Render: More Core vs More PCs

[Hodoer]

Hi everyone,

would like to hear your thoughts on this situation.

I understand that 3ds max uses the cpu when rendering with mental ray therefore I would assume the number of cores a cpu have would have a proportional effect on rendering speed.

Now comes the question: which would do better?

On the left of the attached image is a $900 setup for a render node connected through backburner while on the right is a very power computer.

So strapping 5 of the cheaper PC would cost around the same with similar core count.

Would the farm do better?(as in faster) Or would the lone beast win?

Thank you for any advise ahead of time. 

[vanished]

Hm, good question.  Obviously there is a lot of overhead required to make a CPU function (PSU, RAM, OS, HDD, etc. ie, the rest of the PC ) which would make you want to get the post powerful CPU you can rather than more PCs, but the price of CPUs tends to go up disproportionately with performance after a certain point.

 

At the end of the day, you want to maximize performance / dollar.  That 22 core Xeon is, perhaps surprisingly, only about twice as powerful as the 6700 (well, maybe 2.3x) and yet the PC costs significantly more than two of the cheaper build.  Something to think about.

 

That said, you seem to have a lot of unnecessary parts... expensive SSDs, large HDDs, a video card in the cheap build (not necessary due to iGPU), etc.  Could save some money taking those out or toning them down.

[Nena Trinity]

Umm have you considered Ryzen R7? Or does it have to be Intel for some exclusive feature reason?

[DrMikeNZ]

Does the software support distributed rendering? Do you need a GPU on each node, or can you run them headless?

 

Personally, if the software supports distributed rendering, I would get 4 or 5 Ryzen 1700 systems and save on the cost of cases by stacking them on top of each other with some threaded rod in an up-cycled cabinet.

[mariushm]

You could do this:

* 45$ motherboard like ASRock FM2A68M-DG3+  and

* 65$ cpu like AMD Athlon X4 860k  ( 4 x 3.7 - 4.0 Ghz)

* 50$ for 8 GB DDR3 

* 30-40$ for a 360-420w power supply

* a few dollars for a case

* a few dollars for a used pci-e video card

* maybe a few dollars for an old 80-120GB sata drive

 

and you have a system that's maybe 40-50% the performance of a Intel 6700 you priced at 1000$, for less than 300$ (not including OS).

If you go multiple computers, go all the way.

[Hodoer]

Wow these are very fast replies.

First of all, thanks everyone for your input. Allow me to do some addons:

I chose a quadro with SSD and a huge HDD for the fact that it would be a workstation with high core count for fast rendering. A quadro graphics card is mainly because it seems to be the industry's standards for professional 3d modeling. But maybe you're right, if I'm only using it as a rendering machine while working on another computer and assigning the render job to it then these things might not be necessary. Maybe I'm just trying to convincing myself this is what I need while drooling at the specs. Hahaha.

I haven't tried to do rendering on a computer without a GPU before, most of the time I would use my colleagues computers to render after work through autodesk backburner.

Regarding Ryzen, sorry but I do not have any opportunity to work with amd builds before as most schools and companies I'm in and worked for uses Intel, nvidia and mac. Furthermore, mental ray seems belong to nvidia and I mostly render on mental ray so I'm not sure if it would work with amd processors or graphics cards. Maybe someone can verify this as I said, I've never worked on an amd system before. Thanks again everyone.