We recently went through the same questions and decided to go with the
XEONs. Space was a concern for us, as well as other factors like Arnold
licenses and maintenance..
It's true that you get more power for the money with i7s. But when you
start rendering frames that take 4 hours or more, it makes a difference
to have powerful single computers to get those frames out of the system
faster. While each computer has more cores, each core is slower than the
i7 ones, because of price concerns. This has a negative effect of having
some jobs being slower on the XEONs than on the i7s. Notably, frames
with lots of pre-processing time and short rendering time. We have to
submit several of those frames on the same computer to overcome that.
This is where memory becomes important.
We also build our own computers, render farm 2u machines as well as the
workstations (as well as all our servers). We save a lot of money that way.
On 31/07/2012 01:37, Mirko Jankovic wrote:
About diferent look on AMD and Intel, I posted that post but it was
just a problem with different Arnold version after all. Fixed that and
both AMD and Intel are rendering same. So no problems there.
As for Xeons.. I made some calculations couple times and for same
price of one dual Xeon 24 threads you can get couple i7 comps... at
the end it comes that you can get twice the power for same money if
going with good i7 machines instead of xeons. There is more
power supply's and cases needed, more space for more computers and so
on but price difference is huge.
But even that can be solved as any decend computer store should be
able to build custom configuration and put couple i7 MBOs into nice
rack and connect everything in one packed solution for rendering, 4,
10, 20 nodes per rack...
Or if you get full configurations they are good for any workstation as
well.
In my opinion Xeon solutions gives you maybe 70-80% speed boost for
200% price increase :) not exact numbers but.
Just throw everything on paper first and see what you get.
Cheers!
