OCTANE BENCHMARK: Submit performance scores for your rig!

[FrankPooleFloating]

BASTARD! You and Mr. Goreta should both be ashamed of yourselves... such a vulgar display of wealth and power!

Just kidding pal. I love pissin' contests... unfortunately, I will never, ever, be able to pee that far....

[glimpse]

Hi All-

Inspired by Boris with his seven Titans ...

alec

Man that's a beast!

I'd like to play with this mad renderpower..
ma render-times would be cut to 1/10th =DDD

[pixelrush]

Ah! I wish I could afford such things...
I am still waiting for Boris to post a video of his in action. Perhaps you will do that for us so we can all marvel at the speed of 7 Titans.

Looking at these gpu full boxes I wonder about temperatures.
I had to rearrange my cards for more air space recently because the rising heat was trapped/cumulative and the little display card at the top of the heap was overwhelmed.
I have put it at the bottom now and its temp dropped 20 deg C.
I left a 2 slot gap between my render cards and they run a little cooler but whereas before the top one was 15 deg hotter than the other (although within spec it was undesireable IMO) they are 7 deg different now. I still worry about the air circulation. I plan to get some smoke matches they use to test aircon ducting to see for myself whether my case fans and all are working together effectively. I suspect they aren't and there is some improvement to be made yet.

Anyway very nice render rig you have there.

[smicha]

Now your signature "EVGA TITAN X4" is outdated, Alec

[BorisGoreta]

Both of my boxes are opened on one side for better cooling, I don't understand why some people close them, it is visually more appealing this way.

[smicha]

I need your advice guys.

Next week/month I am assembling a 4xTITAN computer. At first my choice went to Asus WS motherboard series, i.e., P9X79-E WS. But when I read some reviews and on newegg I decided not go with it
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131971

I also thought about evga x79 dark and asus rampage IV black edition.

Do you have any experience with a very good motherboard for 4xTITANs?

[Seekerfinder]

I need your advice guys.

Next week/month I am assembling a 4xTITAN computer. At first my choice went to Asus WS motherboard series, i.e., P9X79-E WS. But when I read some reviews and on newegg I decided not go with it
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131971

I also thought about evga x79 dark and asus rampage IV black edition.

Do you have any experience with a very good motherboard for 4xTITANs?

Hi Smicha,
I happen to have just started building a new machine on a P9X79-E WS, which I purchased after much research to get an optimal Octane / multi-GPU board. Admittedly, I have only just started the build but here is what I can say about some of those posts on newegg.com. I am not trying to change your mind or anything, just share the homework I have done and why I chose the board. I also mulled over it for a long time...

1. One of the main complaints seems to be around the bios upgrade seemingly as a result of the lack of proper info from Asus regarding the renaming convention of the bios flash. Asus just released a new bios in the last few days (v. 1406) and, after renaming to the correct convention (P9X79EWS.CAP), my board seemed to have flashed just fine (installing a 4930K);
2. The other main issue people seem to have is the USB 3.0 claim. Asus claim a "USB READY" feature is deceptive it seems because X79 chipsets can't natively support USB 3.0 as far as I know. But, assuming one does due research before investing in such a system, this fact is well known (here is one source: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... eview.html);
3. Then there are folk complaining about the ram clock speed at the max ram config of 64GB. I think it supports a limited amount of RAM products/manufacturer's in a 64GB config and at less than maximum clock rates. However, I am going for 32GIG for now and should be able to run that at 2400mhz, though this would not make a big difference in day to day work;
4. Asus support clearly sucks. I have had the same experience here in South Africa. They have their noses in the air instead of their feet and eyes on the ground. However, this fact seems to influence at least some of those reviews and I believe one should be aware of that when reading these reviews. Also bear in mind that many of these reviews were written before BIOS v. 1301 was release, which added support for IB-E processors (around August I think) - this was a major cause for MB's not posting.

My own conclusion is that, for a 'non-server' workstation board, the X79 with IB-E is still a winner, particularly if it offers 7 PCI slots. If you need USB 3.0 support and don't mind slightly less CPU power (I need both), go for Haswell i7 (LGA 1150 socket) board (there are many). But Haswell did not get a great reception and these chipsets have some other limitations (like only PCIe 2.0 support). If you have the budget and need to have the best of both worlds, go for the Z9PE-D8 WS (BorisGoreta's board) which has a c602 chipset, supports PCI 3.0 and 80 lanes to your 7 PCI slots (if you install both processors). But bear in mind it only takes Xeons and those babies are expensive.

Though the P9X79-E WS is probably one of the last Asus boards to be built on Intel's X79 aging chipset, it is too important a board for them to neglect. If the IB-E CPU's were crap, this would have been a whole different story. But they're not. There have been a number of bios upgrades for the board and I think that, despite Asus's poor technical support and unfortunate somewhat deceptive marketing, their engineering design team does not suffer those ills. It is a great board once you can live with the limitations listed above.

If you're still reading at this point, here is a link that helped me a bit in decision making: http://www.overclock.net/t/1400061/asus ... -owners/10

Hope this is of value to some.

Seeker

[smicha]

Seeker,
Many many thanks for such extensive description!

Does 2400mhz of RAM improves performance of Octane (vs e.g. 1600mhz which I usually set)?

No budget now for Xeons.

smicha

[Seekerfinder]

Seeker,
Many many thanks for such extensive description!

Does 2400mhz of RAM improves performance of Octane (vs e.g. 1600mhz which I usually set)?

No budget now for Xeons.

smicha

No prob Smicha,
There are undoubtedly others here better qualified that I am regarding your question but my understanding is that overclocking RAM to 2400 (I don't think you can even buy native RAM at that speed - ?) would make very little difference on performance of most applications, including Octane.

Here's what a quick google search coughed up: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/27821 ... erclocking

Best,
Seeker

[smicha]

Thanks seeker.

I am leaning towards asus rampage IV black edition. Anyway, I'll post some info soon about the new machine.

Wishes,

smicha