OTOY Forums

Ok i think i have an answer

Please look at this:

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/Sea ... pNo=362017

Or search elseware on the world wide wibble as a Startech expander box.....Seems cheaper as well..

Hope this helps everybody.

Sorry Guys...

Dropped a clanger..

Reading closer it looks like it expands to PCI slots not PCIE slots...

Bugger...Thought i had it for a moment.

Back to the drawing board.

My best guess then is for the boys to commission a special Octanerender circuit board with an AMD or Intel Southbridge.I believe they will have around 40 PCIE lanes available and then add 10 widely spaced PCIE V2.1 x4 slots(but 16bit slot width) on the board.Put a 4 pin power socket on the board to power the southbridge and a back plane to hold up to 10 cards.Stick it in a moded PC case and add maybe 1 or 2 1200 watt Power supplies to feed up to 10 Graphics cards.

There.

Simple when you think about it.

Oh yes i forgot.You would also need a male to male PCIE Cable.1 end plugged into your Motherboards PCIE 16 slot and the other onto one of the 10 slots in the mod box to transfer the data off your PC and back again.Err that of course may create a data Bottleneck..Not sure

Oh and one last thing.

It would need a name.

I would suggest Frankensteins Monster.

That's it.

My head hurts....I'm off to bed.

heh, take an aspirine

and goodnight,
Radiance

When I first heard about this "expander", I thought that graphic cards are included into the price..

For my Xpander pro 2, I paid around 1260 USD (900 Euros), plus 154 Euros afterward to french customs for french VAT, and the price included a 4 years extended warranty and a Geforce GTX 260. So I can't say that it is overpriced !

Technically i'm rather happy of my Cubix box. The only thing I noticed when I put inside two GTX 480 is that one card is less cooled than the other one (5-6 °C difference between the two cards), but the machine works fine !

Well, surely, Cubix's cutomers are not going to accept to say that what they bought was not clearly a good deal, an i understand it perfectly.

But unfortunately, there are also some facts taht they can't avoid to see.

In some months, will enter into the market multi-GPU personal computers, and multi-GPU workstations. Those hardwares will certainly justify such kind of high prices. But for GPU expanders boxes, it clearly doesn't.

Moreover and as already said, actual computers and graphic cards don't work at full potential with mere PSIe gen 1.0. So, i think customers, like Octane customers, are expecting, as i do too personally, quite cheaper boxes and PCIe 2.0 compatible.

Regards,
bob30

How else do you suggest I add 4 gtx 480's to my mac pro without reinstalling every piece of software after buying a completely new machine? And I am not asking a question that involves unlimited time to mess around. I am talking I have five, 30 second animations that cost $2,500 each that need rendered this week and each and every week after that for the foreseeable future so I need this solution today.

Xpander boxes are expensive compared to what?

There are other factors non customers obviously don't see or understand.

Carl, perhaps, but i don't think the main basis of Octane customes are high qualified professionals in 3D. With the price of the software, it attracts as well the professional compagny, the independent 3D artist, the student, the photographer, the casual 3D enthusiast or even the 3D hobbist which does that during its leisure time.

All those guys need also quick rendering because they don't have time, and also are attracted by the high quality of the renderer. So, if you restrain the market of expansion boxes to professionals who get back the money in one or two productions, you're going to break the market fastly