https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3438&p=41145#p41145 ----------------------------------- GrouchoCaesar Sunday, 15 March 2009, 07:05 AM Re: The Twelve Tasks Of Grouchales ----------------------------------- Number 7 TARA Number 8 HARMONY Number 9 FAITH March 13th 2009, 6:40PM Call me Old McDonald, 'cos I got me a farm. Render farm, that is... I usually have issues with buying name-brand PCs, and if you read the previous post again you'll know why. But a web review of the NEC Powermate X8820 caught my eye, so I bought one, tried it out for a little while, and was so impressed I picked up two more. Not wanting to go any more nuts on the budget that I had to, these two were factory-refurbished ex-demo machines direct from NEC Australia. These are extremely solid, well-constructed machines. You could rupture yourself picking up one if you are not careful. They come with Intel Core 2 Quad processors, oodles of RAM, a decent budget video card and a half-Terabyte of storage on each. And with Gigabit Ethernet onboard, they are perfect for moving and processing large amounts of CGI. I've been slightly brighter than usual when setting up the trio. As I have set aside a small room just for them (so I can air-condition it and keep their operating temperature at optimum) it follows I can save a little money here by using a KVM switch. For those who have never used one before, KVM stands for Keyboard/Video/Mouse - a small box that lets you use the one keyboard, mouse and monitor for multiple PCs at the same time. My particular KVM also allows me to add speaker output for each machine. To know which machine I'm using at a glance, I've replaced the desktop background for each PC with a picture of the Buffy character they are named after. Also, each PC has a different color theme added - Blue for Faith, yellow for Harmony and pink for Tara. (Having done that for them, I've now done it for all my PCs...) The next issue is networking. I've decided that because I have so many PCs and consoles wanting access to network resources - or even the Internet - that I'm going to have to split them into two networks. The first network will be all the laptops and consoles... for which I've bought a 802.11 b/g/n wireless router. The render farm has it's own private network based on a 5-port Gigabit switch, so it is nice and fast. The ports are allocated to Tara, Faith, and Harmony and to my primary workstation affectionately called Willow (more about her next posting...). The fifth port is reserved for a three-terabyte Network Attached Storage box due here next week. Apart from installation and weekly patching, the CGI network does not connect to the Internet. As with all the other new PCs I've installed over the last few days, I've had to remove a bunch of surplus software, but because the Powermate X series are designed as multimedia PC's, I've left some of the Cyberlink stuff on. Everything else is now patched and ready. As for what CGI software I'm going to use... well, as much as I love 3D Studio Max, I think it's time I took a real hard long look at Blender. I've also bought Poser Pro to go on Willow, and own Poser 7 (on Harmony) and Poser 6 (on Anya because she's the only XP desktop machine I have left..). Oh, and here is a funny thing... Faith is not what she claims to be on the box. While setting her up, I noticed that for some reason Faith was going along noticably smoother in general operation. So I checked the Window Experience Index thingy... and guess what? Faith has a better processor than the other two. Turns out that Faith is a downgraded version of Willow - an X9320 with less HDD space and a different burner. Nice bonus... Harmony & Tara's Vital Statistics Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5 Ghz 3 Gb DDR2 RAM Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512Mb 500Gb SATA 7200rpm Western Digital HDD Windows Vista Premium Faith's Vital Statistics Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 Ghz 3 Gb DDR2 RAM Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512Mb 500Gb SATA 7200rpm Western Digital HDD Windows Vista Premium