This post is largely my apology for ignoring this site for a little while. I’ve been busing selling limbs to pay for some computer upgrades. I’m not down to 1 arm, one leg, and a single kidney (metaphorically).

Graduating is expensive. I’ve been sort of floating along until my student Solidworks license expired. It did. Oh boy, did this last week brought some expenses. I’ve now purchased a proper Solidworks license and am a subscriber. I decided to take the difference in moving to a Solidworks Professional package and invest that in some render nodes for Maxwell Render. I’ll let you know how that works out.

I’ve ordered the hardware for the nodes. They’re 2 i7-860 2.8 Ghz quad-core processors with the appropriate motherboards and CPU coolers to overclock them. So basically, right now at least, I’m going with two more computers along side my MacBook Pro. The funny part is that the render nodes will be actually faster than my main computer… just not as pretty. I am adding the cheapest Solidworks certified card to one of the nodes so that I can do my work on it if I so choose.

All in all, total for 2 very fast computers without monitors or keyboards came to about $1700. I spent a while calculating the cost of making 3 machines with Core 2 Quad processors or 2 machines with the i7s. Everything pointed to going with the two i7 because the hyper threading ability apparently makes a good difference when rendering.

I’ll be excited to share my results.

Also on the slate for last week: clean installs of Mac OSX and Windows 7 on the MacBook Pro. This was precipitated by the installation of a 500GB (7200 rpm) hard drive. It was time to move up from the 250GB (5400 rpm) drive that was in it. Fortunately, drives are getting cheap, even in the 2.5″ size.