I am considering purchasing some extra PCs for a render farm (Rendercow 4.22), and I am interested in any experianced opinions. I have been impressed with the Mini PCs specs, especialy as the cows only have to have speed, memory, disk space, and a small price. Thoughts anyone?

I don't know, I am told in the Poser forum that the more RAM you have on the render farm machines, the better, and in the Vue forum I am told that RAM doesn't matter at all, only CPU speed for the render farm machines. So if someone who can explain it better for me would just clarify this, I would be very happy.

Ooookay...... (crick, crack) Here's what I have observed with my rendergarden in the past. The weakest machine is an Athlon 700 slot A with all of 166megs of PC-100 SDram; the current strongest is an XP-1800 with 760megs of PC2100 DDR ram. The smallest HDD is 20 gigs, the largest 40gigs. All use 10-100 NIC interfaces. Where RAM is most critical is in the main system, the one where Vue itself is installed on. The tiny little Athlon 700 has loaded and rendered a Mover 5 test scene just fine (and the dynamics eat memory as readily as large textures). In the satellite computers, you just need reasonable amount of memory, and a large hard disk to supply a large swap file for the RenderCow to use. On the unit that actually runs Vue, and will become the HyperVue network manager, the rules are a bit different. It's doing a potential 5 node management of data transfer (even after you send the textures, scene update info is sent to the cows), running the actual Vue app, handling the OS and the network interfacing, and as most people install that 1st RenderCow on the system with Vue (as Vue itself will not render anything when it is functioning as the manager), you have those resources to manage, as well. Plus the fact at least some of Poser is activated to import the Poser animation content, and Poser is not real good about shutting itself back off (for that matter, it may not be able to; the Poser.exe could be needed for the dynamics processing). So you need a big HDD for the swapfile, and a decent amount of RAM (if using VuePro, consider 1 gig the first sweet spot; and more is always good). Vue 4 doesn't have the same kinds of interfacing with the OS that Pro does, so it uses a bit less of a memory footprint; 512megs is probably the first sweet spot, with 1 gig being significantly robust. The lunchbox units are a good choice; they do all you need. What you will want to do is invest in a 4 unit KVM switch; that way one keyboard, mouse, and monitor will suffice for all 4 boxes (and you can get one really cheap on pricewatch.com). If they do not have integrated video, hit a computer show and find someone dumping a bunch of Jaton 4 meg cards. They are cheap, and do the job. You can also save a little more by forgoing the floppy drive, and only using one CD drive, and physically moving it between boxes; once the OS, drivers, and apps are installed, it becomes unnecessary. One thing to keep in mind is that the HyperVue controller is a bit sensitive to packet collision. You can easily crash Vue if you try to fire up all the Cows at the same time, and at the same places; either sending textures, or sending scene files. This is easily avoided by simply starting one Cow at a time, and waiting until it is actually rendering a frame before adding another Cow. I'm running Win2k SP2 on all my garden boxes (although I finally succumbed and have a copy of XP Pro to put on one of them to experiment with) and have had no trouble. You -may- have to go to the microsoft site and get one of the Visual C++ runtime dlls, if your system doesn't install it for you. And make sure to run a copy of Norton's WinDoctor (or equivalent) to clean up all the dangling bits that Windows always leaves behind. That will save you no end of troubles.

Thank you Dale B. It makes more sense now.

Pheew! Thankyou Dale B, as complete and a consice an answer I could have ever ask for. I have tried the farm on my old P3(server) and P2(node), your right about the Ram, the P3 was swapping disk like mad. Thank you

You're both welcome....

That is a terrible way to use the render cows and it won't work. The cows don't function like this. Eon sells extra cows but it is a scam for it will never work with that many cows without some problem. You also can't start a cow a time and then add others. Imagine if you had to load 30 cows and wait for each texture to clear the network before adding another cow... It just doesn't make sense. Do you even use the software?

Um, do you even use the software? I am running 25 cows, and they work fine. PS. 25 is the maximum.

goldcatlizard; Both Vue4 and VuePro with a nice little 4 box rendergarden sitting at my right; see attached photo (the Cow for each version installed on my main system is node 5). With VuePro, 5 nodes is all you can run out of the box; there is a for pay add-on that boosts the limit to 25. And you are not actually 'starting' the RenderCow; that happens when you start the actual boxes in the renderfarm. You are -adding- a new node to a distributed render process. And I'm afraid they do work that way; there are two large data dumps to a cow as it joins the queue; the textures in one lump pool, and the scene geometry and parameters. Once -that- is accomplished, and the Cow is actually rendering a frame, the network traffic drops to (a) retrieving the completed frame, and (b)sending scene update info to be applied to the resources at each Cow. Neither Vue app has the kinds of network control that something like Max or Maya has, simply because they are not multi-thousand dollar applications. Someone with a more robust network may not have those issues; in fact they shouldn't. But =my= network is a Netgear router 4 port switch (gotta have my hardware firewall and NAT, as I'm on cable), feeding me, my wife's machine, a print server I'm working on, and my rendergarden through a no-name 5 port switch. Not exactly highest tech. But it does work.

What are the file/version requirements (i.e. DLLs) to have the RenderCow run on Win98?

That depends. All the version 5 Vue's require Win2k/XP. In general though, you should make sure you have the latest versions of both the Visual Basic runtime and the Visual C++ runtime installed. Just keep in mind that the Win9x line doesn't have the best memory management in the world, and you are going to be shuffling data back and forth to the swap file a lot. A 3rd party clean up utility, like cacheman, can help keep things clean of files that the Cow is done with but Windows hasn't deigned to delete yet...

More RAM and a faster CPU is always the direction to go if you want to get things done quicker.