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

Re:Dear Slashdot... do my work for me please...

[Atzanteol]

Yes ladies and Gentleman, you too can be a pretentious slashdot asshole! All you need to do is:

1) Bitch about "easy" ask-slashdot questions. After all, you *do* know everything don't you?
2) Answer the "easy" question with vague mumblings about "google", "open source", and a few links to stuff that won't answer the question (but it looks like you really know your stuff if you do).
3) Bitch (there's a lot of that if you're going to be pretentious) about the "stupid" moderators and editors. They are, afterall, morons aren't they?

Yessir, just follow these three simple rules, and you too will find yourself modded +5 insightful whereas all your detractors will be -1 troll!