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Render Farm Build

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superfluido:
Hello Everyone, and thanks for your help.

I am now finally convinced to build my own render farm. I need more render power and online render farms are not an option due to long waiting lines (many still renders, so quick to process, but I need them fast), lack of control and random issues I always seem to come by.

I am happily rendering on Corona for C4D on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra 128 GB ram with no complaints: the machine is powerful yet super silent and sits quietly on my desk. Still, I need to speed up the workflow, thus the render farm.

A few dumb questions, to whom it has more experience in the field that I do:
_Do render nodes need to be as powerful as the main machine? (Probably not)
_Sometimes I find to be short on ram due to very high-poly-count scenes, does that mean that all the render nodes should also have 128GB of ram? (It seems quite unreasonable)
_Is it better to buy a big and powerful (and expensive) machine like a TR 5995 with lots of ram, or is it fine to have many cheaper render nodes?
_It seems that the new M2 Mac Mini has quite a good price to performance ratio and packs everything I need to set up the render farm. Is it a stupid idea to buy 10 Mac Minis instead of one big machine? Or do I need more ram on every unit?
_Do I need to move all my resources and assets to a dedicated server?
_What would you do with a budget of 5 to 10k?

Any suggestions? Thank you All :)

TomG:
Some answers (but not all :) )

_Do render nodes need to be as powerful as the main machine? (Probably not)
They can be as powerful, more powerful, less powerful - it's all good.

_Sometimes I find to be short on ram due to very high-poly-count scenes, does that mean that all the render nodes should also have 128GB of ram? (It seems quite unreasonable)
Yes, the RAM on each machine will need to be able to handle the scene. While there may technically be some savings from not having the full GUI of the DCC open, having less other software running, etc. it is safest to assume that if your scene wouldn't work on 64GB on your main machine and needs 128GB, then the render nodes will also need 128GB (else they won't be able to render the scene).

_Is it better to buy a big and powerful (and expensive) machine like a TR 5995 with lots of ram, or is it fine to have many cheaper render nodes?
Again, either works. It may affect how things are "delivered" - e.g. say Machine A, or two Machine Bs which are half the power. If Machine A would deliver one frame in 1 minute for an animation, then the other option will see you waiting for 2 minutes before you see any final result, BUT it will be 2 frames and not one. It's never entirely accurate, but you can as a general guideline "add up" the overall power of all the machines combined. That said note that if you get into a lot of machines, you may start running into network issues with all the traffic, and would need to look into that as another aspect :)

CambridgeCreative:
Hi Superfluido

I would add to TomG's resonse that you also need to consider licencing costs for both Cinema 4D and Corona and also power consumption. Cinema has 5 node licences as standard but Corona comes with one, then extra costs start at one node licence and then jumps to a package for 5...... I worked in an office 3 years ago with 5 render nodes that were old and not very powerful but you got a sense of burning through lots of frames, but actually the rendering took a long time. Now in my current office we have two PCs, one a Ryzen 9 5800X 64GB RAM (that i use to model on) and the other a Threadripper 3880X 128GB RAM (used just for rendering) and I would rate this setup superior.

CambridgeCreative:
One other thing, I also find that the delay in the threadripper downloading assets and then starting rendering can offset its speed that it can render frames in small/uncomplicated animations compared to the speed of the server. My PCs mentioned above are hardwired together with crossover cables, so asset transfers are as quick as I can get. I haven't tried connecting another Ryzen 9 as a render client to see if that starts rendering quicker, but it might be something to consider.

As a note also, I have noticed the Threadripper is massively quicker than the Ryzen 9 as a client on animations with polycounts over 5 million.

superfluido:
Wow, super! Thanks a lot for the replies – I'll probably go with one powerful build (Threadripper 3990 or 5995 with lots of ram, just to be sure) so that in case I need more I can just (with time) side another machine in parallel. It seems also easier to maintain, plus, as you said, it counts as one node only and maybe it could function as a server too. Let's see!

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