Haha Rage, I hope to get enough cash one of these days to build me a system like that. Instead I am usually forced to upgrade a part at a time as my machine needs it.
If you get a chance to read my attachment to my last post, you will see why I made the decision not to ever upgrade piece by piece because, well, as folks find out the hard way, it only breeds trouble.
I used to have to wait a VERY long time to save up enough cash but, in the long run, it was WELL worth the wait
All it takes is one year of saving $125 bucks from every check, A LOT OF PATIENCE, and you'll have $3000
Timing is good too because where I work I "usually" get a yearly raise, and a bonus AND my tax refund all in the same month, so I tend to use that as my year-mark.
As for your render slaves, they are simply OS, Ram(how much), video card? network card and a hard drive right?
Yeah, like I said, I'm NOT a hardware guy so do not take my word for gospel
But my farm boxes are setup like so:
- Simple Xp sp2 install
- Cheap Intel DualCore procs
- 2-4 gigs of cheap Corsair or Gskill ram
- A cheap Seagate 120gig SATA boot drive
- Gigabit network built on the mobo.
- I used to do no video at all, but now I've begun adding cheap GeForce 8500GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCIE @ $67 from Newegg, of corse
If you use a remote terminal to access your slaves, such as VNC or RDP (remote desktop connection), the machine you are using to access your slaves is providing the video to see the desktop of each slave.
NOTE: I have since added videocards to my slaves to handle hardware particle rendering.
So, whenever I got about $300-460 bucks or so, I try and add a new slave
Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com