Dipping my toe

I've actually bought a Helmer cabinet from Ikea. £24.99 plus £7.50 delivery costs. I've also started looking on ebay for some motherboard, cpu bargains. I've seen a couple of Athlon x2 processors, motherboards and memory combos coming in for less that £50. Ultimately I want 5. I've got one already to harvest from an old acer aspire I'm not using. That plus a further 5 would give me a 6 CPU machine containing 12 cores an 12 gig of ram. Some of the sales are ending tomorrow. I'll let you know if I manage to snag any bargains.

Inspiration...

I've been doing a bit of Blending(for those who don't know I'm talking about 3D grahic design and animation. Not food preparation). That is I'm working through the manual. As always I've gotten way too excited about this already. Quite obsessed really.

Anyway I was googling blender sites (as you do) when I came across this this Swedish bloke called Janne Jansson who has built a small render farm in an Ikea cabinet called a Helmer (see picture above and http://helmer.sfe.se/). This cost him $3,500 which seems like a lot; but when you consider that a professional render farm will set you back $20-30k it suddenly seems to be more of an achievement. Suffice it to say that while I was reading about this I had a serious 'I want one' moment.

As it turns out I'm not the only person to get overly excited about this. Jann has spawned a host of imitators (ok I found three http://blog.dotlot.com/building-an-ikea-helmer-render-farm/, http://digital-vfx.co.uk/?p=128 and http://www.joost.cx/renderfarm-used-in-the-durian-project/ with the last one being the most impressive). Anyway all of the current imitators spent thousands to get as close as they could afford to a top-end machine. As it stands even one grand is a bit rich for my blood. So I am looking to push the boundaries in a different direction and see how cheaply I can make one. I've set my self a maximum spend of £500 all in.