2 CPU OR 2 Graphic cards for rendering?

[khallodah]

hello everyone.

My friend is an engineer. He asked me this Q which I couldn't answer.
what is better for rendering with 3D max, 8cores of Xeon(2x Quad cores) with one graphic card of ATI FireGL OR 2 of ATI FireGL (crossfire) with one Quad core of Xeon?

He has received this offer from his company. He worry always about rendering more than anything else.
I told him, in gaming it's definite that tow graphic cards will be more effective, but I have no Idea about rendering.

what would you suggest guys?

thnks in advance

 

[Wisecracker]

Sorry --- I can't answer your question.

Google 'Backburner Tutorial' and learn how you may develop a 3DSM render farm with up to 9,999 nodes.

“Down on the Farm”
Network Rendering and Autodesk Backburner
http://www.visualz.com/free/down_on_the_farm.pdf

A hugely under-emphasized fact about both 3ds Max and Combustion is the fact that they both ship, out of the box, with a FREE network rendering system. The new software since around mid-2002 for network rendering in these two applications is called “Backburner”. With the purchase of ONE copy/license of Autodesk 3ds Max or Combustion software(s), users can legally network render on up to 9,999 computers (and they can each be multi-processor) using Backburner.

 

[khallodah]

thanx wisecracker for the input. Frankly I've never heard of it.

still there is a problem with big size projects time to upload/download.

 

[alexel]

I do 3D renderings for professional and personal use at home, and the most important thing to remember is that when modeling or whatever you are using 3D Max with, you want to have a decent graphics card to take the load off your Processor. When you Render out images you want to have powerful processors. The graphics card is not going to do the math to render an image out, the Processor takes care of that. I have a render farm that contains 10 servers with dual PIII processors each one has 4 gigs of memory and they fly images out like its nothing, just by using Backburner.