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The render cuda calcs going on in the GPU will proceed at the same speed.
The initial loading of Octane scene data will take a little longer via a 'slower' bus but for all intents and purposes it doesnt make a difference to the user experience.
I am not sure you will actually notice anything else going on around you anyway if you have 5 monitors to look at...
This also applies to the usual video I/O for gaming and probably to Premiere GPU acceleration.
More important for Octane is if your want to load big scenes that fill the 2gb vram you will have at your disposal with the Quadro 4000 (the cards run the same scene data in parallel so vram isnt accumulative) is to have enough system ram so it doesnt page to disk while loading and 'voxelising'.
I would advocate for 12gb in your case because no doubt Premiere can make use of a generous space as well.
Btw you can use a 4x speed slot as well but this is not so desirable. Some mobo have 4x slots or reduce speed to 4x because they share the bandwidth between slots if they are occupied.
It pays to read up on the specs even if you spy say 3 slots in a picture.

I am no expert but I am not aware of any user setting to control the bus speed. AFAIK this is auto handled by the mobo as a function of the technical design and the cards populating it.
Some expensive mobo do have an extra controller grafted on that allows more PCI-E slots to run at 16x but this is not a must have.
Soon, maybe next generation, graphics and mobo will come out with PCI-E 3 which will potentially double the bus bandwidth. This will be backward compatible - ie a PCI-E 2 card will work in it.
While every speed up is nice to have I am not sure it will seriously disadvantage anyone still using Octane at PCI-E 2 speeds.
I am not aware of any slowing of other controllers that handle the usb or sata.
I dont think there is any practical issue to worry about with PCI_E bandwidth for the mobo you have or other stuff being affected.

I dont have a lot of time to answer ongoing questions but I hope what I have written is helpful to you.
The most important thing for you is to check out the ins and outs of the 'Mercury' engine re 2 cards.
later

hello,

i cannot thank you enough for your generosity with knowledge
you have been 'spot on' and i am most grateful

this forum is lucky to have you posting

you have answered all my questions and after thinking for a good 10 minutes
about any last questions to ask you...i have none...

may great fortune smile upon you...

jeffrey

hello,

do you have any quick insight on the difference between
'forceware' drivers and regular drivers for a quadro 4000?

do you see any benefit for studying up on overclocking the 4000 gpus?

i found rivatuner "NVStrap" tab in the "Low-level System Tweaks"
and am curious if i should pursue?

thanks again in advance...


jeffrey

You should use a Quadro driver for a Quadro card. They have optomisations for pro apps rather than gaming. Here is the latest one with cuda4. This is applicable to the latest Octane test versions available to users who buy Octane.
(I think the demo requires an earlier cuda 3.2 driver though - have to check up on that...)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-tes ... river.html
You need to check out on the Adobe site though if there are any recommended drivers for Premiere and in regard of the Mercury engine.
Nvstrap isn't applicable to quadro. It is for hacking some older geforce to operate like a quadro.
I wouldn't actually mess around with stuff like that for an education setting.
You want to keep things reliable and easy to administer.
Rather than use Rivatuner I would use a utility like MSI Afterburner for easy tweaking of fan speeds -actually much the same code though and the same coder working in with vendors.
There are other similar utilities from other graphics vendors like EVGA's Precision.
It depends on your card how much you can over clock it and have stability/longevity maybe only 10%
For Octane its probably best not to over clock because cuda rendering is a full on use of the card that produces a lot of heat anyway although this is not as bad for Fermi based cards (also in respect of additional fan noise..)
Some people actually need to under clock a little to have Octane run with stability.
Personally I would not bother for the Quadro 4000 because they are more robustly engineered, underclocked a little relative to geforce and have less aggressive drivers exactly for stability reasons with pro apps like cad, modelling and video editing. Performance will be fine.
HTH

Also keep in mind that premiere's gpu capabilities are a little in its first steps yet, imho. It only works with certain filters and effects, not all, and external plugins have to be coded for GPU processing in order to work. They can't quite be mixed so when previewing and using gpu computing some effects might no be shown correctly and at render they won't render at all if they are not supported. In the adobe site you have a full list of what is and is not working with GPU, I've seen it working on CS4 but only in previews, finals where rendered with CPU and I've seen videos of CS5 and it seems they've added many more effects, yet check out the ones you are planning to use, in particular any external plugins.

Yes indeed and there is a lot of good info at Adobe regarding optimal hardware and settings he should check out rather than ask about it here
I see Premiere and After Effects are quite memory hungry - not a user myself - 24gb sys ram would be more like it.
He should spec his machine to suite his editing needs rather than Octane use if he is still (if ever he was) interested in it

heyhey,

again, i can't thank you both enough for donating your knowledge

i have learned more about the inner workings of rig 'architecture'
in the last few days from you, than i have at the adobe forums...
not to knock them, but you go deep...providing me with a secure foundation
on how to tweak and not tweak my stuff when i get back to ny

my editing rig at home does have 24gb of ram 1600mhz
and an i7 930 @2.8ghz
because h264 is so cpu intensive i might try to start oc ing it to 4.0
i have a noctua cooler that is pretty good...

i'll let the quadros stand as they are...

at this point no more questions
i can jump and down with no cracks...

have a great day
talk to you soon...

jeffrey


i use evga precision, cpuz...

peaceiteasy

hello,

i am back in nyc editing with PPRO cs5 5.03
with the 2 quadro4000's
everything is working well

i have the asus p6x58d mobo
the gpus are in slots 1 and 3

both running at 16x (changed bios to make 3rd slot run as x16pcie)

PPRO only uses the 1st gpu for cuda

my question is

can i underclock the 2nd quadro 4000
trying get its idle temp down?

the 1st (top) gpu runs at 50C idle
the 2nd (bottom and pretty close to the 1200watt PSU) runs at 60c idle

i use evga precision to control the gpu fans
gpu 1 (top) is set at 70-75%
gpu 2 (bottom) is set at 80-85%

also, if it is possible, do you know what to specifically tweak?

evga precision seems to be the best possibility but i don't want to fry anything....



having 4 monitors is trippy

thanks again for your help,


jeffrey

I dont know why you think we are here to provide hardware support for PPRO for you...
try a side case fan.

hello,

i have all the case fans on high
i have the side of the computer off
with a big fan blowing on it...

the only other solution is to set the computer
by the a/c

the reason why i post here,
is because i get correct answers

the PPRO forum's knowledge doesn't get as deep
as it does here

thanks again for any more help,

jeffrey