k1114, I hope you are reading this.
I am in need of a powerful render farm. I was building gaming cases with processors I could afford and ended up with a rather ugly pile of heaters and a ratsnest of wires. Most of the builds are not cutting it for me. Knowing little to nothing about servers, U's, and the headaches that come with, I dove head first into a decision of building a 42u rack to grow with. I have traveled half of Florida purchasing craigslist items to build with and now have a large pile ready to be put together. I have a 42u rack, 16port kvm, 24port gig switch, ups, 4 1U's, 3 2U's, (all with 500watt power supplies) 48 gigs of ram, server keyboard/mouse in sliding shelf, 35 amp 120w circuit installed, sliding shelves, rails, stack of 80gb hard drives, and other server equipment. I am well on my way to building something workable.
I plan to render using mental ray with maya through backburner. I have pretty much everything figured out and ready to be put together. I am hoping to get some insight from you on matters I don't quite grasp. I will have many questions as I proceed as i have no formal training on anything of the sort.
-Q1.- I would like to use destop motherboards in my servers. This idea was sparked from k1114's partpicker list in the post http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/357545-28-requirement-render-farm
What are the pitfalls of using desktop mobos? Will I be able to get a suitable cooler on my cpu that will be running 100% non stop with this configuration (Such as an H60 or H80)? Will the mobo ports line up with the back of a standard 2u chassis?
-Q2.- Should I limit myself on the processor? K1114 suggested making multiple servers with xeon 1230's. His partpicker list came up to $550 without the cpu
( http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wyQ2 ). At that expense, would I be better off getting 3930k's and building less servers (Due to budget). I know that 3930ks would tear the 1230 up. I have one in my workstation and it renders faster than I ever imagined. They are over 2x the price of the $230 1230's though........???????
-Q3.- A thought... Should I scrap all plans of building this expensive cpu based render farm for some upcoming wave of GPU possibilities? I know Maya does not support GPU rendering right now without a painful Iray workaround. Maya 2014 is coming out soon though and will likely have more support. MORE inportantly, new Quadro cards are being released. Does this mean Quadro 5000 & 6000's will be dropping off in price and I will be able to buy multiple GPU's that would leave the best processors available in the dust??? At this point should I be making some crazy build that houses 7 quadro 5000's and renders in SLI. That would mean scrapping the whole server rack idea...... If I am to scrap it, I would like to do so immediatly!
I Begin building next week and would love some input here before I get too deep.
If I get some interested people here, I will happily post pics, results, methods, and final product info for people to learn from in the future.
I would really appereciate the help
Thanks everyone,
Travis
I am in need of a powerful render farm. I was building gaming cases with processors I could afford and ended up with a rather ugly pile of heaters and a ratsnest of wires. Most of the builds are not cutting it for me. Knowing little to nothing about servers, U's, and the headaches that come with, I dove head first into a decision of building a 42u rack to grow with. I have traveled half of Florida purchasing craigslist items to build with and now have a large pile ready to be put together. I have a 42u rack, 16port kvm, 24port gig switch, ups, 4 1U's, 3 2U's, (all with 500watt power supplies) 48 gigs of ram, server keyboard/mouse in sliding shelf, 35 amp 120w circuit installed, sliding shelves, rails, stack of 80gb hard drives, and other server equipment. I am well on my way to building something workable.
I plan to render using mental ray with maya through backburner. I have pretty much everything figured out and ready to be put together. I am hoping to get some insight from you on matters I don't quite grasp. I will have many questions as I proceed as i have no formal training on anything of the sort.
-Q1.- I would like to use destop motherboards in my servers. This idea was sparked from k1114's partpicker list in the post http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/357545-28-requirement-render-farm
What are the pitfalls of using desktop mobos? Will I be able to get a suitable cooler on my cpu that will be running 100% non stop with this configuration (Such as an H60 or H80)? Will the mobo ports line up with the back of a standard 2u chassis?
-Q2.- Should I limit myself on the processor? K1114 suggested making multiple servers with xeon 1230's. His partpicker list came up to $550 without the cpu
( http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wyQ2 ). At that expense, would I be better off getting 3930k's and building less servers (Due to budget). I know that 3930ks would tear the 1230 up. I have one in my workstation and it renders faster than I ever imagined. They are over 2x the price of the $230 1230's though........???????
-Q3.- A thought... Should I scrap all plans of building this expensive cpu based render farm for some upcoming wave of GPU possibilities? I know Maya does not support GPU rendering right now without a painful Iray workaround. Maya 2014 is coming out soon though and will likely have more support. MORE inportantly, new Quadro cards are being released. Does this mean Quadro 5000 & 6000's will be dropping off in price and I will be able to buy multiple GPU's that would leave the best processors available in the dust??? At this point should I be making some crazy build that houses 7 quadro 5000's and renders in SLI. That would mean scrapping the whole server rack idea...... If I am to scrap it, I would like to do so immediatly!
I Begin building next week and would love some input here before I get too deep.
If I get some interested people here, I will happily post pics, results, methods, and final product info for people to learn from in the future.
I would really appereciate the help
Thanks everyone,
Travis
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