OTOY Forums

Jaberwocky wrote:T_3

Have you considered 2 way PCIE Splitter cables and rack mounting 16 no GTX590's in the case on the Big Bang board.

If your going for it.No sense in half measures.

That would be about 16,384 Cuda cores to play with !!!!!

well, i just wanted to be realistic otherwise i'd go with that: http://www.amfeltec.com/products/x4pcie-splitter4.php and equip it with 20 gtx 580 cards (a 590 simply has not enough vram, and the oc'ed 580 is already 3 quarters of a standard 590). btw. the choosen msi board only has 2x16/2x8/4x1 lanes even if it has 8 16x slots.

what i don't completely understand is, would it be possible to drive 16 different pcie x1 components from just one pcie x16 slot? because that would mean that the theoretical maximum with a standard board like that would be over 50 cards together. would be interesting to see if octane still scales with that ammount of gpus, or if the whole thing just implodes as soon as it is started

but i think/hope that my goal with that octa-rig is well within reach to it get real & working...

I am looking to build a tower dedicated to Octane. Maximum I seem to be able to get to is a Motherboard with 4 PCI3 x16 slots, each spaced as double slots, so I can fit 4x GTX590 in it.
What motherboard have you got so you can put 8 GTX580 ?? Or are you using a splitter.

Also, I just heard yesterday from the MSi importer in Europe that the lightning extreme series is taken out of sales, so dealers can't order them anymore, pity as it is one of the rare 2slot GTX580 cards (certainly ones with 3Gb).

on the topic of a max render performance machine, do you expect data bottlenecks, as using 8 cards - guess each using a 4x - giving together 32 PCIe lanes ? Is this fast enough for Octane swapping data with multi-GPU's ?

Or would a system with 4 GTX950 cards, spread over 40 data lanes, setup as 16/8/8/8x give similar performance to 8 x GTX580 set up as 4x ? IF the data cannot feed the GPU's is time surely our rendering performance will suffer ?

Octanerender running on a RenderStream VDACTr8 with 8 GTX 580 GPUs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1IRQTqMMY

asterix7 wrote:I am looking to build a tower dedicated to Octane. Maximum I seem to be able to get to is a Motherboard with 4 PCI3 x16 slots, each spaced as double slots, so I can fit 4x GTX590 in it.
What motherboard have you got so you can put 8 GTX580 ?? Or are you using a splitter.

Also, I just heard yesterday from the MSi importer in Europe that the lightning extreme series is taken out of sales, so dealers can't order them anymore, pity as it is one of the rare 2slot GTX580 cards (certainly ones with 3Gb).

on the topic of a max render performance machine, do you expect data bottlenecks, as using 8 cards - guess each using a 4x - giving together 32 PCIe lanes ? Is this fast enough for Octane swapping data with multi-GPU's ?

Or would a system with 4 GTX950 cards, spread over 40 data lanes, setup as 16/8/8/8x give similar performance to 8 x GTX580 set up as 4x ? IF the data cannot feed the GPU's is time surely our rendering performance will suffer ?

that msi killed that card (it wasn't really available at all) is sad, because it's specs - esp. in terms of voltage regulator configuration - were so great. the board in question is the msi big bang marshall; still 4 of the 8 x16 slots use only one pcie lane; but that isn't a big problem, because pcie speed affects only the time it takes to transfer mesh and texture data to the gpus - while rendering only a few bytes of camera or shader updates are transferred (or bitmap data, if you load new textures). on render perfromance the pcie speed has no effect...

Please, build 2!

Very GOOD!!!

I just bought a combo like his!
I hope you do not mind using your idea in my new workstation

If possible fill me in case of his that I can do one too.

http://www.nextio.com/products/vcore/extreme.php

16 Tesla....

gabrielefx wrote:http://www.nextio.com/products/vcore/extreme.php

16 Tesla....

... the price of the case alone will for sure let you burst into tears

And with the 3GB 580's, who needs a Tesla? They're a waste of money unless you're doing double precision calculations.

Any update on the OCTower progress or even test results - like how far have you've been able to overclock the GTX580, and what effect does it have on Octane's M/sec speed ?

Where did you find the PCIe extension cables ? My hardware shop claims it is very fragile.
Has anyone got experience with overclocking GTX590 ?