Building a Render Farm?

Dark Bard asks: "What is the best configuration for a rendering machine. Given the variety of chips and components what are the best options balancing cost verses speed. I've been running Lightwave and plan to shift soon to Maya. AMD chips seem to be rated as a bit faster for rendering and they cost less, as well. Given the number of types of RAM available, what are the advantages of each verses cost? Should ECC be considered? What about motherboards? Integrated video would be ideal but it would have to be adequate to run the software. Is there any advantage to running the new 64 bit processors? Should you consider dual chips? What about operating system? Lightwave won't run on Linux but Maya will. How well do the major operating systems compare when used for this purpose?"

Comments

Bang for bucks

[quinkin]

64 bit still isn't cost effective in terms of bang-for-bucks unless you have access to 64 bit binaries.

Even if 64 bit binaries are available you will probably get greater performance at a lower cost by using "cheap as chips"(sic) chips in SMP configurations.

Future proofing is another issue however. Many clustering technologies rely upon a common denominator. For instance with OpenMOSIX running on varied hardware, your code must be compiled for the lowest common denominator. So if you have 20 P4's and one P2, you will only be able to run software compiled for P2 on the cluster (at least without errors).

YMMV - It's been a while. :P

Q.