Building a rendering computer/server

ZeroNight · March 6, 2016

Hi! Pretty new to the forums, but I figured I would make an account and give things a try here since one of Linus's videos was a big help with me setting up and building my first desktop about a year ago now. I have a project that I'm looking to get built in the next two months or so, and after doing some research on how to put something like this together, the only thing that was clear is that I'm going to need some assistance in picking out the parts to put into it.

1. Budget & Location

$2,500-3,000 USD, but there is some flexibility if things need to go a bit higher than that.

2. Aim

I have two very specific use cases for this. The first which will be when I throw a rendering project onto it, and the second where I'm going to be using it as a personal backup/cloud server.

The rendering jobs will be handling things like Vray scenes and UE4 lightmap bakes primarily, both things that seem to despise pagefile. If it runs out of RAM, the render will more often than not just outright crash and lose all of the data, so I'm ideally looking for at 32gb of RAM or greater (with more than 32gb of ram only really being useful for the very specific case of running insane fluid/smoke simulations). It won't be doing any gaming whatsoever, or really any GPU rendering either. All of the renders are multithreaded, and seem to favor the Intel Xeon line of CPUs as opposed to just an i7 as a result.

For when it's being used a personal backup/cloud server, that's the easier part. It would ideally have around 6TB or so of storage capacity for storing a full system backup of my desktop just in case the worst happens, with a bit of extra space for cache files and software installs so it can handle networked renders.

And here's the tricky part. When it's not running a render, my goal is to make this as silent as it can be. I'll probably end up putting this next to my main desktop and don't want the additional 24/7 noise when working. In a perfect world, whenever it's just sitting there not actively running a backup or render, there wouldn't even be any fans running.

3. Monitors

My current two displays are just 1080p monitors, and I would likely just use the additional inputs for one of them to occasionally manage the computer.

4. Peripherals

I have a spare keyboard and mouse already, but will probably need to get a new copy of Windows for it.

5. Why are you upgrading?

Right now, even with my current setup with an i7-5930k, whenever I need to do a render, I suddenly can't get work done for the rest of the day while waiting on it. I'm lucky if I can even use an internet browser with the renders going, and if I dare hit Esc at any time even if Maya/Vray aren't in focus it cancels the render anyway. It's a huge inconvenience and stopping me from getting my work done. In addition to that, OneDrive is killing their larger online storage plans. I didn't have unlimited, but I did have a 10TB cap that they gave me when I signed up for Office 365 that is no longer going to be an option to use for backups and archives of projects. The last thing I want is to have a drive fail in my desktop and lose months of work, and the convenience of being able to download projects over the internet if I forgot to copy it to my external drive saved me more than once already.

I'll be the first to admit, I don't really know anything about how the Xeon/workstation line of components should be set up when doing something like this, so I figure it's better to ask for help than learn the hard way. There are a lot of things like NAS drives (that from the marketing at least sound like a good idea for something like this), all the way to ECC memory that for something like this that I am using as a 24/7 file server (and possibly a game server in the future for a side project I've been working on in Unreal) might be worth it, but then I need to find a workstation motherboard that supports it. There's just a lot about all of this that I don't know enough about to make an informed decision on.

Thanks in advance for the help!