New System Setup

[eyelovemotion]

Dear Community

I have one question regarding setting up a new system.

I want so put 3 6GB cards in that system!

I have one older Gigabyte GTX Titan and want to buy two new Gigabyte GTX 980Ti 6GB.

Board i want to use: MSI X99A SLI PLUS INTEL X99, DDR4, LGA2011-v3, SATA6Gb/s, USB3.1, PCI-E 3.0 ATX
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-5960X, Prozessor FC-LGA4, "Haswell-E", boxed ( 8Core)

My Question(s)
1) Any further recommendations/ warnings?
2) can i put these 3 cards together since there`s one "old" in the system? ( i think it´s only important all have the same amount of VRAM, right)?

3) Must i install another 4th card for my Monitor? I think i can use one of the cards to drive the monitors, right?
Can this one card render and display at the same time or is this not recommendable?

Thanks in advance

eyelovemotion

[glimpse]

I want so put 3 6GB cards in that system!

I have one older Gigabyte GTX Titan and want to buy two new Gigabyte GTX 980Ti 6GB.

Board i want to use: MSI X99A SLI PLUS INTEL X99..
My Question(s)
1) Any further recommendations/ warnings?

no too much, just get reference design cooler equiped 980Ti as it will work better in Your case & avoid backplates..

2) can i put these 3 cards together since there`s one "old" in the system? ( i think it´s only important all have the same amount of VRAM, right)?

no problem at all =)

3) Must i install another 4th card for my Monitor? I think i can use one of the cards to drive the monitors, right?
Can this one card render and display at the same time or is this not recommendable?

there a box to be ticked in settings/cuda devices to give a bit of priority for screen on chosen card - without that being ticked & running rendering on all three cards You might see some laggy interface, but.. even if that happens You can always render on two 980Tis & dedicate single Titan for screen & other task. When You go out from Your PC simply enable thrid card & it would jump into helping to render.

keep in mind that screen/system uses a bit of vram depending on how big is Your panel & other load. so You migh loose a bit of vRAM there available on all three cards if You use all of them (with one share for the system).

[eyelovemotion]

hey glimpse

Thank you!

1) what do you mean by: no too much, get reference design cooler equiped 980Ti..
Does that mean that you don`t recommend the Gigybyte Cards? What card would you suggest?

2. wouldn`t it be better to have on extra cheap Graphics Card for my Monitor?

3) Will my Cooler Master V1000 PSU supply enough power for all of the components i listed? Or do i need a PSU that provids more than 1000 Watts?

[smicha]

something to read
http://tomglimps.com/value-based-multi- ... ne-render/

[eyelovemotion]

thank you guys for your input.

my preferred system would be 3 Cards with 6GB VRAM ( One oder GTX Titan i already have) and 3 newer GTX 6GB Cards ( reference Design)

i Think i should have one "normal" Card installed to drive my Monitor.

Is there a professional real good Motherboard which provides at least 4x PCIe 16 slots for placing the 3 GTX and one "normal" card?
Or even better: A board, that hat onboard Graphics for driving my Monitor?

Would that be a good solution maybe, to have a good MoBo with onboard Graphics for the Monitor and then place 3 GTX 6GB Cards on the PCIe 16 Slots?

[ten]

Beware selecting an x99 board as the cheaper ones including that MSI X99A SLI PLUS you mention only support 3x gpus, even though it has a bunch of slots (the last two slots are to close together anyway for 4x dual slot gpu).

I went through a couple of x99 boards before settling with the Asus x99e ws. It can hold 4x dual slot cards at full pci3 x16 speed without being gimped in anyway like some other boards (it could actually hold 7 single slot cards at x8 if they were being made.... and you had the psu for it . Airflow and heat might be an issue with 4 cards though so look into your setup and options for this (watercooling maybe).

ten

[decade]

But it seems to me it would be more cost effective to go with the cheap MSI board mentioned, the existing Titan as the display card on low priority and the 2 X 980TI's as dedicated rendering cards.
How much more performance would you get adding a mid-range display card (something like GTX 750 Ti I guess?) and paying twice as much for the motherboard ? Does it make sense to do it that way?