What Render Machine Could I Spec Better Than This for Under 3K

[DriesV]

Good deal!
Did you also look at new high-end offerings? When considering buying older hardware (X5670 was released in early 2010), it often makes sense to look at new builds as well and compare all configurations thorougly.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net and Cinebench R15 scores are great references to objectively compare different CPU models.

I did some comparisons myself.
It appears that a single dual Xeon E5-2698 v4 machine would actually be faster than 4 dual Xeon X5670 machines.
Of course that single brand spanking new machine will cost considerably more upfront, but there are other benefits that I think are worth considering:

• managing/installing 1 machine vs. 4
• lower power consumption
• more compact
• more portable
• newer CPUs and architectures support more advanced instruction sets (which might speed up future KeyShot versions)
• typically better warranty

Just some things to think about when buying hardware.

Dries

[Robb63]

Hi Dries,
Good info, unfortunately I don't have the budget this year for anything high-end. I am working to a 3K total budget (hardware & software).

I've been showing marketing, and creative how we can help them with renders instead of photography if the product isn't available to shoot (which it usually isn't), and how they can use animations to highlight features in the products we are designing.

There seems to be a lot of excitement internally about our previously unknown capabilities, so next year I will be able to budget for some newer hardware with some real power.
The nice part about going this route is I do have an IT department who will keep the machines running, and even if it isn't the fastest it will be considerably quicker than our current setup of rendering on our 8 core laptops   

[Robb63]

We have two of our four budget servers up and running (our IT dept are down several folks right now due to vacations so it's taking a while). We are running 48 cores (24 actual, and 24 virtual cores ) which is 50% of the horsepower of what we will have for our starter render farm once it is all running.

We've been running pretty flawlessly to it for a few days, and yesterday I ran a test render to see the difference from rendering it on my local computer, to running it on the networked 48 cores. My computer took 147-secs to render my test scene, while our NR running at 50% of capacity completed the render in 51-secs

I'm pretty stoked about this, as I was a little skeptical when our IT guys suggested going this route verses the single newer PC I'd originally spec'd.
I'll keep you updated once we get the rest of the servers online.