Render Farm and SLI?...

[CaptCarty]

My question is, I am thinking of making a 3 box render farm, and should I bother with SLI? I have 2 SLI cards (2 different, :( . or does the farm use only the other CPU to render? (sry I know Nothing about RF, and kinda a RF newb)

For my main box, I am running a AMD 5600 2x, other 2 boxes are P4 3.0 SC.
would it be worth it to upgrade my main box to a say duel CPU board and run two 2x 5600/6000 ( this gunna be a low budget upgrade, cause FX is 2 costly atm).

Any feedback will help, :)

[Lightwolf]

The farm only uses the CPU - so you can plunk in the cheapest, slowest video cards you can get your hands on.
However, I'd advise against on-board video that uses your RAM since that will (slightly) decrease access speed to RAM from your CPU.

Cheers,
Mike

[CaptCarty]

tnx for the response. So basically its all CPU intensive and ram? would it be worth investing in a duel CPU Mobo?(controller box) or just run what I have with a duel core that I have now?

[Lightwolf]

tnx for the response. So basically its all CPU intensive and ram? would it be worth investing in a duel CPU Mobo?(controller box) or just run what I have with a duel core that I have now?
Hm, good question. You'll have to make the maths yourself. Add up system prices, estimate how much bang you'll get out of each of them and compare.

Also, no dual AMD boards using Athlon64s, you'll need Opterons for that. A quad core intel CPU might be a decent choice as well.

What is your budget?

I suppose the cheapest way would be to use your P4s as render slaves and then move on from there.

Cheers,
Mike

[3DGFXStudios]

My renderfarm is build out of old used junk with new but cheap cpu's and used mobo's. If you don't have a big budget thats a cheap way to get there.
Also you don't need big harddrives (if you store your output on a network drive) and you can use pci graphics cards for instance. Check Ebay