NikKelly posted at 9:20 AM Wed, 6 April 2022 - #4436791

Tangential, a custom 'desktop', but I realised I could build a complete, stand-alone, network-render 'Box' for less than cost of significantly upgrading either of my now-ageing CAD-Tower's twin graphics cards. To put it politely, GPU card prices are scary...

'Box' has an an old 1GB Radeon 'office' GPU card driving a small VGA display, yet 32 GB and a Ryzen-7, so ~16 threads. Queue Manager happily uses 15¾ of them, 95~98% of CPU resource...

Turning the issue around, could you use either your old or next PC as a network-render resource ?

Per comments above, I'd shun Intel, got for the most AMD Ryzen threads I can afford. Even slightly under-clocked for thermal stability, each extra CPU thread totally trumps a few percent of clock-speed. 'Gotcha' is that AMD uses Ryzen-series die-space for either on-board GPU support or extra CPU cores...

Due Care, please ??

VERY BIG IF... IF you can get a compatible graphics card to fit I have 2 burly old x 5690 6 core xeons that only have pcie 2 slots so nothing fits the mother boards besides old sound or usbs card or a really quadro card k4000  and a tesla accelerator isn't 8 or 10 G or vram enough )since enough is a moving target enough shelter enough food enough what KMGT remember 8 disk games? very pre cdr)

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket
Charles Péguy

 Heat and animosity, contest and conflict, may sharpen the wits, although they rarely do;they never strengthen the understanding, clear the perspicacity, guide the judgment, or improve the heart
Walter Savage Landor

So is that TTFN or TANSTAAFL?