My home hackintosh Render Farm

[auze1]

So the other day I was working on a project and had some rendering to do. I used Wake on Lan to fire up my three z8na-d6c hackintoshes, opened smedge 2010 loaded a job up. the 3 z8na-d6c's paired up with my mac pro, and my quad core i7 HTPC hack to tackle the job. I have a FreeNas i3 box which acts as a server and 8 port gigbit switch. anyways...BOOM! job done in 15 minutes, a normal render that would been over 2 hours ( I am guessing on how long it would take on 1 computer, but seriously this {censored} works good and fast!!!)

 

having a little render farm is great. I was gonna buy a new Mac Pro, but at $4000 for 1 computer i was having a hard time, and i really only need pure cpu power. seeing as i build a i7 HTPC hack and knew a bit about hackintoshes, i though I could spend that money better.

 

Each 8-core Hack cost a bit more than $1500. I got the smallest cheapest cases that would work. I got $50 CoolerMaster's that had the PSU space upfront which led to better ventilation. The Z8na-d6 uses regular PSU's and is a regular ATX board so i didn't have to spend a ton on server cases and server PSU's. The onboard video actually works when i remote into the computers, so i only need one 8400 Gt to get them working. I got some cheap 5400 80gb laptop drives from ebay, low power and quiet. i used a newegg combo deals and ebay to get 4 xeon 5620's and 2 xeon 5520's at a pretty good price. same cpu's as the mac 4,1 and 5,1 models. so for $4500 i got 3x the power of a $4000 macpro.

 

Only real setback is sleep doesnt work on 10.6.4 (or any other 10.6) on the z8na-d6c's. so this means i have to turn each one off after the job is done. kinda lame but not too bad. its cool i can use wake-on lan to get them going !

Anyways, just wanted to share that in case anyone else had been thinking about a similar scenario. 8-core hackintoshes are total possible and work great. I don't know why we don't see more of them.

[Nott32]

WoW

I am so jealous at this point in time

I am now walking away from my computer in shame xD

[peach-os]

I´m glad to hear that you have solved almost all issues and you have a real benefit

 

still the same here - no sleep with this mainboard after hours of trial and error. maybe you saw that my G5 mod for my machine has hotplugable HD slots, so it was no problem to test it with Win7.....and guess what.......sleep is also not working with this OS. I tried it also with an other graphics card without success.

 

what´s the behaviour on your machines? does the screen switch off but the fans still working?

[auze1]

Thanks Peach-os

 

wow, thats pretty interesting that it didn't sleep with windows 7. I was going to try windows 7 or linux as a back-up if i couldn't et this running well, but itall worked super well right from the get go. I wonder if anyone on Windows has had this problem and come up with a solution, maybe on Tom's hardware forum??

 

as for my performance, when it goes to sleep the fans stay running, screen goes black and the computer is gone. When i boot up the next time, i have also noticed that shut down doesn't work and the computer stays on, but this only happens directly after a fail to sleep.

 

Other then that i think the performance is pretty good. I only boot it up and run render jobs. after its kinda annoying that i have to screen share into the computers and shut it down, but I m pretty sure i just need to set up some kind of script that can ssh into all the machines and make that part happen a lot quicker.

 

BTW i did see your G5 mod, thats pretty dope!

[peach-os]

on Win 7 I created an energy report which said that tere is no S3 sleep on that machine. having a look on the original dsdt tables of it, I noticed that earlier. discussing that issue with MasterChief, he suggested just to add it in dsdt. on boot os x recognizes S3 - but with no result.

 

i guess enabling sleep on any other OS could bring us a step forward - so please go ahead and try it with linux