Network Rendering - best practice / bang for buck today with machines...

Started by philw, September 26, 2016, 02:40:35 AM

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philw

Now I'm over year into embracing 3D from my 2D world and running a mini render "farm" myself to try and get animations out the door as quickly as possible, I now have a rough idea of how expensive it is to run the setup.

Just putting the feelers out there to anyone with experience to see if there's any thoughts on reasonably priced (second user) equipment that would be super fast, but also power efficient in order to make best use of my 64 core license. There's definitely a big spike in electricity usage when the farm is "on", clearly this is inevitable, but I would like to minimise it. I'm running a mix of various flavours of 4 Dell Precision T5500 towers in a server cabinet to achieve the 64 cores. They were inexpensive to buy, with relatively old xeons, but maybe that was my error :-)

Maybe something more recent, and 1U form factor would be better going forward if the costs weren't silly. Of course, I'd love to expand with BOXX devices, but still suffering in my wallet  from a Cinema 4D Studio purchase...

Any thoughts welcome!

Cheers,