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by fxtentacle 2329 days ago
Yeah, the ThreadRippers are amazing. I was truly astonished when I noticed that one hour of V-Ray on 3970X outperformed $1000 in ChaosCloud rendering.

At a price of $2500 once for the TR versus $24,000 per day for cloud, it's a no-brainer to buy them. Sadly, availability in my area is pretty spotty and even Amazon currently predicts 2+ weeks of delivery time.
1 comments
threeseed 2329 days ago
Not sure where you are getting your costs from.

Threadripper 3970x = 32 cores @ $1999

AWS c5.9xlarge = 36 vCPUs @ $8.34/day (spot)

You could buy a year of AWS for the same price as a Threadripper based PC.

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fxtentacle 2329 days ago
I was comparing with ChaosCloud: https://www.chaosgroup.com/cloud

For EC2, one would need to rent licenses for the V-Ray renderer plus V-Ray tends to be heavily CPU-cache- and memory-bound, so exactly the parts that get slow if you enable the Intel security fixes. Due to c5.9xlarge being Xeons, they are like 80% slower than a comparable AMD CPU.

BTW, calculator.s3.amazonaws.com quotes me $1119 per month for a single c5.9xlarge, so I'm not sure how you would reach $8/day when I see $37/day.

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threeseed 2329 days ago
Then switch to the AMD based c5a.9xlarge which is even cheaper.

And you can reach $8/day using Spot or Reserved Instances. Not sure where you get $1119.

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