well I've been out of the hardware scene for a while, but I would consider nodes for about £400 a piece. Here you can pick up an i5 2500K with a board and memory , for a shade over £300, throw a thumb drive or small HDD/SSD for OS and it's a very powerful cheap node. An extra £100 would get you a decent sub 450W PSU and cheap case if you really need one.. Look at this fun THIS IS JUST EPIC
thanks burnout, really appreciate the help. The only issue is i would like to have the massive boost in performance which i would enjoy with the bigger system. i DO really appreciate the help though, thankyou. i have redesigned the system completely and have now got it down to £2000 for a 12 core machine. so i think im going to go with that once i have the cash together. thankyou all for your help.
fair enough, managing a farm can be a little bit a headache at times, but the performance scales better. Considering you could have a 16 core 4 node farm for as little as £1700 and same node setup for a workstation all for £2000, that's 20 cores of overclocking potential right there.
I have two waiting for funds, ever since I found this. Since then the ITX platform has really taken off and when I had the funds to do it only mATX was available without spending silly money, so I waited and things have changed. I use blender for my renders, so setting up 5/6 nodes with Ubuntu, blender and lokirender is totally free, and I think landscape would allow me to remote manage each node at a software level. However since Ubuntu has been making some big changes, I might just convert to a pure Debian OS or LMDE.
