Hardware for 3D

Hi: I have been doing 3D animation for sometime using 3d studio max, running under windows. As the renders get more complicated, my boxes obviously aren't enough, what would be a cheap solution for buying servers for rendering? I have about USD $ 8000 to spend. I was thinking maybe 2 Dell servers with dual Intel Xeons each. Anybody has any experience using other 3D progs like Maya? Maybe it would be an option to migrate everything to Maya running under Linux (cheap) or Sun or SGI ($$$$). Any opinions are welcome.


Thanks

J

if youre considering sgi's at all, you need to factor in that with most of the used ones on ebay, you don't get IRIX media, which is very expensive to purchase through sgi themselves....
for your purposes, sgi's are rather good with 3d and visualisation tasks, but it depends on the age of the machine and how intensive the work is youre going to be doing, if you want affordable but not really 'ancient' sgi machines, you miht want to check out used Octane systems froma reseller, they can be had rather cheap if you know where to look

theres a plcae in Australia where i got my used Octane from to learn about sgi's, called network remarketing, they deal in US $ and will ship to the US as well, www.networkr.com.au is there website address, they have octanes with KB and mouse for a reasonable price, im sure you would be able to cluster 3 or 4 of them and distribute your rendering across multiple machines, like what they do at Pixar and special effects plces like that....

i dont know much about sgi's yet, not much about rendering software (if anything), but its just a suggestion you might want to consider