Can I use a second laptop to speed up my computer?

3 thoughts on “Can I use a second laptop to speed up my computer?”

1. BEN k says:

   September 24, 2010 at 6:34 pm

   i would get a desktop to enhance your speed as you can get a more powerful processor that way – you might want to ask this in an animation forum as I’ve seen it done – but am not sure how to do it exactly save for one of the computers acts like a server and you send your animations there to get processed – while you work on something else – the guy i saw doing it had like 3 or 4 deskstops each a handling a different job (rendering – editing – finalization etc)

2. Jack B. Nimble says:

   September 24, 2010 at 6:34 pm

   get dual video cards that either support openCL of CUDA acceleration. I use openCL for some CPU intensive tasks and it speeds it up more than 1000% running crossfired Radeon 5850 graphics cards….

   You will need to make sure you animation software support either openCL or CUDA hardware acceleration, as well.

   You can also look into FIPS hardware acceleration, but the FIPS cards are around 2 grand… I paid about $800.00 US for my dual 5850’s and using openCL is acceptable in terms of speed.

   EDIT:

   Linux, is not the best o/s for a rendering farm, epic FAIL! Not to mention to be productive he’d probably need to upgrade his entire network to gigabit Ethernet.

3. bon-gart says:

   September 24, 2010 at 6:34 pm

   Yeah… Ok. Jack’s answer, while impressive in the hardware he uses and whatnot, is not only not helpful, it isn’t even on the same planet as your question.

   The only way a second laptop would assist your First laptop, is if you changed to a version of Linux and created what is called a Beowulf Cluster. This is where multiple computers work together as a single unit. However, you would need to first establish whether or not you can find rendering software that you can work with, that is made for Linux.

   So… if you wish to continue to use your software and Windows, the answer is No… you cannot get a second laptop to add to the power of your first laptop to speed up rendering tasks.

   Now, if you wished to follow Jack’s advice, then you need to purchase an expensive desktop computer, with a pair (or more than two) of expensive video cards.

   end of line

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