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I guess that's why you can't understand why poeple like to make their kit as quite as possible ;)
Hmm... I recently upgraded and built my system into a new case, with some new hardware. I wonder if I could use my old set up as a kind of render farm? This thread has got the wheels turning now.
With the 1U rack mount servers you'll notice more than a humming noise. They are compact so you can mount several in a rack, and they use small high speed fans to keep everything cooled. Get 3 or 4 in a room, and you need to speak noticibly louder. Server rooms are usually quite loud, and get warm too. We only had about 20 servers, probably 60 hard drives, and 3 or 4 swithces in our little server room, and you had to practically yell to talk, and we had to keep the AC unit on year round (even when below freezing outside). The larger tower cases will be about as loud as a desktop, but the fans will get noticibly louder under extended loads.
No reason in the world why you couldn't. Just install the Carrara Render Node (it's a download available once you buy Carrara) onto your 2nd device, and as long as the 2nd computer is on and connected to your main computer, you can add all the rendering cores of your 2nd computer to the mix, to render out scenes and animations even faster. The only catch is you can only network render in batch queue (which means you have to save your scene, then load it in the batch queue part of the render room, and make sure the render nodes that are available are checked). You'll see the extra render cores from your 2nd computer appear as gray squares alongside the colored and number render cores on your main computer (which I admit I was a tad disappointed in the first time I saw it, I really wanted to see all of the extra render cores have their own color and number too). Especially if you're going to do animations or super big/complex scenes, I think adding another computer (or 2 or 3 or 9 other computers if you have them) will only make the rendering go faster.
The i7 3770 I bought still hasn't come in yet, hopefully it will be in by tomorrow and I'll be able to set it up and add it to the mix, can't wait to see 32 cores rendering away at once...
But I'm already greedy to add the next computer and get above 40 cores. And if I were to get one of these servers with 2 8 core Xeons with multi threading, that would be adding another 32 render cores to the mix at a single stroke!
Server rooms are extremely noise. I am in and out of them all day where I work and in some you need to wear hearing protection as it is so loud.
To set it up is not that hard if all the parts are there. I might suggest that you have them hard wired to a Gigabit Switch to ensure the fastest possible transfer of data to keep things running. i know you can get cheap consumer / small busness 24 port ones for under $100 US.
If you do get a server you should have room to add lots of hard drives to use as your storage as well.
Boss at work said he may have to send a server and some desktops home for me to tinker around with so I know what I will be doing with them.
Being a rock dummer all of my life, and still going strong, I wish now that I'd have worn something to protect my ears over the years. Hmmm... Ears over the years... I could make a song out of that!
But I'm kinda with Jonstark, where the whirring of fans doesn't really seem to bother me. Server room? Yeah... I'd wear headphones if I had to spend any time in there.
My Octa-Core has larger lower rpm fans - intended for less noise - and they really are quite silent compared to the cpu fan which speeds right up and cranks wide open as soon as I launch my renders... I love that! zzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZ!!!!!
I am really quite happy with my render speeds with my Eight Cores at what, just over 3GHz per core... nothing really spectacular - yet most of the computers I see around here are s l o w in comparison. Yeah... I love my machine and am extra proud of this particular build. If I could (and perhaps I will - I haven't looked) find another cpu/motherboard setup like the one I have now, I'd love to have that. I'm sure they won't be hard to find.
And that would certainly be enough speed for me. I actually enjoy using my Speed-Render settings for lights, shaders, and output.
I have an Asus double-socket motherboard with 2 Xeons CPUs for a total of 24 cores. For rendering with Carrara native renderer, it's a dream. I'd rather pay for that then pay thousands and thousands for a car. But that's just me. Just don't ask me what I really paid for this system, though. No. No. No. It's nothing like the numbers mentionned in this thread. I don't think you want to know...
Ebay fooled me for a second.
I saw a dual socket motherboard with 64 gb of ram included and 2 Xeon E5-2670 for something like $120.00 and I lost my mind (that would be 32 rendering cores!). For that price, all I need is a case, power supply and fans, and I'm off to the races. I couldn't believe such a deal...
And then I realized I wasn't looking at the 'buy it now' price, but rather just the 'current bid'. Whoops, fooled me... :) For a second I thought I was seeing one of the greatest deals of all time.
Can I ask what motherboard you went with? I've gone with Asus for my last 3 computers (though all were pre-builds) and all of them are running fine, no complaints, and I'm already planning in my mind's eye what my next computer will be, and that it definitely will be a dual socket, hopefully something with SLI capability so I can put in 2 different Nvidia graphics cards for even better Octane rendering.
I was happy with ASUS. My latest is a Military-Grade (High-End, over-sized capacitors and top-notch quality control) MSI, and I love it. I needed a (then) modern board with the SLI capabilities, all the new various PCI slots, USB 3.0, etc., etc., as well as having high-RAM capabilities - something very important to note when MB shopping. Mine maxes out at 64 GB I think - or is it 32? I have 16GB RAM and never seem to tap it out.
I know that you're interested in Server-class... just thought I'd converse, is all! ;)
My current mb maxes out at 64gb, though it only came with one single stick of 8gb. I increased it up to 32gb, just because. To be honest I really haven't noticed any difference from when it was 8gb :)
I have a server-type motherboard. It's pretty much top-of-the-line: the Z9PE-D8 WS
BTW, SLI will do you no good with Octane. On their site, in the FAQ, OTOY says: "Octane doesn't take advantage of SLI, but it can use multiple video cards for rendering (see above). It is also recommended to disable the SLI option in your NVIDIA control panel to maximize Octane’s rendering performance".
Interesting! I didn't know that. My current motherboard has another slot for a 2nd video card but doesn't support sli, so I didn't think it would do me any good, but maybe I should get another gtx video card and slot it in anyway, to see if Octane can take advantage of it.
I think I've officially taken leave of my senses.
I just hit the 'buy now' button on ebay for a dual Xeon server (an hp z600, for the curious). My wallet is pouting, but at just over $200 it seemed like too good a deal to pass up. Comes with 2 Xeon E5620 cpus, and while those are only 2.4 Ghz (so equivalent roughly to my oldest i7 laptop for rendering speed per bucket) it will still add 16 more rendering cores to my network. Plus I'm planning on upgrading eventually to 2 Xeon X5680 six cores in the future (3.33 Ghz, so more poweful than either of my laptops) which are six cores each, to bring this server up to 32 rendering cores in the future.
I have poor impulse control. But I'm excited to have my first ever dual-Xeon machine
Just a thought Jon for your i7's replace the stock CPU cooler with a liquid cooling kit and you can extend the life of them quite a bit.
When mine is rendering at full bore it is only 50-60 Degrees C so that will keep it going quire nicely.
I realize that the liquid coolers may be almost half of what you paid for them but then you can let them run fo ra week and it won't hurt them.
It's a good thought, I already did replace the stock coolor on my main i7 renderer but with a big air heatsink with a fan on either side, and it's running at no more than 55 degrees on full load currently, I know I could get it even cooler with a liquid cooled system but not sure if it's worth the expense when it looks like it's well within safety margins already. The laptops there's not much I can do except that I cleaned out the internal fans of dust and replaced the thermal paste and have both laptop cooling pad fans underneath and also a vacuum fan on the side vent to pull more airflow through (sidenote, I had never realized these type fans even existed until very recently, seeing it on a youtube video, thought it was a brilliant idea). They both still run hotter than I would prefer, but not beyond the limits.
The i7 8300 SFF I bought used on ebay... I haven't been able to pry the cover off yet. Latch is stuck. I put it aside for now, as it's running within limits, but I'm definitely going to have to find a way to get in there so I can make sure it's clean, with good thermal paste, and likely put in a good heatsink if it's running with the stock intel one.
That was a good deal! Have you tried installing an OS yet? I lucked onto some Supermicro X8DTFF blade sever boards cheap, and have been installing X5650/X5650's on them. Windows 7 Pro installed and ran with no problems. The "free" upgrade to Win 10 was intially a problem. The ugrade assistant reported the boards were incompatible, but I realized it was just the driver for the on-board graphics, which has not been updated since VISTA. Switched to the generic "Standard VGA Adapter" driver (which is VESA-compliant) and Win 10 installation went fine. LUXMARK 3.0 (Complex Scene/Lobby) clocked over 600. I had the same problem with my Asrock Rack and Supermicro LGA-2011-V1/V2 sever boards. Same solution. You can switch the driver (or just not install one) and use the Standard VGA driver. Or you can install a newer graphics board.
Well it hasn't come yet, not til this coming Thursday, so I haven't really done anything yet (except get excited)
Honestly I was just going to use Win 7 Pro that comes with it (well, it's not actually on it, but comes with a COA and I've got a thumb drive copy of Win 7 Pro I was going to install). Do you think there are any advantages to using Win 10 instead? I'm only using it as a render node for Carrara and really nothing else, so I didn't think there was any point to putting any newer OS on it.
Remember that Win 7 will be end of concumer support in about 1-2 years.
What chickenman said: Windows 7 has entered its extended support phase, so only security patches will be released until January 2020 when it enters end of life. Windows 10 will receive mainstream support until 2020 and extended support unti 2025, so you're buying yourself a few more years peace of mind with WIndows 10.
You can still get the free update from 7 to 10 by using Microsoft's "assistive technologies" loophole.
I'm facing a similar issue with my Z600 (arriving today - YAY!). It comes with a Vista COA, which will enter end of live next April. Sadly I'll have to fork out for an upgrade. Lucky yours comes with Windows 7 :-)
No, I don't think there are any advantages to Windows 10 over 7 for a render node, particularly if you would have to pay for Win 10. I only upgraded because it was "free" (having already purchased the Win 7 copies), and because I will be using some of the machines as workstations (so I need to keep my support/updates). Since some of the X8 blades are intended for Luxrender render nodes, I am just going to put Ubuntu Linux on them. It is free, and runs Luxrender just fine. I can mix OS's in the renderfarm in this case.
The used server/server parts market is amazing! Everything I have purchased has been in very good shape, and most of it looks like new.
Z600 came in today, much earlier than expected!
No power adapter so ran out to pick one up from the local Best Buy, then got back this evening to start setting it up... and discovered it has no port for vga, dvi, or hdmi. It has something called display ports (4 of them) and I have no way to hook up my monitor (at least that I can figure out). Looks like I'm going to have to buy an adapter, and scanning online I don't see any stores that have it nearby, might have to order off for it 
So, I will have to wait a little longer to see what 48 core rendering looks like, sadly.
I have those display ports on my 980Ti, I bought 3 adaptors to HDMI for my monitors and work fine
got them at Officeworks in Australia