Recommendations for Render farm nodes

[jpjapers]

Hi,

 

Im looking for suggestions for some servers for my render farm. Its a small company so they dont need to be top spec. just a good balance between price and performance will suffice.

I was tempted to build my own threadripper gen 1 3U mount systems because of the price vs a 16 core EPYC server. Can anyone comment on whether that might be a good way of getting good performance vs buying server grade hardware?

[Minbari]

Without knowing more about your use case I can only try and make some general suggestions. 

 

If you want to have proper support from one vendor it would be best to go with a solution from some provider like Dell or HP or Cisco or IBM... 

 

DIY whitebox solutions will likely get more raw performance per dollar but at the expense of having to deal with any warranty service or issues with the individual component vendor (and obviously not getting the same level of enterprise support). Threadripper 2 might also be a better option simply because availability of threadripper 1 is a little low, and there are fairly significant performance improvements between them. Threadripper is certainly cheaper than equivalent EPYC gear, but it is only based on a consumer platform and doesn't give you the opportunity to use server boards. 

 

If you are considering used hardware, new but discounted E5 v4 equipment is easy to come by and fairly cheaply priced. It might not offer the same level of performance as threadripper, but would still come with a few years of support. 

 

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Can you go used?

How many nodes are we thinking?

 

Id be tempted to get a lot of used r630's

 

or if you want really compact get a blade box like a md1200 and fill it with systems like m630's

[jpjapers]

We currently have 12 dell poweredge r610s with some 12 core xeons in but my memory has failed me on which. Theyre quite old though.

We are only a small studio with less than ten people so we dont require massive processing power compared to say a commercial farm. I just cant currently justify the cost of the server hardware because its almost double the price for half the capacity of say a threadripper system.

 

What would you recommend in this situation? Used nodes are still an option.

[dalekphalm]

On 1/16/2019 at 2:01 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

or if you want really compact get a blade box like a md1200 and fill it with systems like m630's

Just an FYI, the MD1200 is an external SAS 12-disk storage shelf, not a blade enclosure. (Source: I have one).

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, dalekphalm said:

Just an FYI, the MD1200 is an external SAS 12-disk storage shelf, not a blade enclosure. (Source: I have one).

derp, meant m1000e.

[Falconevo]

What exactly are you 'rendering' as the term covers a lot.  Do you require hardware acceleration or simply just compute resource?