Hey guys and gals, the office is thinking of grabbing a additional machine for the soul purpose of crunching out frames. I suggested the Dell Powerservers, but i'm not sure if that machine is good for that kinda stuff, basically all we need is something to render no special gfx card. Just lots of MHZ and RAM, any ideas of any machine that is capable of that. Also it must be able to upgrade in the future. many thanks
Doc
Hmmm yeah theres powerserver vaults you can get that support 8 Xeon CPU's per rackmount... but it can get pricy [25 grand is the starting price I think for a base system with 2 cpus but I'm not 100% sure]. You can get it under a business lease and it would be somewhat future proof in that since you are leasing it... you can get the latest and greatest once the lease is up.
On the other hand it may well be cheaper just to fill a room up of PIII clone boxes networked together for a render farm.
A bunch of dual P3 machines would be the way to go, I don't know if they care, but for price of that Dell you could easily build about 10 or more dual P3 933mhz machines networked together. I promote Dell cause they have a factory here but It is much cheaper and a better way to build than buy just about any computer.
man one of those things with 8 processors is like almost 50 grand you easily build like 25 - 30 of your own dual PIII 900 and up machines now that would be a renderfarm
hmmm, yeah i thought of that before hand, but a few things came to mind,
1) how practical and costly is it to say upgrade a bunch of clone NT boxs to a newer processor or adding more Ram. i don't exactly wanna open up 10-20 NT boxs to put in Ram, whereas a Dell server is one unit that i can easily open up and bam throw in some ram. Scalibilty is a key issue.
2) The "Render Power Machine" is going to do just that and render, render, render. It'll be on 24/7 and crunching frames constantly, how issured am i that a of the shelf NT box won't blow up (it has happened to me) and i lose a day of rendering and my client goes ballistic on me. I'm sure the Dell Servers are tested quite extensively before they are sold to customers.
3) how easy is it to hook up a RAID unit to 10 NT boxs?? i know the Dell Server houses a RAID controller and bam!!, on one Unit easy to setup??
The Company i work for isn't massive like pixar or anything, but the jobs have quick turn-arounds, so speed needed, work is done in NTSC, so we really don't want a super-cray or Origin server, just something that we can depend on.
My research also lead me to Alpha servers from Compaq..any good???
many thanks
Dr.Pain
A bunch of built units is not that hard to place RAM in and couldn't cost anymore than throwing a Gig or two of ram in that Dell and processors are cheap, cheaper than 8 xeons.Also Machine 1 could be rendering frame 1-100, Machine 2 101-201, Machine 3 202-302, etc. and machine 17 through 20 you could be playing UT or Quake with a few of the guys.(just joking) I have a couple of units at home that have the side cases off all the time , and dust is just a myth. It does not hurt anything anymore than a fan sucking it in. Also the system runs about 10 degrees celsius cooler with A/C on. But yes it is much easier to fork out the cash than to select each component and build(and warranty). For raid you could just get a good board that supports it.Compaq, run....run far away. Every Compaq I have seen or used is trouble. They have there own Bios.Also alot of stuff has to be Compaq version software to run, at least with there desktop home units that is the case.It is up to you, but me I would pick the best of the best and build about 20 and accept the rest as a bonus. The systems that I have helped build and seen built the only thing I have seen blow up was the monitor from the abuse the card and res. put on it.
Many thanks everyone i have given the following information to the big cheese and see what he thinks. thxs
Doc
One other thing, as I posted in one of my on going posts............Pixar has a refigirated room full of Sun racks. Maybe just cause they got money and sponsor?!?! Would look good in a Sun commercial.