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So... finally 8 GTX680?

Hm they are looking like AMD-Cards, not like Nvidia-Cards...

So... no news about evolution of this Octower?

Looks nice! What kind of a board are you gona be using? If they already have consumer level boards with 8 pci express slots... then I really need to get up to date on hardware

Don't know if this is still an ongoing project but I would be interest in what board you were planning to use? The max. I could find is a board with 7 16x mechanical slots.
I can't see how those GTX580s would perform anywhere near their full performance on a 4x electrical slot or is Octane undepended by the bandwidth?

I had a very similar idea recently, this can be done with very low cost, doing the case vertically like you is really a bad (heat, height etc.) an expensive idea. Do it horizontally, you can easially mount the cards the way they are intended and the case can be built out of nearly anything. Just thing of standard case that has only its backplane and not "slots". Just something to hand the cards in.
Also its important to use a powered riser, otherwise you can may damage your GPUs.

mainframefx wrote:Don't know if this is still an ongoing project but I would be interest in what board you were planning to use? The max. I could find is a board with 7 16x mechanical slots.
I can't see how those GTX580s would perform anywhere near their full performance on a 4x electrical slot or is Octane undepended by the bandwidth?

I had a very similar idea recently, this can be done with very low cost, doing the case vertically like you is really a bad (heat, height etc.) an expensive idea. Do it horizontally, you can easially mount the cards the way they are intended and the case can be built out of nearly anything. Just thing of standard case that has only its backplane and not "slots". Just something to hand the cards in.
Also its important to use a powered riser, otherwise you can may damage your GPUs.

since working on something else octane-related, i didn't got quite far with this. the board in question was the big bang marshall from msi. but i doubt it is still on sale.

pcie bandwidth is indeed not a real concern. it is only used to transfer geometry data to the gpu and the rendered image back, all rendering (currently) relies completely on gpu vram, thus there is no slowdown from that, whatsoever. since there are splitters i.e. from 1x16 to 4x4, it'll be still possible to build a rig with even more than 8 gpus, but imo the commercial version of octane won't use more than 8 gpus anyway (but i'm maybe wrong here). since 580s now go for half the price than a year ago - and are still the best bet for octane (as long as 3gb are enough) - it'll still be very interesting to build something like that.

btw, the idea was to mount the cards in a 45° angel, with the backplate up, and a big fan behind all them (and of course no front cover), so that the heat can easily dissipate into the environment all around the cards. all this while keeping a really tiny footprint. also the cards don't overlap much... usually you don't need much airflow on cards that are not inside a closed tower to keep the temps low, so i bet this could work

Hey guyz, I got PCIe xtension cables from amazon, they actually does works well. But PCIe 2.0 became PCIe 1.1
Well I can say I already did 100`s of renders and gtx580 3gb on the cable works just fine. BUT 15 is really no so long lenght as you may think. 15sm is enought to get you gtx out of the tiny PCIe slots, not more

The only problem I have met is that sometimes my middle gtx580 which is out of the PC runs half of Clk. Lets say all cards tuned to work on 750Ghz but middle card jumping to 450Ghz while render and you can do anything without rebooting. But this problem looks like in the past after 306.23 driver and 3.02 oct for max

Take care, wish you all luck with freaking out your systems))

Oh and why I did all this? Cos stupid motherboard space has 4 PCIe so close to each other that octane fire up each of my gtx580 to 96 degrees. It could be more than 96 if I would not stop rendering. So After I moved middle card with the extension cable even with 10s of rendering hours temp never goes higher then 84degrees which is ok for me. And middle card never goes higher then 76 deg

Regards
be_fast

Thank you for the clarification and testing be_fast
No news project start? Because I'd like to make a renderstation comparable to it. I asked Windows and I do not know if my Win 7 Pro 64bit can support 8 gpu ...

Looks interesting, can you use GPU's in octane in distributed rendering mode like vray? I mean if you have a board with 4 GPU's and another board with also 4 GPU's, can Octane find both boards from another totally different machine and use all 8 GPU's to render?