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(That is, unless you are one of those guys with a closet that doubles as a dry ice fortress of solitude.) Advantages to a desktop processor Overclocking a desktop chip usually comes at the expense of energy efficiency, and you still wonвЂ™t get close to the rendering power of something like a 10- or 12-core Xeon E5 v2. You pay a premium for that energy efficiency, but, if you are planning on getting more of these systems, itВ makes a difference. While a Xeon chip canвЂ™t be overclocked, it will give you more render power per Watt.

If youвЂ™re doing GPU rendering with more than one PCIe x16 card, you will need a Xeon to accommodate all that bandwidth

More PCIe lanes for stuff like link-aggregated Ethernet, USB3, PCI devices, and fast RAID arrays.

Potentially a lot more cores and more cache.

ECC RAM for dependable simulations, if youвЂ™re a scientific user who needs added data insurance.

Most Xeon boards come with dual NICs for Ethernet link aggregation.

Lower power consumption for more rendering power.

You don't need to buy a video card for server motherboards because they have built-in VGA output (yes, VGA).

A Xeon chip is designed to give you a number of things that aren't seen in a desktop processor, and it has certain advantages:

For the build machines I recommend, there are two main routes you can take: a beefy Xeon with lots of cores or a cheaper desktop CPU that is more for the budget-minded. A home-built box should beВ perfectly fine. It just has to render, and it canвЂ™t crash while doing it. We donвЂ™t need sound to work, we donвЂ™t need the latest video drivers, we donвЂ™t need an OpenGL-driven user interface. While I personally wouldnвЂ™t go near a home build for a workstation, weвЂ™re demanding relatively little of our render workhorse. This guide is intended for people who just want to get set up with some added networked power, to maybe learn the basics of Linux and remote administration with ssh, and to understand the foundation of networked rendering and workflows.

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If you are looking to build a room full of HPC nodes and are concerned about heat, performance, reliability, etc.-this guide is not for you. While I'm not an IT guy for Pixar, I've used networked 3D renderers for a number of years and have built some personal render nodes, both Xeon and desktop-chip based.

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If you're not much of a system builder, it's hard to know what CPU to buy, what OS to run, how to set up your host machine to talk to the muscle,В and what, if any, render management software to use. Now, there are a lot of variables and questions to answer for anyone considering this route. And the resulting combo should be much faster than what you would get with a single workstation jacked to the hilt with tons of cores or dual socket CPUs. If you use a 3D renderer that has network rendering support, you can use it on the host machine and the dumb muscleВ to quickly take down render jobs. Instead, I spent a bit of extra money to get another 10-core 3.0GHz Xeon E5 v2 and put that in a machine that will run only during V-Ray for Maya renders.

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I decided to save the $1500 upgrade cost to go from the 8-core E5 v2 that would give me better performance with tasks that couldn't saturate all cores. I opt for the 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon E5 v2 machine because, for anything that doesn't stress more than 8-cores-almost everything but 3D rendering or certain video encoders-the 8-core would perform better than the lower-clocked 12-core. But if you suddenly mustВ get your workstation serviced without warning and have a lot of networked muscle, you can instantly work from aВ laptop and use a render server to keep your efficiency relatively high while your mainВ machine isВ MIA. If you put all your money and CPU cores into one box, you are going to be in a really bad spot if that machine goes down. Dumb muscleВ has one job to do essentially: keep pummeling. After, they go back to sleep and wait for the next call. Work stationsВ are overkill to use as what I call 'dumb muscle.'Дumb muscle machines are like mafia button men: they lie dormant until the boss calls them in for a job and then they go beat the hell out of something-in this case, a set of 3D frames or video composites.

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But a workstation can be too much machine for some things, so often you want to free it up to use for asset production instead of saturating it with render tasks.

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Further Reading A pro with serious workstation needs reviews AppleвЂ™s 2013 Mac ProIn my recent Mac Pro review, I mentioned that a workstation computer (whether from Apple, HP, or Dell) isВ designed to be good at a lot of tasks that are demanding on the CPU and, increasingly, on the GPU.