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1x Dual Quadcore better than 2x Single Quadcore machines?
I’m in the process of buying a new system for running Adobe CS3 Production Premium and Lightwave 9. Was looking at getting the HP xw8600 with dual Quadcore 2.4Ghz, 4Gb ram and Quadro FX 1700 etc but found it was actually cheaper to get 2 xw4400s both with single Quadcore 2.4 and 4 Gb ram each and each with Quadro FX 1700 etc. My thought was that i could run the 2 simultaneously using one as a render node for both LW and AE and DVD encoding etc while leaving the other free to continue working in LW or AE or Premiere etc.
Which would be more efficient? Faster? -
1 Reply
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Personally I think you would be better off with the dual-quad. There are a lot of reasons, but here’s a few:
1. Setting up the second machine to assist in renders would require unnecessary effort.
2. You will lose rendering productivity due to machine#2 having to read the project file AND source files from machine#1 for every frame it renders. Even on a well-tuned gigabit network (which will add expense/maintenance time to set up and manage)this will not be anywhere near as efficient as a local render.
3. Fewer machines to maintain/make space for/buy software and/or plugin licenses for/pay electrical bills for. The generally accepted rule of thumb is that this is NOT a cost-effective setup until you can scale up to 4 or more render nodes. I started with 5 and STILL felt like the work of maintaining the machines and managing files was barely worth the added render speed. Don’t underestimate the cost of all those additional software and plugin licenses, it can really add up fast.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com
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