OTOY Forums

Hi everyone,

I'm going to buy Octane any day now. I'm also window shopping for more GPU power.

Can anyone tell me how SLI effects things? If I have two cards in a computer, do I need an SLI motherboard?

I've done a bit of poking around on the internet about this and can't see a definitive answer.

Octane doesnt work under SLI mode.

Octane works perfect with multiple cards in the computer though with near linear performance boost, 2x 3x speed and so forth.

Brilliant,
thanks for the reply.

you can even mix different nvidia cards and you don't need any bridges or SLI or crossfire supporting motherboards,
just more than one PCI-E slot, or, get a cubix expander for octane if you only have one PCI-E slot...

Radiance

I think its probably a good idea to say it works best if your rendering cards are the same.

OK, thanks for the extra info.

Currently I have an FX4600. I have room for a second card but rather than spend the money on another FX4600, I'm thinking of buying a second system, something cheap but with room for two gaming cards.

I think as far as value for money goes, getting a pair of GTX 465s is the way to go. I can get 2 352 core 465s for the price of one a single GTX480 with 480 cores.

Keeping things budget, this seems to be a good way to go.

Also, one question, are there any brand to avoid?

There is Asus, OcUK, PNY, Gainward, Zotac, Palit and Novatech on offer.

the number of cores are important speedwise, but you have to check the amount of vram, that'll determine the size of your renders, and the complexity of your scenes, so even thou 2x465 would seem like a lot of cores, your scenes won't be too big, check out this thread http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... =25&t=3565

Thanks for the link Kubo. You make a good argument. At the moment my scenes are pretty simple - I've never used more than 130Mb of my available 756.

At the moment I'm waiting for the cash to buy Octane and give it fulls testing. After that I'll know if it is right for the project I'm working on, then I'll know if I am buying the equipment and will think more about what is right for me.

Thanks again.