OTOY Forums

Hello! I was wondering if there was any (advised) external enclosure (with PCI cable and pcie card) that I could buy for building a 4 GPU (GTX 590) rig for Octane. Those cards are HOT and I can't figure out an easy way to stick 4 of them in my box. (I have a watercooled CPU and 1 GPU already).
In the beginning Octane team was more or less introducing a product that has been abandonned since. (X-pender or something, I can't recall exactly)

Thank you!

Here is External PCIe Gen3 to GPU Desktop Enclosure made by Netstor http://www.netstor.com.tw/_03/03_02.php?MTEx
I just found link, not tested this device. Also interested in this topic...

I have this product, you can see it here in action at the bottom of a page:

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... &start=280

It works very well. You get a 1.5 meter cable to connect it to your computer. You need to stick one Netstor PCI card in your motherboard which connects to the Netstor box. The box itself is very pretty, aluminum made and seems quality build. You get two fans inside with controlable speed. PSU inside it is 1000W so you can stick 4 TITANS in it. The only bad thing is that PSU has two small fans which are very noisy. I plan to replace the PSU with Seasonic platinum 1000W, quitest PSUs on the planet. I got it working with 8x connection speed, 16x doesn't work, I need to ask Netstor how to adjust some jumpers, it can work judging by one of the online reviews but 8x or 16x is all the same for Octane rendering I thing, there is no substantial speed gain.

The real problem is with the NVidia drivers, if you have more than 4 GPUs in the system OpenGL does not work so if your 3D package relies on OpenGL you won't be able to work properly. Octane stndalone has software mode so it will work well. I got around this by connecting 3 cards with SLI in computer and 3 cards are in the Netstor box. This tricks nvidia drivers and then OpenGL works. Still there are 6 cards available to render and OpenGL works but penalty is slightly less available RAM because some if it is spent on SLI. Since you plan on putting 590 in your system beware because one 590 is 2 GPUs. But if you don't need OpenGL then this is not a problem.

A good thing with this Netstor box is that the PCI slots are further apart then in standard computer motherboards which helps with their cooling.

A good thing with this Netstor box is that the PCI slots are further apart then in standard computer motherboards which helps with their cooling.

This solves the only flaw of the Cubix Xpander PRo 2, in which one card is 6° warmer than the other due to occlusion of the fan of one card by the other one.

hand how much did it cost?
the thing is...if the GPU Expander cost about 2500€, so i buy a 500€ PC +New Octane License and it cost 800€.
so why should I buy the GPU Expander?