Converting Bit Coin farms into network render farms

[powermitten]

Hello! I've been put in a position where I am acquiring a few machines from a friend who is getting out of the bitcoin game. I'm trying to figure out how to convert these into an optimal setup for network rigs on a tight budget.
Both of them have 6x 1080ti, 16gb ram, decent quad core, samsung SSD's.
My main machine is i8600, 64gb ram, 2x 1080ti, 1x1080 (the non-ti is not used for rendering)
I networked the two machines together and while it did greatly increase my speed of rendering, I feel there may still be a bottleneck or two I'm not taking into consideration as hardware is not my strongsuit.
Also I read on the forums once that your machine should have 3x the RAM of the VRAM, which would mean a TON per machine in this case so am wondering if that's still a thing.
I've searched the forums but haven't found the answers I am seeking and would appreciate any help!
Thanks!

[glimpse]

good day.

Could You give a bit more details about Your systems (some other specks) & we'll give You recommendations what to upgrade and what to expect.

Also, it would help if You could run OctaneBench on both of those systems to see what You score on each of them.

Sinc.
tom

[Hatsize7]

Dear all,

I was about to start a new thread, but found this, so I’m posting here. I have the same intentions as OP.

Can some of you help me with the exact specs of multi GPU rigs, which are fully functional? I found an old thread, but it’s a 94 pages long, probably most of it is outdated, who knows what’s still applicable.

Is it true that I lose out on speed if i use an x1 riser card instead of directly plugging the graphic card into x16? In another thread they mentioned 20% drop in speed, but if that’s the price of the cheaper config (cheaper mobo, cpu, license, etc), I accept.

I bought a mining rig from an ex-miner, which I would like to turn into a rendering machine. It has an AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard, which has 13 PCI slots. It has two 2000W PSU, so power is not a problem.

Is it true that the CPU lanes could cause a problem/limit of how many cards I can run?

I read that for a period of time there was a limitation of max 8 GPUs running on Windows 10, but it has been lifted since. Is there a chance to run an Octane slave on Linux? I prefer Windows, but if it better to use Linux, I wouldn’t mind.
The master would be Win 10.

So can some of you give info for example in this format:

4 GPU rig
Motherboard:
CPU:
Graphic cards:

8 GPU rig
motherboard:
CPU
Riser/splitter etc
Graphic cards:

11+ GPU rig
Mobo:
CPU:
Etc

I don’t want to hack the cards with cutting, changing the cooler system to fit into single slots etc. Just simply buy, build, run.

I see there is also an ASUS motherboard with 19 pcie slots, is that a viable option?

This would be great help, from here I could determine costs and figure out the best benchscore/dollar ratio

It would be nice if Tutor or smicha would be able to comment.

Thank you and Merry Christmas to you all!

edit:
Let me post this setup which works:
12 GPU rig (for me it's 7 GTX1080 (older) & 5 GTX1070Ti (newer))
motherboard: ASRock H110 Pro BTC+
CPU: Intel Core i5 7400
PSU: 2x Senlifang 2000W 95+ Gold split with Thermaltake dual 24pin adapter cable
32Gb ram
12x GTX1080&1070ti with PCI-E 1x to 16x riser cards
SSD with Windows 10 Pro

Octanebench score is around 1770.

(at the time of writing I'm only having some issues with CUDA error 2 (out of memory) on heavy scenes on th 4.01.1 version - waiting for a fix ATM)

edit2:
It seems like you need to set the Windows Virtual Memory to 100Gb which fixes the Cuda error problem.