Hey Matt,it´s good to know that the island´s power supply lines have been tuned to successfully survive short 3000W kettle power drains, imagine a world without just a quick cup of tea. That´s like the Commonwealth never existed. I see why you want to have an UPS.
Seriously, having an unrealiable power supply can ruin your day. It´s commonly forgotten to check a computer´s power supply from where on the wall it´s plugging when looking for problems with a machine crashing sporadically. Often, just a sudden drop or a surge is enough, which can easily happen when multiple users on one fuse kick in or drop out. That will be hard to detect because power installation fuses are dimensioned quite bigger than needed (to support the odd, sudden 3kW kettle bursting in) and don´t blow easily to make it more obvious.
Regardless of high-end gaming PC, workstation or server, they may tend to go beyong a 1kW power supply and may actually happen to use it and that is something often forgotten when laying out power cables and plugging things. Power supply and electricity costs need to be factored in, too.
Electricity becomes so expensive, it can be regarded an important factor when consolidating multiple machines into one or generally budgeting for a specific scenario. Just as maintaining multiple machines vs. one on a day to day basis should be looked at against having the need to run
multiple render jobs simultaneously or not.Here´s a nice link for EU types, might be a cost efficient step into playing with building dedicated hardware http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/
Cheers, tim Am 06.08.2015 um 12:49 schrieb Matt Morris:
The conversation was aimed towards renderfarms rather than workstations though, and I imagine running a render job per gpu rather than per node, so that the scaling per gpu is much better (ie 100% minus maybe a small hit on the cpu usage being shared). Could be run headless so no need for a display card.In terms of power at the wall, in the uk a kettle will routinely use 3000w (albeit only for a short time) so a 4 gpu pc should be within acceptable limits - between 1000 - 1500 w when rendering. The biggest problem I've had is finding a suitable UPS which is silent as most at that rating need fans, and are designed to sit in a server room instead of a studio space.There was an interesting post on the RS forums recently from a guy setting up a gpu renderfarm using these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/2028/SYS-2028GR-TRH.cfmdual xeon, 6 gpu solutions mmm. Sounds like quite a bit of work to get it all working smoothly though, including modifying 980ti card power outlet from top to back to match tesla cards.On 6 August 2015 at 10:16, Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de <mailto:bauero...@gmx.de>> wrote:Would you guys find the 980Ti hitting the sweetspot between price and performance? How about connectors and power supply? The 970 is running on 2x6pin, e.g. a maximum of 150 Watts plus the 75 Watts from the slot, a 225 Watts total. The 980ti is mostly 1x6pin and 1x8pin, the 1x8pin offering 150Watts compared to a 1x6pin offering 75 Watts. In my case, I find it already hard to provide more than one 1x8pin and 1x6pin via connectors. How do you guys provide reliable power to more than 1 or 2 graphics cards without melting your power lines? Here in Germany, it is rare to have more than around 1 kW sustained drain per average wall plug supported by a great many home installations. There is always loads of headroom of course but technically, constantly draining a lot more from such a wall plug can get, uhmmm, hot. That´s a few of the reasons I suggested to start out with just 1 card, like a Titan X (or a GTX980ti), case power supply connection, wall plugs, electrical limits. Cheers, tim Am 05.08.2015 um 16:10 schrieb Mirko Jankovic:agree. 980ti is just a bit above 2 970s price wise, performance wise it realyl dpends on scenes you are working on. but I plan to upgrade my 4x970 with 980ti as soon as possible, even if it means replacing 1 by 1 On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Matt Morris <matt...@gmail.com <mailto:matt...@gmail.com>> wrote: The 970 is the most cost efficient only with scenes that fit into its memory - which using redshift is limited to 3.5Gb because of the internal memory architecture. I'd recommend looking at gpus with 6Gb or higher. The 980ti is a great card for the money, and the extra vram will help performance even on small scenes as you can utilise memory optimisation settings. Because you're limited to 4 gpus (risers don't work too well and limited by number and speed of pci-e lanes as mirko said) you want to make the most of that space. Per card electricity usage and heat output isn't that much more for the 980ti. On 5 August 2015 at 14:04, Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de <mailto:bauero...@gmx.de>> wrote: Thanks for the clarification, Dan. I think I mixed this up with the download section of the forum for customers? Whatever, good that the registered user forum is accessible to interested parties. Cheers, tim P.S: For Hair, Shave&Haircut is supported (I don´t have personal experience with it). Am 05.08.2015 um 14:17 schrieb Dan Yargici:"you may find it helpful to register in the Redshift3D.com forums, afaik you´ll need to have at least one registered license to get access to the "Registered users only" forum area." Just to clear this up. I'm pretty sure you don't need to have a license to access the Registered Users section of the Redshift forums. DAN On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Rob Chapman <tekano....@gmail.com <mailto:tekano....@gmail.com>> wrote: A lot of good and informed points by all, just wanted to add, this guy here, Sven, at http://www.render4you.de/renderfarm.html recently became the first official Redshift GPU render farm and have used him already on a few jobs with very tight deadlines. Essentially he has a rack of 7x Tesla K40st - so 1 node is the equivalent of a 6x single 980gtx which I find is pretty cost effective solution of adding a decent online GPU render node, that works with hardly any setup if you have a redshift scene ready to go best Rob On 5 August 2015 at 11:56, Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de <mailto:bauero...@gmx.de>> wrote: Hi Morten, you may find it helpful to register in the Redshift3D.com forums, afaik you´ll need to have at least one registered license to get access to the "Registered users only" forum area. There´s a few threads there about Hardware, multiple GPU systems and some user cases of testing single gpu vs. multi gpu rendering plus some Developer info about roadmaps and such. Personally, I´m a big fan of Redshift 3D. Still, here´s a few things to consider you may find useful: - Compared to Arnold, there is no HtoA or C4DtoA equivalent, e.g. no direct C4D or Houdini support - Compared to Arnold, rendering Yeti is not yet supported in Redshift3D - it´s looked at, no ETA. - Maya Fluids, Volumerendering, FumeFX e.g. Fire&Smoke&Dust&such isn´t in Redshift3D sofar - Multitasking, compared to CPU based multitasking and task switching (e.g. switching between rendering in Maya, Softimage while simultaneously comping in Nuke and painting Textures in Photoshop or Mari) may pose GPU specific limitations with multiple applications fighting for a very limited GPU VRAM. Redshift3D can utilize system RAM for VRAM but there can be headache when other, "dumber" apps go ahead and just block VRAM for their caching. It´s well worth running a good few hard tests in typical workflow scenarios. Maya, Substance Painter/Designer, Nuke, Photoshop, they all offer one type or another of GPU caching or GPU acceleration option. My personal feeling is, such stuff never gets tested in real-world, multiple-applications-running scenarios. At a glance, it would sound easy enough to have separate, dedicated GPUs run headless for rendering and reserving one GPU for viewport display and other apps but to be honest, all this stuff is so new, even thought it´s great, it´s still pushing grown legacy workflows and boundaries and in doing so, it may sometimes hurt. My very personal suggestion is: - a starter kit is just one GPU, optimally a Titan X with 12GB VRAM. - step 2, adding a second GPU, running headless, reserved for rendering - step 3, adding a third GPU, comparing speed to step 2 - step 4, price/performance balancing, comparing a 1-2-3 GPU GTX970 render rig with the above Could be you find out you like to run 1 Titan X for viewport display and multi-apps, and 2 GTX970 for a render job. Another thing. Multi-socket CPU boards and PCIe slots. It seems easier to get solid single socket CPU boards with lot´s of PCIe slots. Again, from my personal experience running a current generation dual socket Xeon rig, it is annoying how many CPU cycles I see wasted away in idle in most of my daily chores, except for pure rendering with Arnold or the likes, I find myself mostly having one CPU and even most of the other CPU´s cores just not used properly by software. I think a good sweetspot would have been to just go for one fast, solid 6-core(budget) or 8core (current) CPU, unless of course for a dedicated render slave... Cheers, tim Am 05.08.2015 um 12:05 schrieb Morten Bartholdy:I know several of you are using Redshift extensively or only now. We are looking in to expanding our permanent render license pool and are considering the pros and cons of Arnold, Vray and Redshift. I believe Redshift will provide the most bang for the buck, but at a cost of some production functionality we are used to with Arnold and Vray. Also, it will likely require an initial investment in new hardware as Redshift will not run on our Pizzabox render units, so that cost has to be counted in as well. It looks like the most priceefficient Redshift setup would be to make a few machines with as many GPUs in them as physically possible, but how have you guys set up your Redshift renderfarms? I am thinking a large cabinet with a huge PSU, lots of cooling, as much memory as possible on the motherboard and perhaps 8 GPUs in each. GTX 970 is probably the most power per pricepoint while Titans would make sense if more memory for rendering is required. Any thoughts and pointers will be much appreciated. Morten-- www.matinai.com <http://www.matinai.com>-- www.matinai.com <http://www.matinai.com>
