| There come
a time when you look around your surrounding and realize that things are not
they suppose be... For me, that took place around the end of 2004 and the
beginning of 2005.
When I was made redundant from my job in 2003, I had this rather wild idea of building up a small render farm to generate a small amount of income. At the time, I figured that even if I manage to find a job quickly, this render farm business will just run itself and I don't really need to input much other resources other than providing the hardware and having the software to complete the rendering. What's more, this is something that I like doing - building computers from the parts and get everything running smoothly. To cut a long story short, the render farm business is a lot more competitive than I thought - a classic case of not understanding the market thoroughly. Needless to say, having just 5 rigs (all dual-CPU, of various processors, but ended up with 4 dual Xeons and 1 dual AthlonMP), I was in no position to compete. So I had a bunch of fairly powerful rigs crunching SETI@Home and climateprediction.net. Well, at the very least they were contributing to the worldwide scientific community in their small ways. However, it's all very well that my rigs enabled me to climb up the team ladders, I was consuming a lot of electricity and not exactly earning the income that I'd hope from the render farm business. Moreover, we've been very lucky with the apartment that we've been residing for four years - the room sizes are very generous. What happens if we move to a place that does not have a similar amount of space? With the number of rigs I had, the logistics of moving would be made even more complicated.
No, something has to be done. So I hooked up to one of favorite websites and started disposing some of my rigs. From the failed render farm, SideStation and ArtStation were sold exactly as they were, but I chose to keep the rest of my duallies. This mean I still have the Server, MainStation and WorkStation. However, I still felt that I have way too many rigs. Looking at the state of my gaming rig (GameStation), I decided that there isn't much of an upgrade path left in it, so I decided to swap some parts with WorkStation to make the duallie into a gaming rig. The smaller rigs (LANStation and BlackStation) that I've amassed for one reason or another were also sold. Additionally, much of my network was dismantled as there was little need for the additional network hardware without the rigs that require connection. Finally, I went through the older computer hardware that I've picked up over time and discovered that I had motherboards (Abit's BP6 and VP6, MSI's 694D Pro and Gigabyte's GA-6BXDS) that have been sitting around even though the rigs were originally built on had been 'decommissioned' long ago. So, now that I've rid myself of those rigs and other hardware, I can see the question coming: "Do I miss them?" Well, I can quite honestly tell you that I don't. Three rigs is more than enough for my needs. Naturally, I would like to keep my gaming needs and general computing/work needs apart, but I can say that I probably don't need a server. While the Server is now sitting next to me humming away, there may be a day that I'd decide to sell it also. Now that I've only three rigs to look after, I don't have to spend anywhere near the amount of time I used to spend maintaining and servicing them, like I used to. In the end, it's about finding a balance. With hindsight, having eight rigs was excessive, render farm or no render farm. However, I could not see it at the time. Do I still need three rigs? Or would just two be sufficient? I don't know now and I guess I won't be able to tell you until a later time. I guess I won't investing in another rig for a long time, other than replacing parts or minor upgrades. |
