ShaunDon

Hey fellas!

I'm trying to figure out what's going on with my boss' new workstation as it's tracking VERY far behind our render farm for something that Dell charged us over $3k for four months ago. Significantly more in fact than our render servers cost us when we bought them six months before.

Our render farm is made up of dual processor Opteron 275s (four 2.2ghz cores per node) and 4GB of RAM.

The Dell workstation is a dual processor Xeon 5050 (four 3.0ghz cores) and 4GB of RAM.

Now here's the kicker -- I've got a scene I'm rendering which is a pretty intensive VRay scene, very high use of high-poly proxies, that I'm rendering without any GI. Our farm servers range between 20 and 30 minutes a frame, while this Dell workstation is taking 1 hour and 45 minutes a frame!

When we first got the machine, it was tracking about 20-25% slower than the render farm on one of our standard scenes with GI, but I can't understand this enormous slowdown. Does anyone have any suggestions why this expensive beast is so slow to render?

Thanks!
Shaun

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Shaun Donnelly
TANGRAM 3DS

manta

The Xeon 5050 is based on the netburst Technology, it was never as fast as it appeared to be on paper, it was very inefficient and was replaced by the "CORE" series of cpu's...

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AJLynn

But the dropoff in speed compared to what it used to do is weird. Check your CPU utilization in Task Manager and your memory utilization as well.

ShaunDon

Yeah, it seems to be just that one job that has the 350% speed loss... it's back on a regular exterior animation now with GI and is tacking 20% slower.

We're just a little pissed off that Dell sold such an underwhelming performer for $3300 when we bought servers that consistently outpace it for $2800 back in June. I mean, it does have a workstation graphics card, but it's not THAT good...

Oh well. Didn't know that was such a crap proc. Good to know, the boss is gonna be pissed we didn't research that better. ;-)

Thanks,
Shaun

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Shaun Donnelly
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AJLynn

Yeah, you got rogered good on that one. While Opterons were out and Core-based chips weren't, AMD had a pretty good edge over Intel and Dell was an Intel-only company. (They started selling AMDs right before Intel took back the lead - horrible timing.)

alex3d

my experience with "supercomputers" (more than 2.5k) is this: at the end the best is to lease everything for a year, maybe to years contract. if you buy you are loosing a lottttt. computer's world is going too fast to buy something, if you have the knowledge to build your own renderfarm piece by piece, do it.
at the end is cheaper than lease, but if you are thinking in buy retail, hp, dell, etc, remember those guys are hungry for your money.

my experience with dell sistems and slow performance: low capacity hard drives, they build always with those funny 10 gigs scsii hard drives, after 2 or 3 users in the same sistem the temp files full your hard drive. comp performance go down 50% in everything
check it out
good luck

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thatch

I had a problem a while back with certain machines running much slower than others, it was due to data that was written to the 3dsmax.ini file at some point, i fixed the problem by replacing the file with a version from a fresh install or from a working machine, i was using Max 7 at the time so may not work in your case but worth a try.

Heres the original post http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/17875-...rendering.html

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moshenko

Just for kicks, see if that particular machine has the Bitmap Pager set in Max. if it does, remove all of the relevant lines in the 3dsmax.ini file and try another render. You have no idea how many times the Bitmap Pager has cropped up as the cause of VRay rendering slowdowns in my office. It won't make up for the inherent lacklustre performance of the 50xx series, but it may resolve issues in some of your particular scenes.

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ShaunDon

Thanks for the ideas, guys, I'll check on those issues. We're also way overdue for an upgrade to max9 -- I'm being overly cautious this time around until we know what all the quirks are with running 64bit. Hopefully that upgrade will see some improvement as all our workstations and servers are now 64bit.

We actually bought this one Dell as a trial, up until now we've Newegg'ed all our parts and assembled the machines on our own. It's saved a lot of cash since the PC manufacturers always gouge us users who need raw performance. The only drawback is that if and when something goes wrong with the machines, it's on the production staff to fix the problem, which is never convenient when it happens. We'd hoped having a warranty would be worth it, but unfortunately looking at the machine's performance we've already lost out on the deal.

Thanks!
Shaun

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Shaun Donnelly
TANGRAM 3DS