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Hi,

Sorry if this kind of question has been around for a while now but I could do with a little advice.

I'm running Octane with a GTX 470 and want to get another card, just wondering if I need to get another 470 or can I get a 460, 480 etc? When I bought th PC I specced it to handle more than one card so the power supply should be fine.

Here's my PC set up:
Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-950 (3.06GHz) 4.8GTs/8MB Cache
Motherboard: ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Memory (RAM): 12GB SAMSUNG DDR3 TRI-DDR3 1333MHz (3 x 4GB)
Graphics Card: 1280MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX470

Thanks in advance.
Chris.

chrisskinner78 wrote:Hi,

Sorry if this kind of question has been around for a while now but I could do with a little advice.

I'm running Octane with a GTX 470 and want to get another card, just wondering if I need to get another 470 or can I get a 460, 480 etc? When I bought th PC I specced it to handle more than one card so the power supply should be fine.

Here's my PC set up:
Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-950 (3.06GHz) 4.8GTs/8MB Cache
Motherboard: ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Memory (RAM): 12GB SAMSUNG DDR3 TRI-DDR3 1333MHz (3 x 4GB)
Graphics Card: 1280MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX470

Thanks in advance.
Chris.

mixing any "desktop grade" 4x and 5x cards should be no problem, so the answer is - whatever you like and would give the best return for the money, but keep in mind, that the least equipped card sets the vram limit...

Hey t_3,

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

Am I right in thinking Octane will just pick up the new card in Cuda devices after I've plugged it into the motherboard?

Thanks again.
Chris.

I started with asus gtx 470 then added asus 480 to the system later. For me all it took was to plug in the card on the motherboard, windows found the driver by itself and the card popped up in cuda devices in octane too. Only problem is I can not use all 1536 Mb on the 480 when rendering with both card (limited to 1280Mb on the 470).

Thanks for the reply Populus.

I've played it safe and gone for another gtx 470 which I found for a good price. I hope it's as easy for me as it was for you.

Hey t_3, quick question for you.

Do you think I would be okay running a GeForce GTX 560 Ti with my 470? Seems to be pretty much the same spec but I guess my concern is if it has a different architecture, would that cause any problems? I'm not bothered about using SLI at all.

Thanks in advance.
Chris.

chrisskinner78 wrote:Hey t_3, quick question for you.

Do you think I would be okay running a GeForce GTX 560 Ti with my 470? Seems to be pretty much the same spec but I guess my concern is if it has a different architecture, would that cause any problems? I'm not bothered about using SLI at all.

Thanks in advance.
Chris.

i haven't tested it myself, but mixing different nv architectures was never a problem (like having a 460 for display and a 8800 for physx), so it shouldn't be a problem for cuda & octane too - and the performance should just add up; in fact, the differences between 4x and 5x cards are pretty small, even nvidia is marketing an overclocked 460 as 560 (non-ti)

if you grab a 2gb 560 ti, it'll still be limited to the 1.28gbs of the 470 - if both cards should render together - but it'll give you some headroom - trading scene size vs. speed - if you use the 560 ti alone (if necessary). using such a setup and aiming for rendering with both cards in general, you should use the 560 to connect your display(s), because only the windows active card suffers (from an octane viewpoint) from vram usage of other programs. so this arrangement should give you som 100-200mb more avialable vram than before anyway...

btw:

That's great, thanks for the advice.

I'm thinking of the 560 ti which has 1280mb and 448 cuda cores, so the same as the 470 really.

I'll let you know how I get on.

chrisskinner78 wrote:That's great, thanks for the advice.

I'm thinking of the 560 ti which has 1280mb and 448 cuda cores, so the same as the 470 really.

I'll let you know how I get on.

ah, yes - didn't even know, that such a card is around. it also has a 320bit interface by the way, which leads to the conclusion that this is more a 570, where some defective shaders were deactivated (a common method to lower the production dropout rate)...