Hey Kent, I keep seeing ads for refurbished equip that is quite cheap. The units are all the same. They are complete boxes with win 10, 16GB , i7's 3.4 gHz and of course have iGpu's, everything for about $400 each. Now since these are threaded this means that they are kinda equivalent to 8 core AMD's I believe. Would this be a good way to go compared to what you present here? Would this be any easier to set-up? Now with EeVee coming is this still necessary? Any suggestions?
I enjoyed this tutorial. Maybe in the future you would make an Intel addendum for this.
Thanks, Roy
Hi Roy - you ask some good questions. I must admit though, that my tech knowledge is mediocre. I've not bought a new desktop computer in over 3 years and thus haven't been paying close attention to modern hardware in years.
That said, I'm not really the person to give definitive advice about the best, most efficient rendering equipment. $400 per complete box that you describe sounds like a pretty good deal. But it's used equipment. It'd be worth to compare the $ and specs of those boxes to new parts you can buy and build yourself.
Complete boxes would likely be easier to setup compared to building everything from scratch. But the space could be an issue. Having everything in the filing cabinet is quite convenient.
Eevee offers the hope of not needing a render farm! But I think we're still a few years away from realtime tech literally renders as realistic as offline renderers. We're getting there but not there yet. My farm has paid for itself in freelance gigs at this point and I've not ever regretted investing in it.
I'm glad you enjoyed the tutorial! Sorry I'm not able to give definitive answers..there's just a lot of relative variables that go into it.