[Mihai]

Quad Opteron dual core? You mean a motherboard with 4 sockets? Plus you would need the 800 series Opterons to do that, your machine would be extremely expensive...I think maybe €6000+....

The Opteron quadcores won't be out until after summer -07 I think. Best option now is the Kentsfield quadcore, you get the most rendering power in one box, and it can help when doing lots of material previews and scene previews which you can't send over a network. Plus it overclocks really well so don't take into account just the base benchmarks you see in the reviews. You can get at least 25% more out of it with standard cooling.

[thomas lacroix]

hi all
We plan to buy a Quad Opteron Dual Core in january.
The new one.
The power consumming is most cheaper than two quad core.
And we ll have a real Brut power render solution for the Quick Work For Quick Clients... lol

So we ll see at this time...
Great Christmas hollydays.

then you'll have to send us some benchmark
and tell us where you find such beast in france...

[w i l l]

What is the ideal machine for render farms... would this ideally be the best PC multiplies by however many needed? Or are PC's for render farms set up differently, better for networking for example?

I went to a design company recently that had 10 mini Dell's (about 3rd of the size of mine).

[deadalvs]

i think it depends on what You're working on.

if You need a large output of frames like an animation, You go best with a couple of cheapo-slaves with enough ram.
but if You need to do a lot of test-renderings and then have a final image rendered over one night or in a day, You might wanna go with one fast machine.
the problem is that previews can not yet be automatedly rendered over the network. so You want as much power as possible in the box You're working on.
for arch-viz, as i do a lot, i think it's best to have one power-horse so the process of design goes well and then i can let a different, slower, computer render for 22 hours or whatever. but i need a preview in one or two minutes that lets me see what i need to tweak.
if i bought 3 small machines for arch-viz, i'd always have to deal with instability problems of a network, i always have three times the risk of a crash which, with maxwell at the moment, surely kills all the three renderings. plus, the preview is only as fast as one small box.

it's just a decision...

* * *

deadalvs

[deadalvs]

hi all
We plan to buy a Quad Opteron Dual Core in january.
The new one.
The power consumming is most cheaper than two quad core.
And we ll have a real Brut power render solution for the Quick Work For Quick Clients... lol

So we ll see at this time...
Great Christmas hollydays.

HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THESE OPTERON 8212 and 8218 COST ???

and then four of them ? in my opinion, this is totally wasted money. ok, You get a nice system with 8 cores, but the price is totally out of any limit !

for this money You get three computers that outperform this box BY FAR with the newer xeons 51xx ...

* * *

deadalvs

[michaelplogue]

Hey tanguy -

I was wondering what OS you were planning on running on this quad slot machine? Your standard Windows (including XP64) will only support up to two sockets. Above that, you would either need to get one of the Windows Server versions, or go with Linux.

[tanguy]

hi all ...
well...
First the price !
You have a opteron 8xxx for 900 $ on a 4 slots MB at 1300 $.
The RAM will be expensive for sure but it s the same way or few computers..
Second the power on one year...
we have a 8 core for 800 W around... on one year of compute it s really interesting against 3 x 500 W power supply. And the hot temperature we have to dissipate with another system of course...

Third the possibility too treat a big scene in a little time...
Just for the pleasure to test a full scene and preview a seen of the scene.
We work for a large part on architectural profect wich are for big to big...
And the clients are more and more press. So our time production shut down drasticly and we have to found solutions. So if we have a calcul unit really reactiv for 5600 $ HT (hard) and 1300 $HT (RE)... That is the price to pay for immediate response too the market.

We will try for it..
Actually we have a 24u bay with 7 blade dual Xeons and it appear us that is not the right way for our activity. We are three to work with and it s the only right point of the multiplicity of calcul source >> more render process and and more different cleints work in the same time....

So maybe we are wrong but we will try it and of course post a benchmark..
Kind regards

[daimon]

just buy 4 systems with 1 intel dual-core cpu each, use 1 monitor 1 mouse and 1 keyboard with a kvm and make sure the pc you are going to use as the main system has a good gfx better quality motherboard...etc and you are set if you know how to setup the maxwell network render.

[Mihai]

I'm looking at the Xeon quadcore, E5320...looks pretty good. About US 750 and you can put two on a dual socket board. You'll have an 8 core monster, much cheaper than your 4 socket Opteron system, plus you don't have to pay for Windows Server.

Has anybody seen benchmarks for such a system?

[glebe digital]

These are all interesting points, especially the issue of sockets and the current limitations of XP........

The multiple system route is the way I went, I think trying to get an octo 'superbox' right now might scare the sh*t our of your wife/bank manager/mother etc..........also, when your PC dies/falls over [as they invariably do] I don't want to have all my eggs in one box.

I have 3 systems:
1 Workstation [with the fancy graphics card etc]
2 render nodes [an athlon X2+4800 and a dual-dual Opteron 285] both with no GPU muscle to speak of.

Current pricing for this set-up is around $4.5K [on uk pricing anyway] and this gives me 8 cores and around 20Ghz for rendering............a good set-up for a freelancer, but maybe only just about 'in the game' when it comes to using Maxwell on tight deadlines.

[deadalvs]

I'm looking at the Xeon quadcore, E5320...looks pretty good. About US 750 and you can put two on a dual socket board. You'll have an 8 core monster, much cheaper than your 4 socket Opteron system, plus you don't have to pay for Windows Server.

Has anybody seen benchmarks for such a system?

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/des ... 700,00.htm

!! tests with 2.66 GHz samples... now You're talking about the 1.83 GHz cpus...

calculate...
2106 points of octo 2.66 GHz
--> 1449 points for a octo 1.83 GHz (linear downscaled)
but a normal quad 3 GHz has: 1447 points on win xp

ERGO... You throw away a lot of money, because this octo E5320 costs well twice as much as the quad MacPro at the moment... (see dell precision 690)



* * *

deadalvs

[w i l l]

Dell

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstor ... recn_690_2

Mac

http://www.applemac.biz/product_info.ph ... play=specs

(I think the Mac is faster here)

[deadalvs]

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstor ... recn_690_2

exactly that link...

* * *

deadalvs

[w i l l]

just buy 4 systems with 1 intel dual-core cpu each, use 1 monitor 1 mouse and 1 keyboard with a kvm and make sure the pc you are going to use as the main system has a good gfx better quality motherboard...etc and you are set if you know how to setup the maxwell network render.

Are KVM switches quick and reliable? Can I just press a key and go straight to the other PC?

[Mihai]

Thanks deadalvs for that link. A little disappointing, although I wonder how much you could overclock those quadcores. If it's the same as the Kentsfield then you could quite easily get them at 2.66, plus as they mentioned in the review, there is some additional overhead when rendering with so many cores in Cinebench, plus the system wasn't optimized yet to handle the 8 cores. I wonder if Maxwell scales better than Cinebench indicates.