Sorry, render farm machines are all 1u. Silly me.
On 31/07/2012 11:25, Francois Lord wrote:
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!
