For a Render Farm which set up will be good?

I am planning to create a small render farm at home (cpu based):

Which of these 2 setups will be good for blender animations render farm

Setup 1:

2 x 12 core AMD opteron processors

MBD-H8DG6-F-O E-ATX Super Micro dual socket mother board

HAF912 COOLER MASTER CABINET

corsair liquid cooler for each processor

Corsair RMi SeriesTM RM850i - 850 Watt 80 PLUS® Gold Certified Fully Modular PSU with Corsair Link Digital

1 TB internal hard disk

4 x 8 GB = 16 GB DDR3 RAM for each processor

SETUP 2:

Provided I cannot find 12 core AMD processors in my city or even a server board, than this

4 x AMD FX 8320 (8 core) processor

4 x Gigabyte motherboard supporting the AMD processors

4 x HAF912 COOLER MASTER CABINET ( maybe a bit smaller version but which allows cpu liquid cooling)

corsair liquid cooler for each processor

4 x cooler master 700 watt PSU

8 GB RAM DDR3 for each processor.

The second set-up might cost me more but at least if one of the cpu causes some problem, I can continue rendering with the other 3.

Though I am not sure buying low end AMD processors will give me less or more rendering scenes/efficiency?.

Any suggestions?

Do not wish to go the Intel route though, I cannot find even one processor above 6 core ( 12 threads) in my country and I can buy 4 above 8 core AMD processors for the price of one 6 core Intel.

Hi wickedsunny, a Intel 6 core is much faster than 4 AMD 8 core cpu.
You need only one case, mainboard, power supply and much less power consumtion.
May you can find some benchmarks for the Opterons but I am sure older ones are slower too.

http://www.cinebench.info/

Cheers, mib

@mib2berlin

I am currently using a quad core Intel Core i7 950 3.07 GHz and it takes average 2 hours to render a movie quality frame.

3 quad core will give me more speed than a one 6 core? The idea is to have more cores so one core can be assigned for each frame.

Also I do not wish to restrict on one machine, if one machine goes bad, at least I can continue working with the other 2 machines and the work will not get hampered.

Here’s a sample system I put together using my local PC shop’s online site. Prices are in AUD, so would be around 1100 USD to build the same setup, or $4500 USD to setup 4 of these render farm nodes.


My first advice: A render farm (especially a small home one) benefits from the parallelization of its task, instead of getting an expensive workstation/server hardware, you can get more, cheaper consumer hardware for better performance/$$. Similar to GTX cards vs Tesla/Quadro for rendering.

Thus, your first setup is not a good idea. At all. The 12 core Opterons are NOT worth the performance per $$ or per watt, nor the extra cost for a dual socket motherboard vs consumer hardware.

Secondly, AMD processors are not worth the slight savings you may have in upfront costs in the long run. There rendering performance is poor in comparison to Intel processors, and since I presume you will be using your Renderfarm a lot, the power difference will not be insignificant over several years (however this does depend on where you live)

For my suggestion:
i7 5820k, a good 6 core CPU. Will render faster than any AMD processor, and can easily have a decent bump in performance with a mild overclock, plus you seem to want a liquid CPU cooler, swap my selection for a dual radiator one if you wish to overlock more.

16GB DDR4, not a huge factor, but it doesn’t hurt to have fast memory when overclocking the CPU, and 16GB should last you a while.

Motherboard: I had originally selected an ITX board to make the system compact, but feel happy to swap it for a M-ATX board and save $100. Can then add more RAM or some GPU’s if you need later.

OS: I would hope your planning on rendering with a Linux OS on these PC’s, since they seem tor ender a bit faster, and its not worth spending $$ on the OS when that can go to faster hardware.

SSD: Something small and fast, fits onto the motherboard as well so no extra sata/power cables needed. If you think you’ll be storing huge amounts of files on the farm, you could swap it for a larger HDD, but I would think the nodes would be accessing the files and saving the results to a network share or be automated by the farm.

PSU: For CPU rendering absolutely no need to go with such a high Watt PSU, especially with an Intel processor. PSU’s operate more efficiently while under moderate load compared to barely used at all (200W out of 430W is more efficient than 250W out of 700W)
I chose a modular, decent PSU that will keep things tidy and need minimal cables.

Case: Seemed like a good case for a render node, they can stack easily on top of each other, and support the desired CPU cooling.

Hi wickedsunny, I compare the 6 core Intel with the AMD 8 core and they are really slow.
I understand you want to share the work to more than one system, make sense.

Cheers, mib

This webpage here has some benchmarks of both the i7 5820k and the FX 8320:

For CineBench the FX 8320 scores 6.45 while the i7 5820K scores 10.78, so the i7 is 67% faster.
In FryBench the FX 8320 takes 5m39s while the i7 5820k takes 3m21s, so the FX is 68% slower.

This comparison also includes multi threaded benchmark comparisons, which are most important to Cycles.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-vs-AMD-FX-8350/2579vs1489

Thus blender uses the 12 threads in intel 6 core or only the 6 cores to render?

Yes I also realized that Intel ones cost me less electricity. Even now my electricity bill is average ok when I am running 2 refrigerators, 3 AC and even a Microwave plus fans and lights with my workstation which runs at least 12 hrs a day.

Render nodes will be only used when I am final rendering but might run for days, so that will save me a lot of money.

Also if I go with the 6 core processors, buying just 2 will give me 24 threads, good enough for now.

Thanks will go through it.

Blender will use all 12 threads, I did find when testing a i7 4790k, that using 1 thread (in Cycles) as 100%, I got ~380% when using 4 threads, and ~510% when using 8 threads, so I got the ‘equivalent’ of 5 physical cores with 4 cores + hyperthreading.

Thanks that will help.

It will use 12 threads to render, I found using 8 threads on my quad core had the equivalent speed of 5 physical cores.

For me, in the described setup I would pay an extra $80.50/year electricity if rendering 50 days/year, but I believe electricity in Australia is quite expensive ($AUD 0.23/kwh)

Is there some way to attach a meter to the cpus, so I can know exactly what their power consumption is per month?

I am not sure what kind of meter is available for such readings.

Not that I know. I know you can get the approx Watt usage from Intel CPU’s using CPU-Z, been a while since I used it for an AMD CPU.

The data I used was from a benchmark comparison site on total system power draw… this site has the CineBench results as well as the system power draw during the benchmark: