New addition to the render farm

[desquared]

Hey there everyone,

I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I've been working on a project that turned out so cool I just had to share and I thought you all would appreciate it. We've had 64 cores of network rendering at our office for a little over a year now and it works great. Well our design team had been telling me (sysadmin here) that they wanted to go faster. So I did what any computer geek with access to engineers and a fabrication facility would do. I had them build me a custom rackmount chassis to stuff with off the shelf computer parts!

So I used all the info I could find in the benchmarking forum and determined that best bang for the buck would be an Intel i7-4770k. I gave our engineers dimensions for the parts and they determined that they could fit 4 computers in 3U of rack space and designed a custom chassis for me.

Each computers specs
Motherboard: EVGA Z87 Stinger
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770k overclocked to 4.3GHz
Heatsink: Thermalright AXP-200 (swapped the fan with a 140mm AeroCool Shark)
HDD: Sandisk 64GB SSD
RAM: Patriot Viper III 2133 8GB
PSU: NZXT 80 PLUS Bronze 550W

This thing gave us a huge boost to our speed. Judging from looking at the queue, the 32 cores we added with this rig gives us about 80% of the speed we have with 64 cores spread around the office on various computers.

Here's the album, enjoy! http://imgur.com/a/mz3GL

[thomasteger]

Thanks so much for the update. This is great!