A lot of cards vs two great cards Tweet

[will2power]

I am considering doing some changes to my render setup and I was wondering if anyone had done something similar. I know that GTX 980 give a lot of bang for the buck, but I was curious about a slightly different approach. I have two double size video cards in my case right now, and I don't really have any room for any more other than a single slot gpu if I want to add another card. I did some looking and I settled on a Nvidia quadro K4200 because it was a single slot card. Looking at it, if I replaced my two double sized cards with four more Quadro K4200 cards. I'm just wondering at this point whether or not having more gpus with less RAM will equate to better performance than a couple of really good GPUs like the GTX 980. Has anyone ever gone for something like that? If so, do you think it yielded better results spreading the render out among more GPUs rather than a couple of really good ones.

I ask because in looking, it seems like both options are going to cost about the same amount of money. I do mostly still renders at this point with simple lighting setups, but I would like to consider moving into animations with a bit more complexity and I want to get the most out of a single workstation setup. I also don't want to abandon my two xeon processors and 64GB RAM in lieu of a single CPU setup in order to be able to fit more cards on a board. Has anyone pursued more mid range GPUs rather than one or two high performance ones?

[glimpse]

Quadro K4200 would give You ~39 in terms of OctaneBench..- so 3 of them rendering together (using 3slots) will be the same speed as single 980Ti using 2 slots only, costing less & ahving 6GB of vRAM instead of 4GB (that might come handy).

So if You want most of GPU render power grab a pair of 980Ti (with reference cooler) & they will render 6 times faster than Your k4200.. (giving ~250 points in terms of OctaneBench).

if that's not enough there is always splitters, extenders, watercooling & other options. If You're curious to have something specific, feel free to drop a PM & we can talk through some option =)

More than often the best solution comes not from huge amount of money, but some issues You can live with..- liek bit of DIY, slower upload speeds, etc.. - but You can get most speed for Your money.