AMD Phenom II & Intel Core i7 Renderfarm

Hi Everyone,

I am currently using an I7 system with 9GB of ddr3 ram for 3d rendering and video editing/motion graphics with AE. Since 3d & HD video rendering takes alot of time I was thinking about setting up a render farm with 2 or 3 systems to start with. My problem is that to build 3 I7 systems with around 6 gb ram each it will cost me around 600 sterling each and If I go for a Phenom System it will just cost me around 350 sterling a system. My question is: since my workstation is i7 based will there be any flicker in the final renders if I set up a render farm based on AMD Phenom Cpus? Because I heard that since AMD & Intel's architecture differs from one another It can be that they will render the pictures differently.

Any light on this question will surely help me alot!!:)

Thanks in advance

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Originally Posted by radiogical

Hi Everyone,

I am currently using an I7 system with 9GB of ddr3 ram for 3d rendering and video editing/motion graphics with AE. Since 3d & HD video rendering takes alot of time I was thinking about setting up a render farm with 2 or 3 systems to start with. My problem is that to build 3 I7 systems with around 6 gb ram each it will cost me around 600 sterling each and If I go for a Phenom System it will just cost me around 350 sterling a system. My question is: since my workstation is i7 based will there be any flicker in the final renders if I set up a render farm based on AMD Phenom Cpus? Because I heard that since AMD & Intel's architecture differs from one another It can be that they will render the pictures differently.

Any light on this question will surely help me alot!!:)

Thanks in advance

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Logically there should be no flicker but I remember several benchmarking sites used to measure final file size between AMD and Intel processors when using WinRAR/WInzip and they did get slightly different file sizes.
I don't know the answer but one way to avoid it being a problem is to have the AMD systems render one scene and the intel system render another scene.

Really not the guy to ask about render farms, but have you considered using core i5 750 rather than the i7. surely its practically the same architecture, but should allow you to bring the price down per node.

thanks for the reply... an i5 node will cost me slightly more than an AMD node.. however after comparing the benchmarks of the two CPUs I came to the conclusion that they are at the same level.. so I think I go for the i5 road to be 100% compatible.. since I want to do parallel rendering instead of each CPU rendering a single frame.

Thanks very much
Chris

Wouldnt it be better to sell your i7 and go for a dual xeon set up?

You mean your actually using all 8 hardware threads availble to you in oyur i7 system :surprised:

But as mentioned with the Xeon set up... couldn't you just get a Xeon board and stick another i7 920 in there, as far as i know the standard i7 9xx series work fine in the dual-socket Xeon boards.

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

You mean your actually using all 8 hardware threads availble to you in oyur i7 system :surprised:

But as mentioned with the Xeon set up... couldn't you just get a Xeon board and stick another i7 920 in there, as far as i know the standard i7 9xx series work fine in the dual-socket Xeon boards.

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core i7's only have 1 QPI link so they can only work in uniprocessor configurations. for dual cpu to work you need at least 2 QPI link iirc

Yeah you would definitly need proper xeon i7s but i believe you can use your current Ram with some xeon boards so saving you some money.

What software do you use for 3d & HD video rendering? Another thing you could look at is GPU acceleration. Nvidia tesla c1060 cards look very interesting and would probably be alot faster then 2 or 3 seperate pcs.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/product..._c1060_us.html

about the i7 working on a dual xeon board im not sure.. because I am not sure if the 5500 chipset from intel supports the desktop i&7 (in my case the 920) and even money wise it will be much more expensive then building a scalable renderfarm .. something like the helmer (google helmer renderfarm) coz I can't post any links yet

The guy is right about the dual QPI's on the Xeon series. If you were to go the dual socket route you'd still be able to use your current RAM etc all while having 16 hardware threads in one case :D