He Blenderers I run an animation club at my high school (10 members currently) and we have been using pentium 4 desktops to render in cycles for a couple of weeks now and it is SLOW. I have 100$ from the school to spend on equipment for the club and was thinking of some old server hardware. Most in the budget have had 2x quad core xeons, 8gb ddr2 ram. I honestly don’t know if this would be faster or useful, if anyone has any tips or any ideas let me know.
Hi, wich Xeons exactly.
If it based on the Pentium 4 core you get 8x speed of a single Pentium.
Search for Xeon xyz benchmark and compare with Pentium 4.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+3.00GHz
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5506+%40+2.13GHz
Cheers, mib
Might want to start checking with online rendering services. Some of them may offer free (if limited) or low-cost credits to educational users.
Even better if that $100 doesn’t include IT support for that server (or is it just a workstation?).
Hi Foshy
Just wondering, have you tried linking the desktops together? Are you willing to try this? I’m making a free addon that can render in cycles on multiple machines, even for single frames. I’d be willing to support you to get it working if you’d be kind enough to provide feedback.
All it would cost you is a bit of time to set it up. It takes about 20 seconds to install (its a zip file, you install it using user preferences > addons > install from file) on each machine.
You can PM me if you’d like to try it.
You could try using https://bitwrk.net which currently offers free rendering services.
For the tight budget $100 it may also be worth looking at used graphics cards - with some luck a used GTX 760, if not even 960 could be had for that price. Also, if you post your location, maybe some forum members are willing to donate old hardware?