Anyone own a render farm?
 

Lately, I've been doing a lot of work with 3d Studio Max 5, and my render times have been getting long and longer. I'm on a Cel1.8GHz/512MB, some of the renders are taking upward of 3 hours and I'm not even CLOSE to the completion of the first quarter of this project.

Can anyone suggest a good render farm?

Can anyone recommend a barebones system that could possibly help me with rendering and only set me back as little as possible?

Anyone own a render farm and have sympathy for a poor college student? ;)

-SF

Damn, I wish. That would be so damn cool.

The good news is that an Athlon 2500 is cheap (like $80). Grab one of those and a new mobo, and you are talking $200 for what would be a pretty nice system. I suspect the fact that your processor is a Celeron is limiting it too.

Wouldn't you want to get something a bit more beefy then that celeron ? More ram might help too. Take a look at your motherboard specs and see how fast you can go cpu-wise.

I'm not sure how much of a budget you have, but you could get a new motherboard, processor and memory for around $5-600.

Intel Pentium 4/ 2.8 GHz 533MHz FSB, 512K Cache - Retail $168.00
Intel 875P Chipset Motherboard for Intel Socket 478 CPU, Model "D875PBZLK" -RETAIL $137.00
2xCrucial 184 Pin 512MB ECC DDR PC-3200 - OEM $116.00

Just a suggestion.

I'm thinking Intel is the way to go for Rendering and other similar media creation.

It been my experience that the OC'ing and overall efficiency of AMD stock is more helpful for hard number crunching activities. The simple fact that AMD and associated motherboards seem to be less expensive as a whole helps out a lot too. Sorry to disagree -- I used to be a diehard Intel fan, so it says a lot for me to have switched teams...

For the record, I do a lot of high-level video editing, so I'm no stranger to compilation times.

Get a Mac, that's about the only thing they can do.

But seriously, lose the celeron, 1/2 cache = 2x the time!

Don't get a Mac if you need to use Max or Viz or Rhino or AutoCAD or pretty much anything besides Maya and Bryce.

AMD will give you more bang for the buck.

Realistically, you'd be better off upgrading that Celeron to a P4 and getting some more RAM.

I do all of my Maya rendering on an AMD 2100+ with 512MB or RAM. I used to render on dual 2.8Ghz Xeons w/2GB of RAM. They were fast, but they didn't make rendering on my AMD torture.

The Celeron is what's keeping you at bay. Get ANYTHING but that. I would get some more RAM too.

I've got my 2 barton sys, but if you REALLY want some power for rendering ONLY... get a G5 or something, i'm definately lookin into getting one for my Premier/Vegas work.

Guhhh, I was really hoping that it wouldn't come to this.. ..Yeah, I'm going to start pricing a new system for home.. ..that's about it.

But for now, I have a collegue at school that will be lending me some time on a Dual Xeon system. That should cut some time out.

Damn Celerons... ;)

-SF

Those prices posted above are from newegg.com ;)

One thing to keep in mind that no matter what kind of system you are using, its gonna take a while. Consider this--for the LOTR movies, the Treebeard scenes took 48 hours *per frame* to render, and this was on WETA's ginourmous render farm.

48 hours per frame... ouch!
Isn't it just typical. When I wanted to play with raytracing on my Amiga 500 it just took too long time. Now with a P4 3.2GHz machine and 1GB RAM it STILL takes too long to be fun...

upgrade yous system, 1.8 is not that fast (the celeron is the other problem

also overcloking is your freind for 3dsmax

i over clock 12% (2.53 to 2.85) and i get a 30% performance boost,

takes a 4 3 hour render to 2 hour. get some nice cooling and let her fly.