New to Octane, (haven't bought yet), trying to understand Tweet

[TDF2015]

So I'm getting ready to build a system for my business which at the moment does CAD work with Autodesk Inventor, last year I started using MODO to do some renderings for a client, and while they loved the images they are now asking for animations of their products. I have set up and tried a couple animation renders in MODO, but the render times are between 12-20 hours. Someone on the forums mentioned Octane, so here I am. My understanding is that instead of a dual processor machine, I can go with a faster single CPU and then buy mulitple cards for Octane to use in the renderings. If this is correct, how many GTX Titan X's can I fit on a X99 board?
Just looking for a little direction, I don't want to waste money, but I have been given a good budget to build a solid box.
I have been talking with Bill at Xi Computers about a build with the following:



Intel® Core™ i7-5960X @ 4.0GHz w/2666 RAM Hi-Perf. Sealed Water Cooling 20MB Shared L3 Cache Eight-Core 5 GT/s DMI 4th Gen. 22nm w/Artic Silver® 5 Thermal Compound-Requires X99 Motherboard

64GB DDR4 @ 2400MHz High Performance Aluminum Heat Spreader 4x16GB Modules

(3-6) NVIDIA® EVGA® GeForce® GTX TITAN X Superclocked 12GB DDR5 PCIe 3.0 1xDVI-D 1xHDMI 3xDP SLI Ready 3072 CUDA cores [For rendering) (not sure how many Octane can use or how many will fit in the box)

(2X) 1TB Solid State Drive Samsung® 850 EVO™ SATA 6Gb/s 540/520MB/s Seq.R/W <.3ms seek Shock Resistant 1500G. (RAID 1 Configure)

Blue Ray Burner+DVD+RW/DL/+R-R/CD-RW Double Media 25/50GB 2xwr/4xrd/12x

ASUS® X99-E WS/USB 3.1 Intel® X99 Chipset-7xPCIe 3.0 x16(Quad x16 mode)-64GB Max Quad Ch.DDR4 3200(OC)/2133-2xGB LAN-1xSATA Express-1xM.2 Socket3(PCIE Mode)-6xSATA 6Gb/s RAID 0/1/5/10-HD Audio-8CH-2xUSB 3.1/10xUSB 3.0/2.0-CEB M/B

Single 12CM Radiator and Fan CPU Liquid Cooling System for Quiet Performance with superior thermal conveyance (could be already included in some CPU selections)

[nuno1980]

CPU speed and RAM speed/size are toooooooooooo expensive and wrong choices lool because these 2 aren't important for Octane Render and OR uses 100% GPU usage only but yes CPU i5 and 16GB RAM is good and cheap. The group of GTX Titan X's is right choice.

[TDF2015]

nuno1980, Thanks for the reply, my reason for the processor and RAM is because I also will be using this for my normal computer to run CAD, which is a RAM hog, I will also being running the Adobe suite... I'd love for this to "only" be a render box, but it will have to serve double duty.
so I choose that cluster of G-Cards based on what I was reading on this forum, but I'm still unclear if I can or can not fit that many cards onto a x99 board and have room between the cards for air flow, or do I need the air flow... this is something that seems to go back and forth?

[TDF2015]

small hiccup today, was getting ready to order a new computer today with the goal of running Octane for MODO rendering, building the computer through xiComputers, wanted to run the 8 core 5960 i7 4.0GHZ with 4 Titans.... (Bill) is telling me the only motherboard capable of doing that and in urn running the cards at 16 speed is the x99 WS, but it looks like we can only fit 3 Titans on the board "mechanically"... he is looking for a box that would allow the forth. The card has slots for 4 cards...

Is anyone else running a 4 card system? can you post a pic? with 3 or 4 cards, is the heat to much, I'm planning on water cooling the CPU, are the Titan fans good enough? is 4 cards overkill, should I just start with 2..???
any advice is helpful.

My question is to the guys running multiple titans, is the board gap enough for airflow? or are you guys staggering your cards for more airflow?
Does Octane require even number of cards or can it run with 3 Titans? if I cram 4 cards in there, am I over doing it?

[DOS76]

I am still new to it as well. Is it correct that one doest;t have to SLI their cards in order to get maximum performance? For instance: would 4 GTX 1080, 4x980, or 4xTitanX would work better without SLI than to SLI them?