blender Raspberry Pi cluster V workstation

[Zero Smith]

I have not been able to find hard data to determine the pros and cons of using a Raspberry Pi 2/3 cluster compared to a Single PC of comparable price for the purpose of rendering in Blender.  The handful of discussions that I have found on the matter ether assumed that the rate of diminishing return is comparable to Crossfire or SLI, or that the RAM size would limit the scope in a similar way.  I have found statements form people who work with Blender confirming Blender's ability to render on a farm and to split a single frame for multiple nodes.  Please site your reasoning and sources with any answers you provide.  Please feel free to use a variety of price points for your examples.  Thank you for helping me with this.

[k1ng_alex]

Well I cant provide any good sources but if you look at the performance per dollar of a pi vs any PC setup the favour is in the PC ,

That being said if you only have 40-60$ to throw at a render farm the PI is a good learning experience but a PC will always out preform a PI  

[RedWulf]

Pc would be better, I mean unless you get a great deal on bulk buying or high end network equitment it might not even be cost effective in the first place. But after you consider the power usage and the heat(pis do get hot) you will likely run into higher operating cost with the pis. 

Also a single node allows minimum latency, error, and programming knowledge. The pis have to communicate which adds time and its not just plug and play. 

Theres not really any 1 on 1 reviews per dollar simply because its too specific and can vary too much but you can read abit here

https://teksyndicate.com/comment/1837594

[unijab]

Is cpu core count or memory more important to blender?

[unijab]

Just by searching, I found at least 1 free render farm you can you use online.

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 hours ago, Zero Smith said:

I have not been able to find hard data to determine the pros and cons of using a Raspberry Pi 2/3 cluster compared to a Single PC of comparable price for the purpose of rendering in Blender.  The handful of discussions that I have found on the matter ether assumed that the rate of diminishing return is comparable to Crossfire or SLI, or that the RAM size would limit the scope in a similar way.  I have found statements form people who work with Blender confirming Blender's ability to render on a farm and to split a single frame for multiple nodes.  Please site your reasoning and sources with any answers you provide.  Please feel free to use a variety of price points for your examples.  Thank you for helping me with this.

I dont' think you can easily render on pi. Even if you can you will have to compile it your self and you will be limited to on gb of ram which will be limiting for most renders. If you want a cheap render server look at someting like a dell c2100 with dual 6 cores. Its about the same speed as a 5960x in rendering for around 300 on ebay.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, unijab said:

Is cpu core count or memory more important to blender?

You need a certain amout of memory for a scene once you have enough it doesn't matter. Speed also doesn't make a big difference. It can use as many cores as you through at it and will scale well.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I dont' think you can easily render on pi. Even if you can you will have to compile it your self and you will be limited to on gb of ram which will be limiting for most renders. If you want a cheap render server look at someting like a dell c2100 with dual 6 cores. Its about the same speed as a 5960x in rendering for around 300 on ebay. I

EDIT if you need cpu this is good. If you need gpu get the faster nvdia gpu you can and get the model with as much vram as you can. you probably want 3gb+ and a used titan would be a good deal.