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I got my Z620 for a bit over $400, but it came with only 1 cpu installed. I didn't care because the motherboard came with 2 slots, and the cpu it came with wasn't the high end one I wanted anyway, so there was additional cost of me getting 2 cpus that could get me up to 32 cores (if memory serves that was about another $200) and just installed them myself. I also bought 64 GB of RMA sticks for another $100, and while that's nowhere near as important as CPU or GPU these days, it does mean I have no stuttering navigating in scenes in the assembly room no matter how complex they may be. Then I added in the Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card, which was another $400 or so. It would have been safer if I had installed Windows 7 Pro, but I didn't know that and went with Windows 10 pro instead. I might roll it back and re install everything with Win7Pro instead in the future if I run into too many problems with Win10.
From my experience (so far), and what others have told me, turning off as many of the server-specific functions in BIOS as possible, particularly hiberation and wake-on-Lan functions, helps with Win 10. Also, if your server has a secondary SATA controller (such as a Marvell), make sure you boot from a drive on the Intel support chip primary SATA controller (C602, C606, etc.). Several folks on forums have reported that they had stability issues with Win 10 that cleared up when they switched from the Marvell controller to the Intel Controller for the boot drive (on the Asrock Rack C602 series).
If I may ask, what memory did you buy?
There is a YouTube video on a Z620 system similar to yours with Win 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Y0Q-ImvZE
There is also one I found handy which deals with BIOS settings for the ASROCK RACK C602 MB series, although I disagree with his statement that you should turn off ECC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_rxg84vVGw&t=183s
I honestly can't remember what type of RAM, other than it was DDDR3 sticks, as that's what the server took. Some no name brand, no doubt lol as I didn't know enough about RAM (still don't actually) to know whether it made much difference. Thanks for the tips about working with Win10, I haven't really had many problems yet but it's good to get ahead of the game.
This tech info is very timely. I ty to keep my work computer and hobby computer completely separate. I've been putting off replacing my old sick dying unit. Lots of great stuff here.
Glad to discuss further if it would be helpful.
I agree w diomede- thanks again to you both (greymom and jonstark) for the details or your journeys. I will likely make more queries after some due-diligence. It's on my near-term roadmap, but I've got some critical-path issues to manage first.
So, nobody has found a way to get more than 100 processes out of 'GRID' licenses? If that's the case, then would you recommend building a beefier xeon machine to max things out, rather than a 'cluster' of smaller machines?
tia,
--ms
I have not tried GRID as yet. Focusing on getting everything built and Win 7 installed and activated while I still can.
I wonder if GIRD has a limitation on the number of cores/threads on a given machine, given the age of the software. I will test that when I can.
I don't think it is limited to the machine, but the overall cores/processors. Someone did test some time ago, but I don't recall who.
I could not find that post either. Oh, well, I will test soon.
I tend to think that's the better approach, make your main machine as beefy as possible with as many cores as possible, just because you'll use it a ton more often than the rest of the render farm (if you're like me at least, lol). There's rarely a situation where I'm rendering and I think it would be better to save the scene, start up all my other servers, then load it the scene up for batch render, then render out with all 100 cores. Since I've got 32 cores in the main machine most of the time I don't even think about it, I just render and it goes quick enough that it never crossed my mind and the render completes before I could have even started up all the other servers anyway.
However that said I haven't done any animation in a good long while. If I were doing animations, then definitely the render farm would be the way to go.
I remember a thread where someone mentioned having a machine with like 96 cores, just a total monster, but they were posting that it wasn't using all the cores, like topping out at 50 or 60 (can't remember exactly). Like you guys though, I don't remember who it was that posted that, or whether they had Grid installed or not.
well I saw one using 96 on here once
it was their work PC and they just tested Carrara on it out of curiosity IIRC
may have been Argus 1000