I wrote an email to cyclone asking for the price of the PCIe2-427 Backplane Card (5x Gen2PCIe x16, ATX Form Factor) and the host adapter... so this would fit in every standard Midi PC Case for about 30-40€. Seems like there are no resellers for these components, are there?
I am looking for building a system now with 4x or 5x GTX580 Beast Edition with 3GB Ram... overclocked, watercooled version, that I allready have one. It is about 550€ now, so 200€ cheaper then I bought it 6 month ago :9.
Did some research for watercooling, all these with very low noise components, cause I can`t outsource the GPU rig in another room and want to keep it quiet.
Components I found so far: An external Watercool Radiator MO-RA3 360 Core with 6x to 8x Be Quiet! Silent Wings 2 Fans - 140mm (16dB) (Radiator can be mounted outside the Case) and 2x Be-Quiet Dark Power Pro PSU 650W (16dB) or 750W (21dB), to power the 4 or 5 GTX580 (much less noise then 1x 1300W PSU!), an aqua computer Aquastream XT pump and of course some other watercooling stuff and a midi case. This is going to be a bit pricy though... almost 800€ for all the watercooling components... but who wants to listen to little helicopters, while working? I don`t like noisy systems, and as I have a complete watercooled PC-System, I can tell everbody that it is not only quiet and cool but also very nice for clean room-air.
Now it depends on the cyclone backlpane price, if I will go for this second gpu watercooled system.
So when the GTX680 is fully supported and a 4GB watercooled version is out, I maybe just sell the gtx580s and replace it with the gtx680... or build a second GPU-rig for even more power?
But this leads me to the issue: Will the GTX580s then bottleneck the gtx680s when used alltogether to render?? Or will these not effect each other, since they are connected in the 3rd PCIe x16 slot of my Motherboard?
Btw, I had a closer look at the Adnaco-R1BP1B:
- One upstream Gen2 PCIe x1 port 2.5 GT/s or 5.0 GT/s over fiber optic
- 4 PCIe Gen2/Gen1 x16 slots (downstream ports) connected as PCIe x1
http://www.adnaco.com/products/r1bp1b/
So will the downstream ports connected as PCIe x1 bottleneck the loading time of the scene and textures (500 MB/s for PCIe x1) and doesnt affect the render speed cause of the 5.0 GT/s?
I am a bit confused about the PCIe x1 x4 x8 and x16 thing and how it relates to the octane loading delays.
In theory it would mean it takes 6s to load the full 3GB memory of one gtx580, so it will delay the renderstart about 4x6s minimum when using 4 cards? That`s an issue, when rendering animation with f.e. the current C4D Plugin, because octane is loading, rendering, closing and reloading for every frame... Am I right with this math and thoughts?
Anybody out there, who has a DIY GPU-Rig already?
Or knows of a watercooled GPU Expansion systems?