OTOY Forums

Hello friends,

I am hoping some of you may have some insight to share based on your experiences building custom Octane rigs. I am building a new machine for one of my artists to use, and am hoping to maximize the cost and performance of the setup for Octane, Maya, Davinci and Adobe CS work. Please take a look at the components I have ordered and provide any insight or things that I may not be aware of to think about. We do plan to OC the CPU and GPUs, although primarily the CPU.

Thermaltake Core x9 case
Intel 5930k CPU
Asus x99e-ws USB 3.1 Motherboard
64GB Crucial x2133 DDR 4 Memory
3x EVGA 980ti Hybrid GPUs
Samsung 950Pro 512 NVME M.2 SSD
EVGA Supernova 1600 G2 80+Gold PSU
Corsair Hydro H110 280mm AIO CPU Cooler
Arctic Silver Thermal Paste

Miscellaneous:
Dell U3415W Ultrawide Monitor
Samsung UN40F6400 4K LED IPS TV Monitor
Blackmagic Decklink Card (for 1080p review of editing and color grading on Samsung)
Additional fans for case once it's put together and we see what is needed

Please share if you see anything missing, advice on bios vs software controlled CPU cooling, advice on GPU overclocking (is it even beneficial to Octane?), etc. Please help us make this the best bang for the buck possible! Thanks in advance.

Thanks everyone for all of their great tips! It's super nice to know that people on here are willing to help out from time to time.

Anyways, for those of you who are looking for similar information that I was looking for, I'll share what I learned:

The Hybrid cooling cards are absolutely easy to install and perform as expected. They are already overclocked to a certain degree out of the box, but we were able to get about a 10% boost out of them before things became unstable. Now, in terms of affecting Octane performance, YES... overclocking did impact the Octanebench score, but not to the degree that it affects gaming. We received a 388 score right out to the box without GPU overclocking (although the CPU was overclocked automagically by the Asus BIOS). Once we overclocked the cards, we were getting consistent scores of 411 with (3) EVGA Hybrid cooled cards. The best part of the setup is that the GPUs never got above 47C in all of our tests, making the liquid cooling alone for longevity a solid investment.

In the end I have learned that you don't need a custom loop to stack 3-4 cards and maximize octane performance, but you should be liquid cooling them using an AIO hybrid in these scenarios.

Right now I see that Corsair/MSI have another hybrid card that seems to perform a little better out of the box than the EVGA, although they level out with overclocking factored in (based on other peoples tests). The reason we went with EVGA is because the fan radiators are controlled by the card, while the MSI/Corsair model requires independent control via motherboard fan controller. We already have our MB fans loaded up and I thought it would make sense for the GPU radiators to be controlled by the card in our work situations.

As far as tips, we found a couple of good overclocking tutorials using EVGA Precision to OC the cards, and used the Heaven test from Unigine for the stress testing. We also baselined our tests using octane bench before and after overclocking.

Octane version:
2.17
Operating system:
Windows 7 64-bit
Devices:
GeForce GTX 980 Ti
GeForce GTX 980 Ti
GeForce GTX 980 Ti


Scene Kernel Ms/s GTX980 Ms/s Ratio Weight Score
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño) info channels 339.53063 81.25 4.179 10 13.929462
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño) direct lighting 77.54002 18.64 4.16 35 48.531844
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño) path tracing 65.815331 15.99 4.116 35 48.020358
Idea (by Julio Cayetaño) PMC 11.689142 2.88 4.059 20 27.058199
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev) info channels 134.512292 32.48 4.141 10 13.804628
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev) direct lighting 50.875476 12.4 4.103 35 47.866711
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev) path tracing 41.24399 10.02 4.116 35 48.021945
ATV (by Jürgen Aleksejev) PMC 15.071523 3.77 3.998 20 26.651676
Box (by Enrico Cerica) info channels 247.242789 59.18 4.178 10 13.926033
Box (by Enrico Cerica) direct lighting 48.933837 11.76 4.161 35 48.545473
Box (by Enrico Cerica) path tracing 48.742513 11.74 4.152 35 48.438045
Box (by Enrico Cerica) PMC 15.492222 3.83 4.045 20 26.966444


Total score
411.760818

Thanks for sharing your experience with hybrid cards, I'm very interested in them for my next GPU update, the temperatures are amazing and seems very easy to setup and maintain
ciao beppe