Put this question on a few other forums and never got much information. First off, I do a ton of high poly Sims in c4d and houdini. Most of what I do scales well with multi gpu set ups.
I just built a ryzen 9 5950x 2x 3090 machine. I wanted the threadripper pro but decided to wait till ddr5 & pcie 5. So I plan to build my real workstation in 2 years of so. Hopefully by then, crypto will have crashed. Which may help a good bit.
So questions are.
Since what I do, scales so well with gpu. Should I use 5950x as desktop and network to threadripper as server/renderfarm. Or the other way around? Or scrap the 5950x entirely and just use one computer? Is there anyway to utilize both?
What else could be achieved by such a setup. I understand storage and backups of data. Vms as well, though a bit cloudy on the why behind VMs. Any other benefits?
Since you have the hardware, you can probably estimate how well the workload parallelizes to multiple machines. You can constrain the cores for testing, and you can spin one of your GPU along with half the cores in a VM to do an efficiency scaling test.
Then breakout things into a spreadsheet and figure out if you go with more 5950 boxes, more 3300x boxes, more 3970 boxes or more 7443p boxes (tons of lanes for tons of GPU but crappy desktop). Build a formula for how much it costs you to process a certain volume of work. Assume 100% depreciation on hardware after 3y and figure out which option is cheapest to process the volume of work you have today vs. in 3y from now.
Nobody wants to use VMs if they don’t have to (e.g. in order to mix operating systems or isolate different use cases for a bit of security or for learning and playing around).
Yes, losing stuff is bad, machines have a tendency of dying. Having more than one machine and more than one copy of data is useful for either “business continuity” or personal life. If you’re already covered with backups and restores and you’re comfortable with reasonable rates of hardware dying and getting infected by ransomware then there’s nothing to worry about.
It’s always a cost benefit analysis within constraints between how much budget you’re willing to spend and how much stress you’re willing to endure.
Yea, that depreciation sucks… just got this thing running and the new amd due in what? October? Most other stuff I’m into, value raises over time. Tech is B
