NETWORKING ADVICE
Bob,
The most important aspects of such an environment include speed/ram/
and system stability. If the network is designed to be a "rendering"
farm then nothing else really matters. You'll need a small hard disk
in each box to facilitate having the R3 executables on each machine,
but beyond that, you don't need anything else.
In fact the best thing to do if you're going to set up such a network
specifically for rendering, then I'd say avoid buying monitors and
keyboards and just use a swithbox tying every ten systems into a
single monitor and keyboard. That'll leave you more money for
motherboards and ram. We rackmount everything, bring the systems on
line, and then dump everything to a network cue. It's fast, little or
no maintenance, and unbelievably stable. (As in NEVER a single
problem).
Additionally, if you're about to buy systems, check out the Pentiums!
We've got a number of them running and our performance increases are
FAR beyond what some members have reported. Not to mention that while
everyone talks about bus throughput for seeing great things on screen,
if you're interested in speed, you're looking for sheer processing
power, and periphials are not a major factor. You can find Pentium
Boards for around $1500 and they are stable and really fly in the
rendering world. I've had boards from 5 different manufacturers
running for a couple of months now, and haven't had a single problem.
Hope I managed to answer your question, I just got up.
Paul