I’ve recently been given the task to put together a rendering machine for the 3DS Max designers at work. They need a computer/server to run Backburner on.
Backburner is a program that runs on a separate computer from the one used to design the scene, possibly accross several computers. This backburner computer then renders jobs that have been put in its queue and returns them to the user. The reason this is good is that the computer used to design the scene or movie is not completly bogged down and made useless while rendering (rendering takes ALOT of power). The user can continue working on other things while the scene renders.
I spent the last few days researching on what makes the best backburner machine and simply put; ram, and cores is where it’s at.
The task is then to get the most processor power and RAM out of as little money as possible. They at this stage did not want to work with multiple computers.
So.. one bad ass computer in the making..
I also read in several places that the new i7 architecture was kick ass in rendering situations, so I was pretty sure i wanted that. After checking out benchmarks #1 and #2 I was certain i7 was right for the job.
Lower is better (seconds to render the job)
The problem with the standard consumer i7 chip is that there can only be one per motherboard and we want MORE. This is however not a problem for the Xeon processors. After much googling I found that the Xeon 55xx series is an i7 chip with an added module that makes it able to work in multi processor enviroments. I decided for 2 x XEON 5520 @ 2.25Ghz
Next step was finding a motherboard that could house these beasts of processors. It turns out that right now there aren’t that many to choose from because of the chip being so new on the market. I did however find a few candidates, but finally settled for; ASUS Z8PE-D18.
This motherboard was perfect for the processors, and it can have up to 144GB(!) of RAM, plus it was made by ASUS, a name I trust and use in most my computers.
The next step was RAM, and this was a rather easy step. My general rule for RAM is always buy as fast and as much as you can afford, and then some. Which ended up being 24GB of Crucial DDR3 1066MHz 12GB KIT, CL7, ECC memory, which is in total 6 sticks of 4Gb. It will have to do for now, more can always be added later.
The next step was finding a power source and case for this thing. For a few different reasons (such as we werent sure where we were going to put it) we did not want a rack mounted server. Since the motherboards form factor is SSI EEB 3.61 (made for rack servers) there werent alot of options for what kind of case we could have for it. Fortunately a cooperation between Cooler Master and nVidia has produced a very nice case, which also has a pre-mounted power source.
It dosent look very server like but I’m happy enough 
Next I went looking for hard drives. These processors are going to need to be fed quite a bit of data to keep them running at max so I’m going to go for 2x Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB, 10000 RPM disks, and mount them in striped RAID 0 (splits the data in two and reads and writes to both disks at once, really fast but if one disk crashes all data is lost).
Also going to put a WD 1TB Black Edition in there to have some place to store the rendered scenes.
Finally I also ordered 4x Nexus 120mm Real Silent Fan’s. Just to make sure we can keep temperatures in check.
Due to the non consumer type of things these items are they were not in stock (specifically the motherboard was not) at any of the places I usually buy computer hardware at, so delivery will take about two weeks. I’ll post more pictures when I get the stuff and try to put it together.
The nick name of the machine is going to be kraken because its just a monster of a computer…
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- the ‘Kraken’ job
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Thanks for posting about this, I would like to read more about this topic. I work with 3D Studio myself and we are about to start using backburner at our office as well.
Going to be interesting to se what kind of performance you can get out of it!
The only thing i can say is: I want that beast just by my self!
[...] for the Kraken computer I was going to build for Hags, komplett.se was unable to deliver the parts in time so that [...]
[...] This is a continuation or completion of the post ‘the kraken build‘. [...]