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

Reindeer Farm

[MountainLogic]

What a great seasonal question. The most important thing in a Reindeer Farm is plenty of snow.

Oh, wait. Never mind.

now or later

[aminorex]

If Maya came in an amd64 native linux binary,
it would kick some serious booty, but assuming
that you need your pipeline filling up NOW
rather than later, go for 4-way Athlon MPs
with all the ECC DDR you can cram into them.
More than 4-way, and you're paying premium
prices for the chipsets. Less than 4-way,
and you're wasting cycles that could be
amortized over wait states. ECC is de rigeur
just because you don't want to be chasing
down defective dimms all the live long day.
Similarly, I can't see any reason for paying
the 10% performance tax of Windows 2000 Pro
(the best of the Windows lot for SMP use)
or suffering its 2-way limitations, unless
theres some Lightwave feature that is
critical to your operation.

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.

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!