Render Farm Specification Help

[Suren]

Hi guys!
I try to find good render farm specification and equipment description which I will use in my work.
I'm designer, use 3Ds Max and don't understand how to choose best solution for my render farm.
In this I'm working on PC with Ryzen 7 1700 and it's perfomance not enough.

I have budget 10k $, Please help me.

[Juraj]

You can buy Threadripper 2990WX as your workstation, it's 4 times faster than your current Ryzen.

2990WX + 64GB ram + 1tb SSD  + High end GPU + Everything =<5k $

You can then buy another without some fancy stuff needed for workstation for well under 4k. The total would give you 8 times faster rendering times than you have now.

Alternatively, you can buy unofficial grey-market xeons for the second rendering node (but not WS), but it's not for beginner and you can't re-purpose it meaningfully as workstation should you need to do so (your PC breaks down, your studio gets another colleague,etc.. ).
I don't suggest this route to you, I am just writing it here before some smart-ass comes and mentions it as the only correct solution.

[Vuk]

Hello, you haven't said in what environment you will use this "farm"? Are you a freelancer/single user or will there be more people accessing this farm like a studio environment?

From what you wrote I understand you work now on a Ryzen 1700? If you indeed are a single user/freelancer I would not suggest investing all your budget in building a rendering farm. If I was in your place I'd rather invest in a more powerful workstation since 90% of your time you will be rendering interactive and you will have more use of a powerful workstation + some nodes then your current machine + more nodes. With 10k depending on the market where you buy your stuff you could have 5k left for a 32 core 2990wx and  2 rendering nodes for the other 5k, for example 2x dual 24C Xeon Platinums from Ebay. You could even get 3 of those but then you would need to go for something less powerful as your main horse. Something like a 1950x/2950x even which is still more then double the performance of your current 1700 Ryzen pc.

On the other hand if you just want to invest this money in a farm then you could get 4x dual 24C Xeon Platinums with 32gb ram each or 3x with 64gb each. Again this is just pure speculation since I don't know where you buy your equipment and what are the prices in your country.

Side note for all those freelancers out there asking if they should build a rendering farm. For low-end rendering farm you need at least 15-20k$. For someone who is just starting that's a huge investment and I would always advise to build a good workstation first. If you are doing animation heavy work you would need even more then the 15-20k... Recently a friend of mine who is a freelancer told me about current online render farm service pricing and I was astonished how cheap they are now.
I won't mention any names since I am not promoting anyone but for all you out there who plan to invest in a farm take a look first on the online prices you won't believe how cheap they are lately.
All of a sudden the 15-20k you planed to invest can serve you well over 3-4 years of online rendering while your equipment value over that time span can go as low as 30% of the initial investment... So think about it well!

[Juraj]

Render farms are cheaper lately, what else can they do with all the GPU renderers getting foothold :- ).

I was heavy Rebus user, but for me local render farm brings further efficiency by rendering even previews quickly and with high-quality. I render preview at 4k, down-res to 2k and send client a superior looking image. The time it takes is still faster then sending it off to farm unless I want to pay the premium price for instant start in queue.
But even with 200 physical cores (400 HT) I still render overnight my biggest stills... Corona can quite slow.

[Suren]

You can buy Threadripper 2990WX as your workstation, it's 4 times faster than your current Ryzen.

2990WX + 64GB ram + 1tb SSD  + High end GPU + Everything =<5k $

You can then buy another without some fancy stuff needed for workstation for well under 4k. The total would give you 8 times faster rendering times than you have now.

Alternatively, you can buy unofficial grey-market xeons for the second rendering node (but not WS), but it's not for beginner and you can't re-purpose it meaningfully as workstation should you need to do so (your PC breaks down, your studio gets another colleague,etc.. ).
I don't suggest this route to you, I am just writing it here before some smart-ass comes and mentions it as the only correct solution.

Thank you for your answer. Can I use 2990WX + 64GB ram + 1tb SSD  + High end GPU new RTX 2080? would it give me X times faster rendering?

[Juraj]

Only the CPU part would increase your rendering times. So workstation + Nodes.

Choice of GPU depends how much you're also gonna do GPU rendering (Fstorm, Vray-GPU, Unreal4 engine,..) and how big are you scenes (3dsMax viewport requires a lot of VRAM, for example, my scenes need often 10 GB +/- Vram, so GPUs with 8GB like 1070/1080/2080 are not enough and I need Titan/1080ti/2080ti which have 11/12GB Vram.

So if you only going to do 3dsMax/Corona, get 1080ti for the 11GB Vram. 3dsMax viewport can be very freezy/laggy when it runs out of memory.
If you also gonna do GPU rendering in future, get RTX 2080/2080ti. The latter is super expensive.

[Suren]

Only the CPU part would increase your rendering times. So workstation + Nodes.

Choice of GPU depends how much you're also gonna do GPU rendering (Fstorm, Vray-GPU, Unreal4 engine,..) and how big are you scenes (3dsMax viewport requires a lot of VRAM, for example, my scenes need often 10 GB +/- Vram, so GPUs with 8GB like 1070/1080/2080 are not enough and I need Titan/1080ti/2080ti which have 11/12GB Vram.

So if you only going to do 3dsMax/Corona, get 1080ti for the 11GB Vram. 3dsMax viewport can be very freezy/laggy when it runs out of memory.
If you also gonna do GPU rendering in future, get RTX 2080/2080ti. The latter is super expensive.

V_1 = 14k $
intel xeon gold 6148
intel xeon gold 6148
asus ws c621e sage
asus gtx 1080ti strix
kingston ecc reg 192gb 2666mhz (32*6)
wd blue 2tb ssd
wd blue 2tb ssd
wd black 1tb m.2 ssd
toshiba x300 6tb
toshiba x300 6tb
cooler master v1200w
cooler master case cosmos II
Noctua NH-U14S DX-3647
Noctua NH-U14S DX-3647

V_2 = 9k $
intel xeon gold 5115
intel xeon gold 5115
asus ws c621e sage
asus gtx 1080ti strix
kingston ecc reg 128gb 2666mhz (32*4)
wd blue 2tb ssd
wd black 1tb m.2 ssd
toshiba x300 6tb
toshiba x300 6tb
cooler master v1200w
cooler master case cosmos II
Noctua NH-U14S DX-3647
Noctua NH-U14S DX-3647
What you can say about this variants? One IT company prepossessed this variants.

[Juraj]

Well, as you can see it's lot more money, esp. when buying official Xeons. I don't know whose budget this is, if it's your company, it's their call :- ).

Both those would be slower than 2990WX in every aspect.