GPU's vs. Render Farm

[aggiechase37]

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?

[gabrielefx]

if you are going to use Octane you don't need anymore a renderfarm.
I got 7 dual Xeon 3.2 Ghz workstations switched off for 4 years when I built my first 4xgpus machine.
I do all my work with 3 quad gpus workstations with a total of 12 GTX graphic boards.
To do render previews I use all the gpus because the data transfer between machines runs at the speed of light.
Octane render is 10 years beyond Vray distributed render technology.
Regarding your hardware configuration I suggest you an external NAS where you backbup your dailies (Synology)
My machines have 2 mirrored ssd boot disks and 2 raid0 ssd disks for projects and textures.

regards

[prehabitat]

Octane render is 10 years beyond Vray distributed ...

Good hearing that from someone of your calibre Gabriel

[glimpse]

Powerfull workstation can house up to 7-8GPUs - that's insane considering it's simple system with little to no bottlenecks, but You need capab le board & some workt to make this happen.

New boards (Z97, X99) can leverage NVMe drives that give You 3-4x speeds than typical SSD..

overall if You're looking into GPU rendering - build Your self single good system & see how that goes,..network rendering leverages up to 12GPU, but it's worth to throw as much as You can into single system (as You save on licences & minimise bottlenecks).

I'd say leave Your part of Your render farm for CPU bount projects if You're still on software that does not support GPU acceleration..but try selling some of nodes if You can get good price.

[aggiechase37]

Can you guys give any feedback on which would be faster to render? 11 2p nodes and C4D physical render versus a single machine with 2-3 titan x on Octane?

[indexofrefraction]

if you are going to use Octane you don't need anymore a renderfarm.
I got 7 dual Xeon 3.2 Ghz workstations switched off for 4 years when I built my first 4xgpus machine.
I do all my work with 3 quad gpus workstations with a total of 12 GTX graphic boards.
To do render previews I use all the gpus because the data transfer between machines runs at the speed of light.
Octane render is 10 years beyond Vray distributed render technology.

i think you exagerate here a bit which might give false hopes. things just depend on what kind of jobs you need to do. if you're into product design shots or not too memory intensive exteriors, octane is your thing, better and faster than anything. if you do really heavy scenes (especially interiors) vray is working better for me. (or is just the only solution)
its incredible how powerful octane became, but its not always the tool of choice in my experience.