Okay, I’ve put this off as long as possible. There are enough exciting things to tell that I’ve got three or four posts in my head and more than enough to keep me busy.

It was the arrival of the parts for the servers that set me of course. The 1600SC works like a champ, and renders 3ds MAX images with VRay and Catmull-Rom in half the time of my brother’s AMD64 machine.

The 1300, however, is slightly less than useful. I even ordered new processors for it, but the front side bus keeps them from having a full effect, and I have a feeling it will go the way of all flesh as a result.

The P4-2.53 is … exactly that. What can I say? It will do well as a backup machine for the render farm … which isn’t really a farm any more. It’s just kind of one dual-processor Xeon machine, with a P4 on hand in case the going gets tough. I’m not even going to bother trying to farm them together.

But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve learned enough about how these things work to know that if I had it to do over again and was willing to spend the money, I’d drop $3K on four or five 2.2Ghz laptops with wireless cards, network them all together with a generic wireless router and start them going. The wires and cables I have now are nothing short of UGLY. Dual Xeon or not, it’s not worth the mess to me. I like clean, sharp lines. It’s my personality.