Whats the cheapest option for running octane?

[Stealthworks]

Hi
I'm looking for advice to build the cheapest possible rig for doing Octane renders. I can cannibalise some components from old pcs so really looking for the bare minimum motherboard / processor setup. I have an nvidia card with 96 cores and although its not the fastest, what's killing me is the fact that rotating around my scene is really jerky because all the cores are being used for rendering.

What I need is a motherboard with one pci-e slot to plug my CUDA card into that can work simultaneously with its onboard graphics card to navigate around my scene. Although my existing motherboard has onboard graphics if I enable it then my pc hangs during boot when the graphics card is plugged in.

What would be ideal would be if octane could allow you to specify how many cores should be used for rendering and how many used for other tasks so you would only need one card. Would this even be possible? Id happily sacrifice a bit of render speed if i could navigate around my scene quicker! Alternatively would it be possible to program Octane to use the CPU for scene navigation and the GPU cores for rendering?

Thanks

[face_off]

What would be ideal would be if octane could allow you to specify how many cores should be used for rendering and how many used for other tasks so you would only need one card. Would this even be possible? Id happily sacrifice a bit of render speed if i could navigate around my scene quicker! Alternatively would it be possible to program Octane to use the CPU for scene navigation and the GPU cores for rendering?

The latest releases of Octane do exactly this via the "render priority" setting.

[Stealthworks]

Hi face_off. I got very excited when I read your reply and immediately downloaded V1.14. Sure enough, in the CUDA Devices tab there is an option beside my graphics card called "Use Priority". However ticking or unticking this option seems to have no effect. In fact, to be honest this version seems to be a lot more sluggish that V1.1. I have quite an old card so is that an issue or do I need to do anything different? I have a Geforce 430GT card and it says beside it that the compute model is 2.1.
Any help would be greatly appreciated
thanks

[mib2berlin]

Hi, I am not at my workstation but iirc there is a new button in main view to setup high, mid or low render priority.
It looks like a clock.

Cheers, mib.

[Stealthworks]

Hi mib,
yes i saw that and tried all three settings but again I dont see any improvement in the response of the interface

[face_off]

You tick the "Use Priority" checkbox in the cuda tab then select "Low Render Priority". Alternately, get something like a H77 (or equivalent) with 2 or two graphics cards slot and make sure it has on-board graphics.

Paul