I figured it would be helpful if I show you what I chose and why for those interested in doing the same... I was originally going to use an Ikea Helmer cabinet to house all my render nodes but once I found some cheap cases w/PSU's that were cheaper than the PSU's alone for the Helmer setup I decided to just go with 4 separate boxes... CPU: Intel Q9300 = $260.00 - gotta have a quad... could of went with a Q6600 yes but I wanted the lower heat and power consumption that comes with this 45nm chip seeing that its going to be on forever... not planning on OC'ing either RAM: 8 gigs DDR 800 = $130.00 - My workstation has 8 gigs... I matched it so whatever my workstation can spit out these nodes will be able to render it... I'm doing lots of SPD with big textures so need the memory HArd Drive: 80gb Seagate = $40.00 -Nothing special here..just get the smallest, most reliable drive you can find Mainboard: Gigabyte Micro ATX = $104.00 - Why so expensive? Well I needed one that
One-man misanthropic media empire creating original works