Hi Everyone,
I am a new octane user and relatively new to CG in general. Spent a lot of my professional life in photography and now I am branching off into CG and Octane rendering. PC user at birth, switched to apple 15 years ago... now things are pretty uncertain from apple for the high end.
I am at the point where I need to build something... anything really that can get my render speeds faster so animations can run in the background during the day and overnight. I would love a headless box that is just a render farm / data management box. This means it could be PC or Mac. I am not averse to switching my whole setup over to PC with some macs attached to the network as workstations. Before I dive into PC I want to exhaust my options on mac. This also means I'm basically starting from nothing and want to build everything the right way first. I used to build PC's as a kid but haven't in awhile, it's not extremely scary to me.
I currently have 2 mac pros. They are a 3,1 and 5,1. The 5,1 has a flashed 780 6gb and 12 cores, 96gb ram in it and that's what I have been testing octane with.
I'm looking at 980ti / 1070 / 1080 (all hybrids) for the GPUs
I have run through a lot of possible options on the forums and here is my current understanding of what options are available:
1. GPU expansion for mac = limited by macOS to 3 GPUs ( or is it 4? ) and expensive ( not a great option considering my machines don't even have native usb3 ports )
2. GPU Cluster via amfeltec = interesting/affordable though again limited by macOS / seems like a good expansion for existing PC
3. Lightweight multi-GPU network render slave PC = does anyone do this? would love to know more if so. i.e. a box of GPUs that has windows / octane installed and that is all it is. does all hardware have to be tops to make this work well?
4. New multi-GPU PC workstation = most bang for buck, the downside for me is switching OS. I would have to switch up c4d licenses and also lose speed from familiarity with macOS
5. Rental / cloud farms = good if you are in full production but why not build your own server, way too expensive for learning and testing.
I know this is covered well in some areas already on this site but there is not a whole lot of resolution around the idea except to buy a PC / switch to PC. I agree that is a great option, I am overly exhaustive about this and looking for all other solutions before I buy things.
If I could buy a headless 3gpu box and 2nd license for octane I would be done already. Apple peripherals are notoriously pricey.
I am all ears for any other creative solutions to getting an octane score that is around 300-500 in a single box as a slave renderer in 2k or less
Thank you for any advice and help, and gaps in my understanding of the GPU rendering landscape or PC hardware.