Ok, Need some advice people...

[WaS!aN]

I am going to paste something I wrote on another board. Now, excuse me if there are errors... Just ignore it. But through reading it. Help me figure out how to go about this.

Basically you have your main computer... Then where ever you wanna put it, you have a rack mount (I plan to build a book shelf, and shield it with aluminum sheets) that hold so many MBs (mother boards) I plan to do 5 boards... Each being Xeon boards (dual procs) with a gigabyte network, or I might go optical fiber between the systems... Which ever is cheaper... From there, you connect them together to a gigabyte switch, when is then connected to your main computer.

Each board will have 2 procs, each being 2.0 GHZ Xeon chips... So basically outta the 5 boards, I will have a total of 10 processors running. When I install Maya, it will auto detect my other computers that are linked and install the basic rendering engine into each of the hard drives that is in each slot of the book shelves. From there, when I complete a model, when I click render, Maya will automatically cut the data up into 5 sections and send each part to each hard drive to be rendered and sent back to my main system to be recompiled back into what you would see... A fully rendered image or animation.

Now, the problem with dual proc boards is that the FSB (Front side bus) isn't keeping up with the processors... right now, there are boards that are 400 DDR FSB. But the Xeon boards are 333 DDR FSB. So in which case, I am thinking of going 5 single proc boards, each having either 1 gb or 2 gb of dual channel memory. My main system will consist of a Raptor drive (10,000 RPM, SATA, 5.3ms seek time) with an external drive that is also connected to a external SATA port, where the large portion of the animation will be held.

Now, through what I wrote, Does anything seem right. Or was I complete wrong in all this? All of this is written from what I just naturally know about computers and putting pieces together to make sense.

[WaS!aN]

When it comes to a rendering farm... I heard Video cards don't do anything while the rendering is being performed. All they are really good for is while you work on your models or world, and then in the finished project (the animation)

I seriously hope to god they don't... Man, don't feel like spending 500 per card just because of the stupid rendering processes...

Oh and if I do go with the single proc boards, I am going to get all intel 800MHZ FSB procs... Probably all being 2.0 or higher...

[John Prophet]

Do you know anyone who has a setup like this? On the website for "maya" etc do they have examples of multicomp type setups?

One thought that comes to mind is that there are tricks to make Athlon Xp's work as MP's...if you could do that you would save a LOT of money over the xeons.

JP