yet another helmer / monster for < 1700 eur

carbon · Post by **carbon** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 1:50 am

hi, i just want to show you on what i was doing for two last weeks with friend..

it consists of one computer for everyday use (3 top drawers) with gpu, etc.. and 3 render nodes (one in its own drawer at the bottom), each has overclocked quad core at 2.7ghz (so 16 cores in the box), main computer has 8gb of ram, nodes each 4gb.. main coputer has 3.5 drives and nodes just one small 2.5 drive. all of them wired together with gigabit ethernet and cooled with 7 super silent coolers on case, and temperature at full load? eh.. <70Â°C

PureSpider · Post by **PureSpider** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 2:08 am

Awesome! I want one!

dmn · Post by **dmn** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:05 am

Is this for personal use or are you planning to sell them

If the latter, what were the dimensions of the cabinet? Did you actually use the drawers to house the render nodes, or did you mount them directly to the drawer tracks and permanently fix the drawer fronts? And what is this silent fan that requires no filter whatsoever?

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 10:48 am

I thougt about building a render slave Helmer too, maybe 2009 is the year for me

At the moment for me heat + noise are the both most annoying things about such a Project.
Also I would chose a architecture where some CPU upgrade from 4 cores to 6 or even 8 in some time would be possible.

I'm not very much convinced you did the best choice for the CPU Cooler m8!
You have a airflow from the front to the back of each drawer, why did you took a air flow killing CPU cooler that sucks air from above?
A simple side mounter air cooler like the AC freezer 7 Pro would enhance this airflow and cool system much better or ever allow higher overclocking...
For such a project some state-of-the-art Thermal grease is worth every cent!!!!

Beside this it seems you did some really good work, now please lets see some Indigo benchmarks

carbon · Post by **carbon** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 10:43 pm

ZomB: well, because inner height of drawer is 90mm, this cooler was the best choice from what was available.. the air is sucked from front fan directly to heatsink, than travel to rear fan out of the box, fan from power supply takes also a bit of air..
one important note for you about building, measure-think-measure-think-measure and cut, there is so little space

eg: take a standard power supply + microatx board - you got ~3mm space between them.. the space between cpu with cooler and upper drawer is like one or two milimeters more - you cant open drawer

EDIT: also i forgot, fron fans are controlled with this and rear fans are controlled from board, so during rendering i can speed up fans..

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 12:38 am

He he... I realy forgot about the space promblem carbon, you are right

I own two bigger Helmers here, a drawer has here some awesome extra cm in height ^^

Don't forget about some benchmarks

carbon · Post by **carbon** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 1:38 am

i won't forget, i promise, but i am leaving for a few days..
btw, is any more or les standard way to benchmark indigo? i dont know, maybe material scene with default settings..

there is much more work software related, every machine is running xubuntu (1.1.15 64bit build for linux is great (Ono!)), stabilizing network, shell scripts for automating workflow and so on

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 2:47 am

carbon wrote:i won't forget, i promise, but i am leaving for a few days..
btw, is any more or les standard way to benchmark indigo? i dont know, maybe material scene with default settings..

actually there is this benchmark command line thing, but I never worked out how to use it exactly :/
Try to go for one of the test scenes, so everybody can compare (best nothing with SSS, because it is [and always been] kind of experimental/buggy).
Maybe the prism thing that brakes light into colors...?!

carbon wrote:there is much more work software related, every machine is running xubuntu (1.1.15 64bit build for linux is great (Ono!)), stabilizing network, shell scripts for automating workflow and so on

This i the part of a helmer project that I'm scared mostly about being a total linux n00b -.-

Post by **fused** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 4:23 am

i think the diffuse transmitter test scene is used for comparison quite often.

carbon · Post by **carbon** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 1:38 am

here is some test / benchmark

:

Code: Select all

Total render time elapsed: 10 m, 1 s
Done 833970000.00000 samples (3088.77778 samples per pixel) 
1447235.58865 samples / second (0.69097 micro-seconds / sample)

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 3:21 am

nice numbers carbon

I did some math to compare your rig with the iMac I sit in front of atm.

Code: Select all

Helmer:  16x2.7Ghz = 43.2Ghz > 771%
iMac:         2x2.8Ghz = 5.6Ghz > 100%

Helmer:  833970000 sampels > 1004%
iMac:        83080000 sampels > 100%

So your Rig is over 10 times faster by having "only" 7.7 times as much Ghz!

Hail to the Helmer!

Kram1032 · Post by **Kram1032** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:26 am

omg, nice numbers you say? I'd rather say.... GREAT numbers!