Best option for budget rendering

[Bobbysmith05]

I'm looking to get a system that can render 1080 frames for animation in a reasonable time frame. I currently have an i5 8gb PC and that is very slow for rendering.

I have a limited budget to upgrade. I'm looking to buy a workstation to add to my existing one and use distributed rendering.  I have a choice of either buying two older units such as this below

Rackmounted HP Z600 Workstation, Dual Xeon E5530 2.40Ghz, 8GB DDR3 Ram, 1TB WD SATA HDD, ATI FirePro W7000 4GB Graphics Card, DVD Multi Player, Win 7 COA with Windows 10 Pro 1809 installed with all drivers and updates

Or one system that's more expensive such as this one below

Dual (two) Intel Xeon X5680 3.7GHz Turbo Processors - with 12 physical / 24 logical cores.
Huge 96gb (ninety six gigabytes) Samsung RAM (12 x 8GB).

120GB SSD for Operating System (Windows 7 installed) + Two High Speed (15K) 300GB SAS Drives in raid 1 (duplicates and distributes data evenly to both SAS drives

 Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6gb (Factory Over Clocked) 'Windforce' triple fan Graphics Card complete as new

I don't know much about computers outside of the software so Which would b better?

 2x HP Z600 Workstation, Dual Xeon E5530 for £250 each

Or

This one with dual Xeon X5680 3.7GHz Turbo Processors and 96Gb of RAM for £950

What do you think would be the fastest rendering?
Cheers

 

[TomG]

If you don't know much about computers, I'd likely avoid a rackmount, they are different kind of beasts that do need more knowledge of how they work (I contemplated getting one at one point, but went with a regular workstation instead).

[Bobbysmith05]

Ok thanks on the listing it just looks like a regular hp z600  what exactly is the difference with a rack mount?

[TomG]

Rackmounts may have differences in software licensing, including Windows, and different drivers. This may be particularly true where you have more than 2 processors in them. They usually don't have all the USB and other connections that a Workstation comes with (since they aren't designed for someone to sit and use them, and are expected to only be accessed remotely - whereas a workstation can have someone sat at it and using it, as well as being accessed remotely). They may have different power consumption and cooling needs. The parts that fit them may be non-standard, since they aren't a standard case size.

In general, they are just a different, more technical kind of beast, and much more single-purpose than a standalone workstation. They are what render farms use of course, so if you are happy handling the differences and understanding them, they have benefits (less space, designed specifically to be used as data processing nodes that no-one is sat at, can support crazy numbers of processors like 4 or 8 in one rack, can have crazy numbers of hard drives like 8 or 12, etc.)

[Mladen]

If you are freelancer in home office, rack machines are definitely not what you want, it's too loud and tricky to maintain or upgrade as TomG allready point out.
Also, keep in mind that those Xeons X5680 are old 6/12 CPUs, slower than actual mainstream CPUs like i7 or R7. Xeon E5530 is even worse, it's only 4/8 @2,4GHz.
96GB of RAM looks tempting but it's old DDR3 RAM, slower then actual DDR4.

If you don't need more than 64GB (which is limitations on mainstream platforms) go for two cheap Ryzen 7 render-slaves with older R7 1700 (it's under 150€ now), or just one machine for start if budget is really tight. You don't need some high-end motherboard, some in 100€ range would be just fine (older B350 chipset) and some better CPU cooler (50-60€ range) if you want to overclock. Prices of RAM is finally drops so you can find 2x16GB kits for 250€ and add another one when you can. It's cheap, flexilble, ordinary build that you can upgrade or could easy sell when you don't need it any more.

Second option is, of course, Threadripper 1950X but it's much over budget (X399 mobos are expensive and need 4 sticks kit of RAM).

Third option is, if you can wait few months, new gen of Ryzen (still rumors, but 12/24 models are almost sure thing, with even 16/32 possible).
(On Computex, May 27th, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD will probably reveal more details and specs).

[Bobbysmith05]

Would this be a good option? My budget is less than £1000 ideally less than £700 I just want the fastest for the money.

Refurbished Lenovo IdeaCentre 720 Ryzen 7 1700 8GB 2TB RX 550 Windows 10 Desktop PC

It has the Ryzen CPU.

What is the latest Xeon processor available? E7? Maybe I can get a more modern second hand Xeon machine.

[Bobbysmith05]

https://www.europc.co.uk/dell-precision-5820-tower-workstation-intel-xeon-w-2123-16gb-ram-256gb-ssd-1gb-nvidia-nvs-310-dell-3-yr-wty-129027.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwhbHlBRAMEiwAoDA341OHwPrB4nAT3AlKxUIkPYXl1Pi_oA1NSJVu_OFsrDU8cAasc3TzqBoCFzIQAvD_BwE

Is this a good option?

I can't for the life of me figure out which Xeon is new and old the naming dosnt seem to make any sense to me.

[TomG]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors will give you the list of Xeons in timeline order to see which is newer - of course sometimes better versions of a previous generation may be faster than less good versions of the next generation, so the https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark/results is always useful to look up how a processor performs with Corona.

[Mladen]

Would this be a good option? My budget is less than £1000 ideally less than £700 I just want the fastest for the money.
Refurbished Lenovo IdeaCentre 720 Ryzen 7 1700 8GB 2TB RX 550 Windows 10 Desktop PC
It has the Ryzen CPU.

Depends on price ... cheap GPU (RX550) is ok for render-slave, but you need more RAM.
Also, brand machines (like Dell, HP, Lenovo) have some custom parts which you can't replace or upgrade with usual stuff from local computer store.