I know that you guys might be biased towards Octane Render, but please try to stay bipartisan.
A friend gave me his entire server farm. Included are several Dell Power Edge servers, and most seem to have dual xeon processors. Though they look to be all clocked quite low. But there's 11 nodes, and each seems to be 2p systems. So worse case scenario (if they are dual core) I've got 44 cores, or 88 cores best case scenario.
So my question is: what would be a better path for me. I could buy 11 copies of Windows, install C4D team render on each one, and power through my renders on the built in physical renderer, or I could sell these things, use the cash to buy a Octane centric system, and purchase Octane Render with the C4D plugin. Here's the build I would be considering:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/GbhcrH
I'd like to keep my own cost burden down as much as possible, though I don't mind throwing in some cash (and even having to buy 11 copies of Windows is going over $1000 already. I'm not real sure what kind of money I could get for these servers, but they also threw in these huge industrial battery packs to go along with it.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
What would you guys do if you were me?