Building a render node

[atelieryork]

Our gues for the rendernode is 2x X5670 or similar intel xeon procesors with 12threads for each procesor. Those are not tne newest one but the best in price\speed.

16gb or more DDR4 RAM.

The chapest there is 256 GB HDD (Better 256 GB to increase virtual memery in case of trouble with a pagefile)

1 gigabit network card

No gpu.

I love the work you are doing Necro, but you are obsessed with pagefile and low RAM, for some reason. I guess cost. For me I wouldn't build any rendernode machine with less than 32gb ram and that is if my budget was extremely limited. 64gb is much safer and you no longer need to worry about jobs not rendering or falling back to slow pagefile causing delays.

A good, reliable 250/6GB SSD for the OS will be more than enough. Probably 120/8GB would be fine too. You'll be rendering to your main machine anyway, so file storage on the node is probably not a big consideration. Cheapo basic graphics card for output (but make sure it's got display port for future-proofing!). Throw as much money as you can on the processors and lots of RAM, that's my advice to the OP.

[ihabkal]

I agree with 16GB ram I am getting warning messages constantly, 32GB is the new minimum for render nodes.

[subpixelsk]

Thank you guys I am currently looking for some used hardware on local market and would not definitely go into 16gb RAM but into 32gb minimum. So to sum it up - some i7 4770 CPU, 32 or 64gb RAM, and 250gb ssd. Don´t you guys by any chance know what are the limitations of 3ds Max licensing when using render nodes? Is it possible to use same license as on my main workstation?

Thanks

[Fiorentin]

Just curious, how much does one gain in speed with one reder node/slave with the specs mentioned above? I was thinking of building The 500$ render node from the pcfoo site but a bit unsure if it's better to go for one more expensive unit as above or a cheaper one and then add more of those further on.

[Nejc Kilar]

Thank you guys I am currently looking for some used hardware on local market and would not definitely go into 16gb RAM but into 32gb minimum. So to sum it up - some i7 4770 CPU, 32 or 64gb RAM, and 250gb ssd. Don´t you guys by any chance know what are the limitations of 3ds Max licensing when using render nodes? Is it possible to use same license as on my main workstation?

Thanks

I think I've read somewhere that you can run like 999 3ds Max "nodes" on one license. Be sure to double check that though ;)

[Philip kelly]

Can I ask what was the final spec?
I am building render node also, for vray and Corona.....is there a difference?

Thank you

Philip