RenderBoxx.(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)

Boxx Technologies' low-profile, high-power rendering machine

Boxx Technologies has been building workstations and rendering servers for the graphics and entertainment community for a number of years. The company's RenderBoxx is its dedicated solution for rendering.

A decent size production facility can have dozens of machines dedicated to rendering. When you consider space, administration, and power requirements, that renderfarm can cost more than most people expect. One solution is ART's dedicated rendering appliance, the RenderDrive, (see review on pg. 66 of the March 2001 issue). Another is a PC-like RenderBoxx, which is very compact, powerful, and easy to administer.

RenderBoxx is approximately 19 inches square and fills only one unit of rack space, which means it's slightly less than 2 inches high. This makes it just about the smallest dual-processor machine on the market today. The front of the case has a single floppy drive, two switches, and a few LEDs. The rest of the front is perforated with holes to improve airflow.

The case opens simply: You remove one screw, which lets you pop the top. Inside, you can see how Boxx has cleverly packed a powerful computer into a tiny space. The motherboard is a Tyan Thunder LE, which runs the Serverworks Serverset III LE chipset. The review unit shipped with two 933MHZ Pentium III CPUs (1GHZ CPUs are also available) 1GB of RAM, an IBM 10,000-rpm Ultra160 SCSI drive, and the floppy drive. The basic system has dual 800MHZ CPUs, 128MB of RAM, and a 10GB IDE drive.

Ports include one serial, two USB, two 100BaseT Ethernet, and keyboard. A single PCI slot is mounted on a riser parallel to the motherboard to save space, and the back of the case also has an open spot where you could install an external SCSI connector simply by running a cable from the back of the machine to the SCSI connector on the motherboard. It would have been nice if Boxx Technologies had included this cable.

As expected, the small size of the enclosure entails a few tradeoffs. There is simply no room for a CD-ROM drive, which must be connected via the network or externally through either the USB or SCSI port. Another significant omission is the parallel port. A number of rendering packages on the market require a parallel port dongle. The only way to resolve this would be to install a parallel port card in the spare PCI slot.