Xbox render farm

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1

ok, silly idea, but…how much would a brand new PIII 733 PC with 64mb of RAM and a 8 Gig HDD cost? Along with Power supply, ethernet and a Geforce3…? Oh, did i meantion a DVD ROM?

Now, assuming that i can get an optmized build (gentoo?) on the xbox which runs at a decent speed (comparable to that of a PC with the same CPU), wouldn’t that be awsome?
http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page

I am not that savvy when it comes to Linux and never owned a console before, but building a rendering farm out of 10 Xbox for $150 each is …just awsome. :o

Oh, and I could play Halo2 occasionally, too. :wink:

2

I know Xbox lacks memory, but 64 is sufficient for low-poly/texture scenes. Plus, there is always virtual memory :expressionless:

3

…which render at the speed of 5 seconds per frame, so whats the render farm for?

…which is 100 times slower than ram, and when renders starts using it, you’ll get the rendering speed of an old 386 processor …only diffrence will be, it’ll cost you 1500$. :slight_smile:

4

but can you add more ram? If you look at the cheep price of the other hardware you would still be ahead quite a bit on cost savings. I’ve had this thought too and would like to know if anybody out there thinks a Xbox render farm is possible.

5

it is possible

it probably isn’t worth the effort, for the cost of two you can build a machine that is more than twice as powerful in nearly every respect

6

That’s a good point. I think the only thing that makes me wonder about it is if the price of xboxes fall dramatically now that the next gen has come out.

7

That’s a good point. I think the only thing that makes me wonder about it is if the price of xboxes fall dramatically now that the next gen has come out.[/quote]

I doubt the price will fall much, but buying a second hand xbox isn’t such a bad idea: it’a cheaper, and you are voiding the warranty anyways.

8

But even if it isn’t worth the effort to build a render farm out of xBoxes, it would still be nice to have just one xbox that can run linux, render, Folding at home, play DVD and musics and run Halo2…all for $150 USD.