Hey guys, I am always looking at computers for my renderfarm, but I'm PC based, sometimes Mac's come up for free, or for a little bit of cash, but I don't know what kinds of speeds comparatively they would be - I think Jeff Jacobs has a great idea (unfortunately I have deleted the PM you sent me with your cross-mac times on different machines)
I would greatly appreciate it if you could give me a processor speed and a file that you tried - how long it took, and then the same file that you tested on a different machine (either mac or PC - doesn't matter - I like numbers.) Please mention if it's a laptop - heat dissapation can make the numbers for a laptop not look quite as good.
I'll start with some numbers:
Using an animation that I just ran that was as complex as heck, one frame:
My Opteron 170 dual core (at 2.02 Ghz) took about 6 minutes
My AMD TurionX2 Laptop 1.66 Ghz dual Core took about 8.5 minutes
My Celeron 2800 took about 27 minutes
My p4 1.6 Ghz Dells took about 52 minutes.
My p4 1.0 and 965Mhz Dells took also about 52 minutes (I found that very strange - but it tests out on my machines all the time)
Using the Celeron 2800 (yech!) as the benchmark, I could think that:
the Opteron is about 4.5 times faster
The Laptop is about 3.17 times faster
The 1.6 and 1.0 P4's are about 1.92 times slower.
I would never spend the time picking up a P3 or 4 500mhz, but I saw a G4 lately for 150.00 that was a 500mhZ - I suspect that might be more in line with the 1.0 and 1.6 Ghz PC's? Don't know, so I didn't move on it and it sold right away..I can use PC or Mac for my render nodes, so no issues there. I guess I just want to know how your machines stack up to each other, then I can get an idea after putting this all together, what roughly I should spend per/speed... thanks guys!
Shaun Tennant