Good motherboard for maximum GPU

[amathews9518]

What is a good motherboard for installing maximum number of gpu's.
Or is there an afordable expansion box option.

[pixelrush]

Depends how much you want to spend and how badly you want extra cards I suppose.
You will probably need to do a home grown case and install pci-e risers if you are really keen.
I've been looking at a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 which can take 4 double slot cards and is quite reasonably priced I think but I'm not going for a max rig. That's a 2011 socket mobo though
You can find similar cards for 2x the money and 7 single slots for 4x the money like the eVGA Classified SR-X.
This sort of question has been asked before so there are a few posts in the forums you could search out.

[amathews9518]

Thank you
This was helpfull.
Expander boxes seem to be expensive!

[jmfowler]

Depends how much you want to spend and how badly you want extra cards I suppose.
You will probably need to do a home grown case and install pci-e risers if you are really keen.
I've been looking at a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 which can take 4 double slot cards and is quite reasonably priced I think but I'm not going for a max rig. That's a 2011 socket mobo though
You can find similar cards for 2x the money and 7 single slots for 4x the money like the eVGA Classified SR-X.
This sort of question has been asked before so there are a few posts in the forums you could search out.

please note - you will need a riser for the 4th slot as you can't fit a double width card down into the slot properly because there are cables in the way, also meaning you will need to place this card somewhere in your case nearby.

I'm looking at maybe getting a 7 or 8 slot mobo and using risers and a custom made case, but I'm also keen to see what Otoy does for an Octane render farm that is planned.

[pixelrush]

Hmmmm I think its OK. Some small wires might get squashed however I probably won't really need those 2x Sata3 sockets at the bottom. However you do need to find a suitable case to give you room if you use a dual slot there. You can, thanks to the BIOS options, use a single slot card there as the display card (which may well end up being a Quadro 600 or 2000 in my case) which leaves 3 x double slot cars for cuda (most likely GTX670's). For my purposes that would be enough and a considerable improvement on what I have.
Dunno. Thats the most useful mobo I've found so far. I'm tryiing to build a reasonable rig and save money . If you know of a better budget/performance mobo please tell me

[coon_ra]

Have a look at ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS and ASUS P9X79 WS.

[natalievfx]

I have had a asus z9pe-d8 ws which has brought me nothing but trouble with my 690 gtx's. I finally just got a whole new mobo for the gtx's. It is very important that both of your cards are the same manufacturer as well i.e. 2 evga's or 2 asus gtx 690's. the board i am using now is a asus p8z77-v. Works great with two gtx 690's giving me a stable 6000 core solution. I put an ATI radeon 7970 on the asus z9pe-d8 ws and it seems to be pretty stable.

[mdharrington]

remember it is not just about number of pci express slots....but number of usable lanes

a lot of motherboards will only give you one or 2 lanes running full 16x....

just FYI..

for instance with the ASUS P9X79 WS...you can run 2 full 16x cards...but if one of the other black or blue slots is occupied (with anything)it will take 8 lanes from one of the 16x slots...

meaning you would have 1 card at 16 lanes, and the other at 8...and if you are running a 690 that will only be 4 lanes on the card....not a real problem with PCI 3.0 but just to be aware

be on the look out for MB with the NF200 co-chipset....it is an Nvidia chipset that can double the amount of lanes...but the boards with them are usually pretty pricey

[igen]

Now I use asus sabertooth z77 with 3 gtx, 1 slot I put gtx 550ti only for work and preview 3d and 2 slot I put gtx 690 only for use rendering with octane (1 slot pci-e 8x), until now does'nt have problem with my gtx 690 so totaly 4 gtx work in octane

I will upgrade my mobo to gygabyte sniper g1, with 4 slot pci-e and buy 2 more gtx 690 so totaly it will 4gtx 690 and have 8 gtx work in octane. Hope octane will realese renderfarrm version

[clintond]

As Octane uses the GPU for heavy computation only, the number of lanes dedicated to each PCIe device is not so important.

The reason is that Octane handles certain computations up front on the system side (voxelization etc), which utilises the CPU and system RAM. Once that data is transferred to the GPU, there is very little data being passed between the GPU and the Octane executable - primarily the realtime feedback from the rendered image, which can be measured in the megabytes per frame. Let's say you were tumbling a scene at 1024x512. In it's uncompressed floating format let's assume each frame is 8MB. When tumbling, you get 20FPS. So we are looking at 8x20=160MB/s. Throw in some overhead and we are still under 200MB/s. So not a great deal is required of the bus to fulfill it's role. Given that, it's fair to assume that the PCIe spec from 2003 which defines 250MB/s per lane would suffice for Octane in this instance.

This is quite different in the case of the Max plugin, which is doing quite different things compared to the standalone (eg dynamic scene voxelization), so you would likely require a couple more lanes, but even at 4 lanes the PCIe bus circa 2003 is capable of 1GB/s!

Which is to say, I would not worry about the number of PCIe lanes being devoted to your GPU, it most definitely does not require 16x that's for sure!

Perhaps the Octane dev guys can chime in here?

ps, Happy New Year!