OTOY Forums

I am building a system that i want to run all the CG software (3dsmax etc) fast but also to be able to render in octane very fast.

Should i buy a system with 4 GTX470 nvidia cards and intel i7-930 (2.80 GHZ - 4 cores/8 threads) CPU or a system with 2 GTX470 nvidia cards and intel i7-980x (3.33GHZ -6cores/12 threads) CPU?
Also is 12 GB ram enough?

need advice

thanks!!

buy a power plant first

idtasos wrote:I am building a system that i want to run all the CG software (3dsmax etc) fast but also to be able to render in octane very fast.

Should i buy a system with 4 GTX470 nvidia cards and intel i7-930 (2.80 GHZ - 4 cores/8 threads) CPU or a system with 2 GTX470 nvidia cards and intel i7-980x (3.33GHZ -6cores/12 threads) CPU?
Also is 12 GB ram enough?

need advice

thanks!!

If you want to buy 4x GTX470, you must prepare powerful PSU(1500W) and proper case which has nice air flow too, and they are expensive.
So, if you did not have extra budget to buy them yet, I'd like to recommend 2x GTX470 and a powerful CPU.
But, if you are going to use Octane for animation, 4x GTX470 would be better.

Thermaltake ToughPower 1500W

http://www.tt-germany.com/product_info. ... ent&ovid=n

that will do? or do you think a 1200w will be ok?

idtasos wrote:Thermaltake ToughPower 1500W

http://www.tt-germany.com/product_info. ... ent&ovid=n

that will do? or do you think a 1200w will be ok?

1500W would be safe.

YoonKyung, from what I have read GTX470 and 480 at full load draw about 490-500W. When they work in SLI they use a little less, but for Octane rendering they will have to be utilized as parallel independent devices. So if I got it right, 4 GTX470 will need approximately 2000W to run stable and let say 300-400W for the rest of the hardware. Total 2400W. Do you really think 1500W PSU would be sufficient? Could anyone post some measured results with CUDA applications (Octane) running?

Storen wrote:YoonKyung, from what I have read GTX470 and 480 at full load draw about 490-500W. When they work in SLI they use a little less, but for Octane rendering they will have to be utilized as parallel independent devices. So if I got it right, 4 GTX470 will need approximately 2000W to run stable and let say 300-400W for the rest of the hardware. Total 2400W. Do you really think 1500W PSU would be sufficient? Could anyone post some measured results with CUDA applications (Octane) running?

Hi guys,

I'm running 2 x GTX480 fine on a 850 watt PSU, together with a decent i930.
Imo for 4x GTX470 you can get away with a 1200 watt PSU.

Radiance

Storen wrote:YoonKyung, from what I have read GTX470 and 480 at full load draw about 490-500W. When they work in SLI they use a little less, but for Octane rendering they will have to be utilized as parallel independent devices. So if I got it right, 4 GTX470 will need approximately 2000W to run stable and let say 300-400W for the rest of the hardware. Total 2400W. Do you really think 1500W PSU would be sufficient? Could anyone post some measured results with CUDA applications (Octane) running?

From the NVIDIA site, each GTX470 will use 215W at full load. That means that four (4) cards will require 860W (not including the rest of the computer).

See here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_ge ... 70_us.html

You are absolutely right. On second look I realized that the power consumption measurements listed on http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gef ... 85-15.html and the other review sites I read some time ago are for the entire test system not for the cards themselves. In that case 1200W PSU should be fine for 4 gtx470.

You might also look into liquid cooling, that's what I'm doing with mine. With that many GTX 4** cards in one box good airflow or no your going to have some heat buildup on the motherboard let alone the cards, plus it would only take up one card slot instead of two.

Protect your investment.

My .02

Lic