What Rendering Machine!

The latest acquisition for our production company "What Comics Entertainment". It's also our most major purchase to date - hopefully we'll one day have a whole fleet of them:) It's a Dell Precision Tower 7910 Workstation - the configuration is 24 cores. Two latest Haswell Intel Xeon E5-2670 v3, which are 12 cores each. 32GB (8x4GB) 2133MHz DDR4 RDIMM ECC. It also has a built in "Optimizer" profile for Maya rendering:)

We're rendering with Maya Mental Ray which really favors multiple cores, and while Mental Ray has been bought up by nvidia it so far makes little use of the graphics card. So we have the lowest end nvidea card available for the workstation. Quadro NVS 310. The computer is also very scalable so we can update as needed. And it's also very quiet, reliable, designed for 24/7 year round rendering and uses low wattage.
I did a few weeks of price comparison shopping.and can say we got a really great price. A "Preferred Business" price, I believe they called it:) It was $5500 including tax. It also includes: "ProSupport Plus: Keep Your Hard Drive, 3 Years, Next Business Day Onsite 3 Years, 7x24 Technical Support 3 years".
Needless to say we can't really afford this machine as we're making our first film with literally no budget so far - so we will have to go the route of crowdfunding.  The only expenses to date have been gmail storage, external hard drives - and for years we had the domain/website.
The reason for this latest major, major for us anyway, purchase is that we have now naturally gotten to a point where we really need to do a lot of test rendering, not to mention final rendering. I figure if we do 20 seconds a day we'll have the whole film rendered in some form within 1 year:)
#20seconds1year

So a major chapter in our journey. Full sail ahead!:)

CEREBUS NEWS
Dave Sim OFF-WHITE HOUSE BULLETIN
http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2015/03/off-white-house-bulletin.html

Kevin Eastman, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, announces exclusive deal with IDW Publishing and says: "following the inspiration of the underground publishers, and guys like Dave Sim, who was a huge inspiration to me."
http://www.comicbookresources.com/article/eccc-exclusive-ninja-turtles-co-creator-kevin-eastman-talks-idw-exclusive-deal