- Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:41 pm
#329720
Hi everyone. At work we're looking into building a powerful rendering machine and looking for some pointers on what to research into. I know this gets asked quite a lot and can be very specific per person... but I thought I'd start a new thread here as I've searched around the forums to not much success. Also the topics I did find on this subject are - in terms of technology - quite old now. Any help, recommendations or tips here would be great. Even any general comments and opinions on your current rig/performance would be helpful, too.
We have a budget of around probably £2000 (when directly converted into USD, that comes out at $3,078.76) and preferably looking to custom build to keep the price around that mark. This'll be the frustating part to people who know about this stuff: I'm not very computer-savvy. :P I generally know the basics in that more cores + higher RAM = faster performance. The bit I'm not sure about is what's currently the number to aim for in this area, what's actually necessary to have and what it means for the other internal components (graphics card compatibility, etc).
Current Spec:
Dell Precision T3400
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU
Q6700 @ 2.66GHz
8GB RAM
We're getting OK results from this, but we often have to leave each render going for at least a night (I know that's not uncommon generally). We're potentially working with some animation jobs soon too, and will need something faster to generate the frames at a sensible rate.
Another thing to note is that it doesn't have to be a fully-functional PC as such (if that makes any sense). We're thinking of maybe keeping the current computer to work on, then sending files to this rendering rig if that's an option.
Again, any help or general comments on this on-going subject would be great. Thanks!
We have a budget of around probably £2000 (when directly converted into USD, that comes out at $3,078.76) and preferably looking to custom build to keep the price around that mark. This'll be the frustating part to people who know about this stuff: I'm not very computer-savvy. :P I generally know the basics in that more cores + higher RAM = faster performance. The bit I'm not sure about is what's currently the number to aim for in this area, what's actually necessary to have and what it means for the other internal components (graphics card compatibility, etc).
Current Spec:
Dell Precision T3400
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU
Q6700 @ 2.66GHz
8GB RAM
We're getting OK results from this, but we often have to leave each render going for at least a night (I know that's not uncommon generally). We're potentially working with some animation jobs soon too, and will need something faster to generate the frames at a sensible rate.
Another thing to note is that it doesn't have to be a fully-functional PC as such (if that makes any sense). We're thinking of maybe keeping the current computer to work on, then sending files to this rendering rig if that's an option.
Again, any help or general comments on this on-going subject would be great. Thanks!

- By Mark Bell