Farmer Tangle in Render Farm.

[tangletail]

I was recent employed to help someone build a small render-farm that was insanely cheap, and cost effective with easily affordable replaceable parts. The limits being three whammies;  he had the budget of a high end gaming machine, the space of a cubby and the tech knowledge of a stone being used by a caveman. With that being said, I had a huge techno-geek-gasm as I flew into Frys Electronics sweeping around for cheap parts when I noticed one thing. All the parts were just freaking exspensive, and the lowest price was just unnecessary for what he needed. (Mostly because forging another mans garbage for his computer just seems creeperish)

My first issue was finding a decent cheap PSU. Well since they are normally the first thing to fail I went ahead and found a 250watt PSU for only 15 bucks. SCORE! We needed 6 of these, affordable.

My next issue was finding a freaking CPU that was cheap and still supported by a motherboard. Oh geez 21st century logic is to throw out the working older CPU's that cost only 30 bucks each for ones that cost 100 USD. No biggy, just snatch me six Phenom II 6x 1055 and go. (Bought)

Next was RAM. Now I am... a maxer when it comes to this. Mostly because it will severely slow down the system if you have a low speed hard drive and everything starts swapping. So... bought 24 DDR3 4 gigs modules in single packs because it was cheaper. Total of 96 gigs, and yes this will double as a Beowulf cluster.You won't believe the looks I received. The cashier looked at me as if I was a mad man. I looked at him as if I was.

Motherboard, self explanatory. I was very picky. I never had problems with Asus, and Bio would always short out with smoke. The thought of burning down my employer's house terrorized me so I stuck with Asus and kissed some rears for the quality I lived with. So grabbed myself a cheap MSI (because the budget was stiff and it had a gpu chipset at 70 bucks... and it was Micro ATX)

So hear's what enraged me. The Hard Drives were two freaking big, and the laptop ones where too freaking expensive.  Seriously?! How does that happen? You have one that uses less metal and has far less capacity being godly expensive and you have a drive thats larger, uses more metal, has higher capacity and is cheap?! So... the lowest price being 38USD for a 250gig hard drive with 3.5 form factor. This seems good... but I am very limited with space and a 2.5 one can fit perfectly but the cheapest one available was 60 bucks. After talking to my employer on the phone for 30 minutes he was saying that would break the budget find something else. So... after a bit of thought I recalled a nifty feature about motherboards. Oh yes, they boot from USB >. Am I that tech savvy... oh yes, and that much of a cheap scape.... you guest it. So... I happened to buy them while they were on sale I now have 16gig x 15 USB drives for 60 bucks. SCOOOOOORE.

Now for mounting... eh screw it lets just duck tape em to the wall ;3. I wish I had a camera to document this.

Now... as far as set up goes... I realized... I could saved a few bucks because I didn't need an on-board GPU, because I could just as easily install Linux on a single flash drive, clone the entire thing to five more in just 5 minutes tops on my computer with freaking 10 usb ports. This was an awesome time saver. Screw you hard drives... I am using usb's for servers for now on.

The actual time it took to get the server built was...
20 minutes to setup motherboard (Including setting up the wake-on-lan in the BIOS and other BIOS settings)
15 minutes for installing linux on a single USB using my computer (and configuring the OS to support several settings, and pre-building)
5 minutes for cloning USB to five other USB's
45 seconds to plug in USB...
5 minutes with help to duck tape motherboards to cardboard on a vertical wall.
Total time used was a little over an hour

Node Specs: Total of 6
16 gigs of ram,
Phenom II x6 1055 2.8Ghz
16gig x 2 USB Thumb drive (Set as 2 gigs for swap, the rest for storage on one USB)
MSI 760GM-E51 AM3

Man does this scream... plus we also set it up as a beowulf cluster to see how well it does. It did alright... just not a good flop to power ratio.
Please do not ask for it... I did not calculate it for a few reasons. One, input is ALWAYS greater then output, and using this to calculate is just as unreliable as a con artist. Reason being, sure your drawing that much power, but it fluctuates suddenly depending on your system, as well as anything else you have plugged in. The innards releases heat so your not getting the same input from your PSU no matter the efficiency... so... No calculating will ever come from me.

[White Wolf Guardian]

I think if you bought all of this online rather than Fry's Electronics, you could have significantly saved a great deal of money (About 30%+ maybe) and then you could have bought a 160GB SSD hard drive which would make memory storage far less complicated. Though I don't know what your time limit is/was.

[tangletail]

Well no, I went to many other stores. And some actually have great deals at random moments. As far as the 160 ssd. Uh... no. SSD's are amazingly exspensive online and in-store. Yeah it may have been faster, but the price does not compare to a crap load of 16GB USB thumb drives. He also had space problems so the thumb drives did the job just fine. We did laugh at my "ingenuity" for being originality, since we doubt others have tried this.  And he was surprised it worked..

A render-farm is considered a server. It will never need anymore then 4gigs of space depending on your project. If you install windows, then you do need to chip in more money for a HDD. Because windows just happens to be insanely heavy and chock full of useless features.