Hi Roy – you ask some good questions. I must admit though, that my tech knowledge is mediocre. I’ve not bought a new desktop computer in over 3 years and thus haven’t been paying close attention to modern hardware in years.
That said, I’m not really the person to give definitive advice about the best, most efficient rendering equipment. $400 per complete box that you describe sounds like a pretty good deal. But it’s used equipment. It’d be worth to compare the $ and specs of those boxes to new parts you can buy and build yourself.
Complete boxes would likely be easier to setup compared to building everything from scratch. But the space could be an issue. Having everything in the filing cabinet is quite convenient.
Eevee offers the hope of not needing a render farm! But I think we’re still a few years away from realtime tech literally renders as realistic as offline renderers. We’re getting there but not there yet. My farm has paid for itself in freelance gigs at this point and I’ve not ever regretted investing in it.
I’m glad you enjoyed the tutorial! Sorry I’m not able to give definitive answers..there’s just a lot of relative variables that go into it.
