Dale or anyone...what would be a budget for such a video card, one that just has to work, nothing fancy? I am using Tiger Direct and a few other component vendors now, beginning to zero in.

Message edited on: 02/06/2006 06:24

relaxis, that sounds like a fine rig, but it has nothing to do with my purpose for the render nodes

basically you want a 64mb graphics card. you can buy them for as little as 10 euros to 100 euros. But you will need a lot more than 64mb graphic card if you're going to be using 3d stuff. Hell, maya 7 doesn't even run unless you have 128mb graphics card and even then it slloooowwwww

if you're setting up a render farm then you just need the bare minimum and a good cpu. although cpu (to a certain point) speed hardly affects rendering speed within renderfarms, you also don't want to bottle neck your multitasking abilities on each pc. personally i would buy lots of cheap pcs and rig em together, sod the specs.

where can I get a copy of that? I'm personally having a hard time rendering with Vue right now. Rendercow crashes on the first frame every single time and I lost my registration code so I can't download the update to fix it. Anyone have a perfectly decent (working) copy of rendercow?

Pose-net is available at poserproducts.com, by sixus1. jonthecelt

Opera; If the motherboard as AGP video, you can find 128meg off name AGP 4x/8x cards for as little as $25. If PCI-E, then barebones 64meg cards are around $40 (most of those cards have some sort of software trick that snags system memory if you push your card with high res textures and whatnot, but so long as you are talking about simple display, this trick never comes into play). Pricewatch.com is a good place to find the discontinued but still adequate cards.

In fairness, I think opera was referring to the site sucking, not the product. At least, i hope that's what they meant - it's kind of hard to state a product sucks that you haven't found, but it does make sense to be frustrated by a website you can't navigate around. and opera, I apologise for not givign you a link straight to their pose-net page. i'm so used to navigating there, i did'nt think anyone would have difficulty finding the relevant info. The fault is mine, and I apologise. jonthecelt

Oh, and opera, this wasn't a suggestion to not use Poser: Pose-net requires the use of Poser in order to do its network rendering. Since Poser cant' do it natively, I guess someone thought it would be helpful to offer something you might not be aware of, that can help wth the situation. jonthecelt

Thanks Dale, I was hoping to come in way below $100.00, good to know it can be done. PATA.....is that the older technology before SATAs came along? What if, forgoing SATA for extra percentage points, mirror and RAID-0, I just got two straight-forward 7200 drives. Are you saying place the swap file on one and the OS on the other? what about everything else, Poser.exe, RuntimeFolder, Pz3? Are three small, cheap drives best? ::::: Opera :::::

sorry again. just drop it ok? we don't get along and lets leave it at that.
removing my posts so you'll calm down and stop throwing a tantrum

Message edited on: 02/06/2006 09:13

Graphics cards: either nVidia 6200 or ATI x300 are fine for what you're doing. Reliable and not overly expensive. As for the mainboards - you want reliability. I've seen cheap Asrock boards with integrated graphics, but they're not as reliable as Asus or MSI. I'd recommend spending a few dollars more for decent mobos. As for cases - you could buy a cheap case and replace the PSU by something reliable. Often cheaper than buying a decent case with a decent PSU. A cheap case would cost about $30, a decent PSU will set you back around $50. I use Fortron 400W PSUs in three of my systems, maybe not as good as Zalman, but very silent and stable, and fairly affordable. If you're going for an nForce4 mobo, go for an nVidia graphics card too. They play very nice together. The boxed cooler that comes with an Athlon64 CAN be quite silent, if the case is roomy enough. Usually it's the PSU fan that's the noisiest. Those Forton PSUs I use have a 12 cm fan, running at about 2000 RPM, as opposed to the ordinary 8cm fans running at 3000 RPM. The 12cm fans are way, way more silent. I built a Media Center last Christmas, using a Sempron 2600 + boxed cooler, a Coolermaster Centurion case, Fortron 400W PSU, Maxtor SATA 160 Gb drive, NEC DVD dual layer +/-RW. If the DVD burner is not playing you can't hear the system at all.

Opera; Yep! PATA (Parallel ATA) really didn't exist as an acronym until Serial ATA came along. My experience is that having the OS and any needed drivers and codecs on C:, and nothing else, speeds up performance a bit, at least if it isn't a huge drive. One of the things that slows down computers over time is having the swapfile sharing the same drive with the OS install; fragmentation occurs, and you start losing performance due to the access time needed to hunt across the platters (particularly if Windows controls the swapfile size. Many times it can't simply enlarge that swap area, as active apps may be using the adjoining space, so it establishes another swap section). What you -may- want to do is build one box specifically for resource management. One small boot drive, then two large drives set to mirror, and install all your content on the primary drive of the mirror. Once things are networked, if you set that mirrored array as a network drive, you -should- be able to link the various versions of Poser to that drive (I haven't tried it, so I don't know if Poser would get into a fight with its other selves, but this would be the most efficient way to handle things. All your textures, meshes, INJ/REM files, would be in one location, so there would be consistency across all the Poser installs, and managing one runtime set is a lot easier than several. It would also insure that your pathnames stayed consistent for all the rendercondos). If you managed to get the resource server set up, you could install Poser onto the boot drive. Probably the best arrangement for the separated os & swapfile is two 20 gig HDD's on separate channels, if you can still find them. Drive size is getting insane now... You'll also probably find the smaller drives at a reasonable price in SATA nowadays. Just read the box =very= carefully. Unless the SATA drive explicitly says it supports -being- a boot drive, then it won't. It may seem to work, but you'll get a corrupted OS install....assuming it doesn't BSOD during installation. I fought with that for almost 3 months, replacing one bit of hardware at a time, as the symptoms kept shifting on me, before I caught that little blurb on a Seagate drive. My wife got a nifty Athlon 64 3000+ 939 out of the spare parts, but still.....

Dale, Your resource server idea? It's a good one, but that's exactly what PoseNet does, and that may be the path I take! I am putting aside your fragmentation warning, as 1) this will be so purpose-built it will not fragment easily; 2) I will institute regular defrag. Now, with that aside, is it still a good idea to put the OS and the Swapfile on different drives, because they optimally would like to occur simultaneously? And where would you place a: Poser.exe b: Runtime Folder c: pz3 d: output file for rendered frames. Thanks for your dangerous-sounding warning on SATA as boot drive! ::::: Opera :::::

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