[greengreen]

Hi all, I've been thinking about investing in a render farm for my professional work as an architect. It's a sole practitioner studio, and by budget may be several thousand dollars, but I haven't yet decided exactly how much I want to spend. I think the renderings that Maxwell can produce can really help the business, so it's worth some investment to me and I would like to save time.

I've found a lot of information about this on the web, but it's a lot of info. I got a quote from Boxx Render Pro, but it seems like it might be too much for a Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600v2 Processor set up at $4,200. If you're curious, I put the quote below.

Hopefully you guys have some suggestions or good resources, I am interested in building my own if I can get significantly more cores and more power for this amount of money (which it seems like I might be able to). I found a page describing how to put 6 CPU's into an IKEA Helmer Cabinet. Maybe that route can get me much more power for the money, but on the other hand, the Boxx is a neat little package.

Having a little trouble deciding which route to go, please let me know if you have some ideas.


Configuration


DUAL XEON E5-2640v2 2.0GHz, 20MB cache, 7.20 QPI (Eight-Core)
16GB DDR3-1866 REG ECC (8 - 2GB DIMMS)
120GB SSD SATA 6Gb/s
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition 64-Bit
BOXX Premium Support 1 Year (Years 2 and 3 Standard) - US and Canada Only
BOXX 3 Year Limited Warranty
Model Specifications

Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600v2 Processor
Intel C602J Chipset with QPI up to 8.00GT/S
Up to 256GB DDR3 1600-1866Mhz DIMM REG ECC
1 x Intel i350 Dual-port Gigabit Ethernet Controller
2 x SATA 6Gbps Ports
3 x USB 2.0
1 x PCIE x 16 Low Profile Slot
1 x Matrox G200eW Graphics
1 x IPMI 2.0 (Intelligent Platform Management Interface v.2.0)
1 x 350 Watt Power Supply
Physical Characteristics
3.8" x 6.75" x 20" H xWx D



Monday, August 11, 2014

BOXX Technologies

System SubTotal: $4,419.00
System Discount: 5%
System Total: $4,198.00
System Qty: 1
System Grand Total: $4,198.00
Warranty Total: $0.00

*Grand Total: $4,198.00

[Mihai]

Just to offer another perspective - I would investigate also the renderfarms that have Maxwell available. If you already have a pretty good workstation which can give you decent previews quickly (an i7 4790K system for example is pretty cheap and powerful), sending any large resolution final renders to a render farm may be an option. I can say the render farms on our site have been around for years and are very reliable.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/resources/renderfarms

Advantages:
- no need to worry about the expensive hardware breaking at the worse possible time
- getting huge renders done very quickly when needed, while the not so urgent renders, you can let them run overnight on your own workstation.
- save a bit on the electricity bill

[zparrish]

Hey greengreen,
All the marketing "fluff" that's out there regarding system specs and performance can be a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, Maxwell makes it pretty straight forward by boasting an impressive 95% efficiency when scaling CPU core count from 1 to 32 cores. That means that the more cores you have, and they faster they are, the better your Maxwell turn around times will be.

With that being said, not all rendering engines are created equal. In the event you use a mix of rendering engines, you may want to consider designing your farm around simpler, single socket machines. I actually posted a detailed benchtest about Mental Ray majorly dropping the ball when going from a fast single socket workstation to a beefy, dual socket E5-2690 render server.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/shading-l ... rue#M21253

I can verify that Maxwell's efficiency claim is absolutely true. My dual socket server performs proportionately as expected. Even though that's the case, when I finally get some extra funds budgeted for my farm upgrades, I'll be using single socket machines. That also lets me diversify my render queue a bit, so I can reallocate a node or two to work on a still image while my animations are still being worked on. Plus, the cost per performance ratio doesn't peak at the most expensive, flagship processors. It's somewhere in the middle with smaller, slower chips. You would have to price out all of the components to find the best match though as motherboard, RAM, and chassis prices vary. Granted, you'll use more electricity with more, smaller machines. Where I work, that's a soft cost that we don't track, so I don't worry about it. It may be something for you to consider though.

The Boxx server I have is the rack mounted one in a 1U chassis. Good thing too, because it is LOUD!!!! It's at least half as loud as an electric leaf blower and moves about the same amount of air Seriously though, it's obnoxiously loud. It has 3 dual impeller fans that keep the air cooled procs cool. I spoke with a vendor of ours that has a few of the desktop versions (the Boxx RenderPro) and he said that those aren't any better. The motherboards in these are all from SuperMicro (SM), and the rack mounted version is probably a SM chassis with a Boxx decal on top. It looks identical to the ones offered directly from SM.

My RenderBoxx has the following motherboard:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... 9DRT-F.cfm

I think it's proprietary though, so you would need to order direct from SM, probably preinstalled in a chassis. You can get a four node system (single sockets with 64GB of RAM) from SM for around $10K, which is significantly higher than the ~$4K quote you posted, but the same thing from Boxx would probably be between $15K - $20K. I even asked SM for a barebones quote (no CPU, RAM, or HDD/SSD) and I would have only saved about $600 by sourcing parts and building it myself. Boxx spends a fortune on advertising, which is why they're so expensive. They do have tremendous customer support, and they take performance very seriously, but the inflated cost can be too much for certain situations and smaller businesses. I like dealing with them, but I know they are the most expensive option. Besides, with enough know-how and determination, you can build your own machines that are just as fast as theirs. They just already did the research and testing, so you don't have to.

You also can save some money by going with AMD procs, but I can't verify the performance difference between Intel and AMD for Maxwell. I'm sure there are plenty of benchmarks out there, and probably quite a few in the Benchwell posted stats.

http://www.maxwellrender.com/benchwell

I hope this is helpful for you.