Building a 2nd rendering machine -- any advice?

[Phantom107]

Hey guys,

I am looking for some advice on building a 2nd rendering machine for Octane Render.

A short while ago I upgraded my GPU power and got 4x GTX 980 ti. My old cards, 3x GTX 770 and 1x GTX 780 are now sitting on a shelf. I figured that it would be cost-effective to simply build a 2nd machine and stick those 'old' GPUs in it. As it only needs to be a slave I thought about making it as cheap as possible:

Motherboard: ASRock Z87 OC Formula (cheapest motherboard I could find that supports 4 cards, socket 1150)
CPU: Intel Celeron G1820 Boxed (pretty pathetic CPU but Octane doesn't use that right? Right now when rendering my CPU is sitting there doing amost nothing)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport BLS2CP8G3D1609DS1S00CEU (2 sticks of 8 GB each)
PSU: Lepa G-series G1600-MA 1600W (got this one right now aswell, works great)

Any thoughts? Would this work or would I need a way better CPU? Does the slave PC needs to compile the scene on it's own or how does that work otherwise?

Thanks!

[itsallgoode9]

Does setting up network render nodes like that sill limit the VRAM to whatever you lowest card has? It'd be a shame to limit your GPUs to 2gb of vram, if that's what would happen! If you don't need more than 2gb I guess it doesn't matter.

[Phantom107]

That's an excellent point... with the 980 ti's I've been expanding on the details so I'd like to use the out-of-core rendering on the GTX 770s, which have 2 GB indeed... I have no idea whether that is possible. I'm hoping somebody knows!

[Stonefield]

I'm in the process of fine tuning my workstation and currently am running a Titan X card and two 980ti's.... The original machine all these were in had a huge case, but had lots of heat build up, largely because the mother board didn't have enough space for the cards to breathe (I bought Asus Strix 980 Ti cards, and I should have chosen reference models instead. The extra cooling fans these OC cards have, make them large)

So, I found an extended ATX board to house the cards with more space, but my best discovery was that SilverStone produce cases that rotate the motherboard 90 degrees... Meaning your expensive cards sit vertically instead of horizontally. That means less stress on the connection and better air circulation since heat rises up between the cards. With the top of these cases being equipped with big silent fans, the heat gets sucked right out of the top of the box.

[Rik56]

Hi there,
I am looking into building a secondary rig, it should be used strictly for rendering. I hope you don't mind if I ask some questions here, I think they should be relevant to you also:

- can I safely use the celeron CPU with 4 GPUs? Isn't there some limitations in place which would for example recognize that this cpu cannot "feed" enough pci-e lanes and simply disable some of the slots?
- what about the heat, I am planning on using a 3x 980ti with reference design and 980 with aftermarket cooler. It will be in a separate room, so I can crank up the fans to 11, will that be ok?
- is 1600W really necessary? I was thinking of getting 1250W seasonic, will that be enough?

[pegot]

Does the slave PC needs to compile the scene on it's own or how does that work otherwise?

+1 I would very much like to know the answer to this as well.

[bepeg4d]

Hi,
no, all the scene is compiled by the Master, in this way anykind of asset doen't need to be shared. For this reason, the slave does not need to have a powerfull CPU.
If the slave has some GPUs with the same VRAM, but less than what the Master has, you can activate the Out-of-Core option during the net demon installation in order to match the Master VRAM
ciao beppe