QuoteWithout getting into too much personal financial data I'm interested in knowing how you came to your conclusion that it would be cheaper to build your own farm. i9-9900k are coming in at about £2k each so that's a £10k upfront cost plus extras.
i9-9900k incl. mITX mainboard, ram, case and m.2 ssd is roughly ~1000€. I'm assembling everything myself - so no unneeded bells & whistles. After having tweaked a lot of rendering parameters the cost estimation for the PP-Farm still says ~3k€ for 15min CGI in 1080p - this is just the TG4 stuff. Actually I pushed some test animations through PP. My collegue is working with C4D for the buildings/interriour etc. - this has not even been counted in yet. This is only one project - but we are working on some more. Currently these projects don't have external funding - so we are short on money w/ them.
I intend to start out with 1 or 2 machines and will add nodes as needed - but I need to design it for 5 .. 10. For the moment I need to get TG off my video editing machine, since it is unusable when TG is running.
My tests and calculations suggest that 3x i9-9900k roughly equal the compute power of PP at powerlevel 0.8. Everything else is simple algebra
Actually, I compared the farm speed against my current workstation (HP-Z230 i7-4770k) and found that PP@0.8 is about 12times faster. Then I run the TG4 benchmark on my machine and looked it up in the benchmark list for the i9-9900k. Everything else is simple algebra
I did the same for TR2990WX, TR1950X and I-97980XE. Based on compute speed and price the I9-9900k showed the best power-to-cost ratio and has the least power consumption (heat production !).
Rendermanager ? I don't know yet; it depends ... All I know so far is that in a optimal case it should transparently integrate my little local farm and PixelPlow and I don't want to pay subscription costs for the rendermanager - since in this case I'd write my own.
w/ best regards,
Sanaia