Need help with System Configuration

[RobSteady]

Hi guys,

I'm planing to upgrade my system with an additional GPU (Titan).
Please see image for details. Text in the image is wrong; it's a Gigabyte p67a-ud3-b3.
I would use the 560 for display and the Titan for render.
Do you think it's possible to upgrade like this (heat etc.)?
Can I plug the SATA2 HDD's into SATA3? Otherwise the card won't fit.
Is a 1000W PSU enough? Right now i've got 650W.

[prehabitat]

I have a 1000w and it powers my OC'd Q9550, my GTX590 and a GTX560ti 2gb i borrowed from a mate (for viewport).
Looks like a good plan!

[voon]

You don't need 1000W for just a 560 and a titan ... 700+ would be more than enough at even maximum theoretical peak. If your PSU is high end, you probably don't even need a new one, as long as it can deliver enough power on its 12V chains ... depends a bit on how it is built.


It's not a good idea to buy vastly oversized PSUs, you get outside the efficiency if your load is too small. But: Buy quality! Only those deliver the named power (and often a bit more). A cheap noname crap "1000W" might struggle delivering 200 and go up in smoke a bit later. Which doesn't mean an unknown name per se is bad, as nearly all PSUs are manufactured by large and to most people unknown makers (like Chicony etc). PSU ranges from someone like Cooler Master actually come from all kinds of manufacturing sources.

And yes, SATA3 is downward compatible.

[RobSteady]

Ok, cool.
So everything should work out fine?
Then I would order the Titan and a ~800W BeQuiet PSU...

[voon]

800W can easily drive even two titans plus a heavy CPU and a system stuffed with RAM and a few harddisks. BeQuet is usually good, but might want to get one of their better series,too. If you're shopping for high end, you can also have a look at the Corsair AX760i. But less usually works as well. That should work out fine, if you can fit them nicely into your PC case.

But are you sure you need a Titan? A 780ti beats a titan gaming wise, and since Octane is not double precision float, I'd guss that the Titan has no advantage with it? Don't cite me on it, though, might want to get an answer from the Octane Team here.

Personally, I'm waiting for the 880, which I hope will include the latest tiling textures for games and such, at least 4 GB of mem (nice for cuda rendering) and ... spposedly.. a huge bunch of CUDA cores. But that will be at least may or so for them to show up.

[FooZe]

The 780ti seems to be faster in octane than a Titan but doesn't come with 6GB of VRAM.

Thanks
Chris.

[RobSteady]

I don't want to run short into memory. That's why I chose the 6GB Titan.
I'm used to work on relatively complex architectural scenes with vray on a hp workstation with 32 GB ram (lots of MultiScatter, proxies, highres textures/ hdri's).
Two more questions:
1. How much vram for instance consumes a 15000 x 7500 hdri map?
2. What about the pciex16 and the pciex4? Will the viewport in 3ds max be slower when using x4?

[FooZe]

1) A 15000x7500 HDRI take up about 860MB of space without importance sampling.
With importance sampling you are looking at about another 430MB (about 1.3GB total).
2) I don't think PCIe x4 will be a problem. If there is any slow down i don't think it will be much.
Rendering speed should not really be effected (ie: MSamp/sec).

Thanks
Chris.

[RobSteady]

Thanks guys!
How does it work when I later exchange the 560ti with a second Titan?
Can I then use one Titan for display and one for test renderings? And for final renders add the second Titan for rendering?
The card that is used for viewport and rendering will have less vram?

[mib2berlin]

Hi.

Can I then use one Titan for display and one for test renderings? And for final renders add the second Titan for rendering?

Yes.

The card that is used for viewport and rendering will have less vram?

Yes, about 3-400 MB for your OS.

Cheers, mib.