Re: Renderfarm options

[Sylvain Lebeau]

ok! recycle your old blade for comp! ...  or for ethernet gagming!! ....Quake 2 arena is massivly comming back here....  ;-) and no i didnt compare....   i buy new shits and hope for the best upon the specs i get.. !! yeah boxx are very expensive and ... maybe overated... in my humble opinion. Maybe others could chip in to tell us... i would be very open to hear experiences with those boxxes... sly -- Sylvain Lebeau // SHED V-P/Visual effects supervisor 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM <http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM>   Leoung O'Young Monday, July 30, 2012 11:30 PM We render in old Mental Ray. We do have a few systems with not enough ram collecting dust . Have you compare a single intel i7 3930 (6 cores, 12 thread) with 2x Xeon X5650 I spoke to Boxx about their Renderpro 2x Xeon E5 2670 16 cores 32 thread but it comes with a price On 7/30/2012 11:01 PM, Sylvain Lebeau wrote: Sylvain Lebeau Monday, July 30, 2012 11:01 PM Hey no problem!! We only have Dell Poweredge servers in the farm.  35 blades total with 14 dedicated to nuke (old ones that doesnt have enough ram and power for arnold) ...  The other ones + the artists workstations are dedicated to 3D.... Our latest machines (15 wich we named Ultras) are Xeon X5650 with 2 physical mutli-threaded processors for a total of 24 threads. Each 16 gigs of ram. They are rock solid!!!!  We render everything in Arnold here and they are very performant.. Glad you've never had any problems.... i've recently read that in the Arnold or XSI list a couple weeks ago....  Maybe it is related to how your render engine is programmed too?... i dont know much about instruction sets like i've said...   Are you Arnold based?. or Mental Ray?  Just curious.. as you can see, my farm is not doing much right now ;-)  wich is pretty temporary... Because with the load of work heading among us.... i may need 5-10 more blades soon enough.... dam it!!!  sly Leoung O'Young Monday, July 30, 2012 10:37 PM Hi Sly, Thanks so much for quick responds. I had a mix of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon previously with no problem, but that doesn't mean it won't be a problem now. Did you guys build your own computers for the farm or bought them off the shelf, are they dual processor systems? Thanks, Leoung On 7/30/2012 10:02 PM, Sylvain Lebeau wrote: Sylvain Lebeau Monday, July 30, 2012 10:02 PM Hi Leoung, i would definetly go with Intel procs if you are ADDING on a farm/workstation that is already Intel based.... or vice/versa i've heard a couple of times that the same frame rendered on different chips we're giving different results.... wich could lead into a nightmare. I dont know how instruction sets differs and i cant help in this atomic precision.... but go the safest way in my opinion. If you got intel right now?...stick to it... Here all workstations are Intel so is the farm.... and we never had surprises between what the artist do and what the farm crunch.. dont forget to add some major RAM!!! sly Leoung O'Young Monday, July 30, 2012 9:53 PM I am looking at adding a few more computers for rendering. Looking for some opinions. AMD  2x opteron 6272 for total of 32 cores Intel 2x  E5 2670 for a total of 16 cores Thanks so much, Leoung