Seeking advices for a second card

[shelghost]

Hello there,

I have a Asus Crosshair Formula IV mother board with 4 PCIE ports.
At the moment, I use Octane for Max with a 580 GTX 3Gb.

I would like to buy a second card to boost things up. What do you recommand ? I have the money for a Titan GTX but is it really worth it ? If not what else would you choose ?
I could also buy two less expensive cards for the price of a Titan, but the PCIE slots are very close to each other on the motherboard, I'm not sure I could make three cards fit on it. Is there a trick ?

For a third card, I could only run it on a PCIE 8X (only two 16X on this MB) port, is this important ?
What alimentation would you pick for two or even three cards ? I was thinking 1200 watts would be fine ?

Thanks for your advices,

Fabrice

[kavorka]

As far as I know, the x16 only matters when it is loading everything into your VRAM, so it is important if you are rendering animations, but for stills, it isnt that big a deal and as far as I have seen, doesnt effect your render speeds.

The Titan is looking to be one of the fastest cards, early tests right now are showing it faster than the 690, but the 590 may be faster.
You have 3 gigs of VRAM right now, so try to get a card that has at least 3 gigs, or you will be down grading. (the 590 and 690 are double cards, so the actual VRAM Octane can use is half of what the card shows).

I think the Titan is gonna be a big winner, it also uses less power, puts off less heat and runs quieter than the other cards.

[shelghost]

Thanks for those infos, as you said, I guess the Titan is the way to go then.

Thank you Kavorka

[kavorka]

only thing about the Titan, if you pair it with your 580, your VRAM will stay at 3, so half the VRAM of your Titan will go to waste. If you don't have a separate display card, I think you can use your Titan as primary and it should use the extra 3 gigs for all your display before it uses the 3 available to Octane, I think.