Opinions needed on a 4 GPU Rig

[HazrulIdzwan]

Hi there,

We're thinking of building a 4 GPU Rig for rendering. Running an ASUS Z270 WS with 4 Gigabyte GTX1080TI Gaming on x8. What do you guys think?

[Tenth_Old_Man]

These are GREAT cards and very energy efficient. We beat our old Titans and use much less energy while doing it. Very stable cards. Please water cool them though so they can render for ages :0)

[PiotrAdamczyk]

Hi, i would stay away from watercooling, becouse (assuming you are not experienced with making watercooling rigs):

- Expensive to set up properly
- Possible problems with the rig itself which you often cant handle by yourself. ( i had mine made with best parts possible, handled it like my own child and still had a leak)
- Difficulties with selling the GPUs after few years

and the biggest drawback-> if you run into any problems with CPU or motherboard or any of your 4 GPUs you can't fix it ourself which freezes your work during a project.

My main workstation has a problem with motherboard and it needs to be replaced, the problem is that everything is watercooled and the person that created the rig does not have time to fix the problem ( it was about 6 months ago ) so i am left with a very expensive piece of industrial furniture


The only good thing is that the rig will be very silent and cool, but as i wrote before, if you do not have any solid and trustworthy person that knows how to set it up and manage for the next couple of years dont go with watercooling. Also, check if your motherboard and case can fit 4 GPUs and at least 1500W PSU.

[HazrulIdzwan]

These are GREAT cards and very energy efficient. We beat our old Titans and use much less energy while doing it. Very stable cards. Please water cool them though so they can render for ages :0)

Thanks! Good to know its working out well for you! I guess we need to get our hands dirty with the watercooling Will need to do some research and trial the setup for abit. We had to get MSI Duke 1080TIs instead because the Gaming X's were all sold out. Thankfully the PCB is still reference so we cans till purchase a full VGA cover from EKWB.

What watercooling system are you folks using?

[HazrulIdzwan]

Hi, i would stay away from watercooling, becouse (assuming you are not experienced with making watercooling rigs):

- Expensive to set up properly
- Possible problems with the rig itself which you often cant handle by yourself. ( i had mine made with best parts possible, handled it like my own child and still had a leak)
- Difficulties with selling the GPUs after few years

and the biggest drawback-> if you run into any problems with CPU or motherboard or any of your 4 GPUs you can't fix it ourself which freezes your work during a project.

My main workstation has a problem with motherboard and it needs to be replaced, the problem is that everything is watercooled and the person that created the rig does not have time to fix the problem ( it was about 6 months ago ) so i am left with a very expensive piece of industrial furniture


The only good thing is that the rig will be very silent and cool, but as i wrote before, if you do not have any solid and trustworthy person that knows how to set it up and manage for the next couple of years dont go with watercooling. Also, check if your motherboard and case can fit 4 GPUs and at least 1500W PSU.

Super valid points! Yea we're looking at it with care, because theres quite abit of custom work involved. The speed improvements are just too attractivethough. But we definitely don't want to have it become a piece of industrial furniture as you say haha

[FrankPooleFloating]

PiotrAdamczyk, when you tell folks to avoid water-cooling, you really should explicitly say custom loop, if that is what you mean. Hybrids are considered water-cooling too, and it would be a shame for anyone to avoid those, based on your single experience of your loop taking a piss in your workstation.. which is extremely rare in custom loops, and essentially never happens in hybrids.

You do know that smicha (Earth's highest authority on building custom loop workstations) lives in Warsaw, right? He could have done it correctly for you. Hell, for all we know, he lives three houses down from you.

[AEponym]

+1 for Hybrid coolers. I use this solution and very happy with it. You just have to find room in your case to fit the 4 radiators.

By the way, I too have a question, regarding PCI lanes:

My 4 gpu's currently run at 4x instead of 8x or 16x (because I use an intel 6700K which only manages 16 PCI-E lanes)
I can't find benchmarks comparing rendering times between PCI-E 4x and 8x.
Do you think there's any significant difference between 4x and 8x regarding rendering times in Octane? (I mean, loading the scene in the cards + rendering time itself + the time it takes to retrieve the rendered frames from the GPUs)

[Zay]

And for my 2 cents, hybrids are too noisy on idle

[Refracty]

Hi,
personally I would avoid hybrid cooled cards especially multiple of them.

If you want to create a custom water cooled rigg I would only do it if:

1. you enjoy building a custom mods and WC Riggs

and / or

2. if you have a mainboard with 7 or 8 slots (Because the spacing of the cards is so narrow that you need a flat cooling block, or risers which will mostly create problems).

Otherwise WC makes not much sense these days.
I have an old custom WC rigg with 590s in action but the old fermi GPUs got very hot, so it made more sense 8 years ago.
If you aren't a WC enthusiast and you need flexibility (e.g. swopping cards) don't do watercooling but set up a good case with good airflow.

Building custom mods and WC can be fun. So it is about taste. The technology of the water cooling equipment won't change quickly and usually it will last long (with good equipment). But the cooling blocks will be an extra investment what you can not get back as soon as the cards are outdated.
Personally I would only build a WC rigg with 7 Cards. But then you can invest the same money in building 2 PCs and Octane's network rendering does a good job.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Hi,
personally I would avoid hybrid cooled cards especially multiple of them.

So how many hybrids have you owned?

I very highly recommend hybrid cooled cards, especially multiple of them.