For those who are curious about refurbished server hardware, take a peek at StallionTek . Seachnasaigh over RDNA has a lovely thread on what you can get for a very small investment. In most cases, you only have to add harddrives and OS and you are cooking with dual Xeons and anywhere from 8 to 32 gig server ram, depending on the config of the hardware.

If your software supports distributed bucket rendering, or you animate, investing in a rendergarden is more than worth the time ( I use the term rendergarden because it is much more in keeping with reality. The 1,000+ monstrosity that ILM runs is a render farm. What we are talking about is a few tomatoes under the kitchen window). For anyone who seriously intends to build one, I'd recommend rack mounted cases and rollers on the rack. Unless you intend to have to completely disassemble the thing or abandon it if you move. Configuration is something that you need to plan out before you get too buy happy. If you plan on GPU rendering, then most of the blades are not for you, as they are not and never were meant for external video cards. There are a few 2U server units that can accept a card, but you have to keep in mind that a modern GPU with real power takes two card slots, and the 2U cases aren't tall enough. They typically use a 90 degree riser board for an add on; so even if you can fit the thing in the case, the fans will be flat against the motherboard. BBQ city for the hardware. The 3U and 4U cases tend to have the room you need, but are either older systems without the power of the newer blades, or are custom units and you have to deal with the customization. However, just getting 3U-4U empty cases and building your own GPU renderbox is easy, and actually fairly cheap. The case is around $100-150, You can get a CPU/mobo combo for about the same (and since this is GPU rendering, you can ease off on the other things a bit). It's a good idea to have the same memory load out as your main box, since that insures you have the same memory pool all around. If you catch a sale, that runs about $199 for 16gigs. Power supply that can handle anything runs about $120 with care. The video card is where the bite comes from, but even then with careful shopping and deal snatching, you can get a fairly powerful card for $200-$350. I didn't mention hard drives because that is the last bottleneck in the process. You can go old school with a terabyte drive for less than $70, or a 256gb flash drive for somewhat more. I'd personally recommend the Samsung vertical drives. No, you don't have to stand them upright; instead of shrinking the transistors on the substrate to make more room for storage (and making the drive more prone to failure due to atomicity), they are apparently stacking the gates so the actual silicon is much thicker...and so are the transistor junctions. I'm running one in my game box as a test to failure environment, and so far so good. The thing also comes with a 10year limited warranty, and if it lives up to that spec, it's safe enough to use mission critical.

Software config is another nightmare scenario all together......