OTOY Forums

Hey Guis,

i am still making plans on what would be the "best" solution for really working efficient.

Efficient meaning not to have your workstation running 4 cards on 24/7.
This means lots of power consumption the whole day, or doesn`t it?

You all know, that it takes a while to start a final render...

So wouldn`t it be a good way to have one system with only two cards ( on a 6 or 7 PCIe x16 Slot Board) with enough space for aircooling the GPUs
to work with during the work and progress stadium and then turn on a mining rig like system with lots of GPUs on open Air with PCIe risers from Amfeltec
or other solutions that "rise" your cards from the slots of a MOBO?

For Rendering we do not need realtime feedback of the card, or do we? So it would not be too much of a problem even if the scene took a little bit longer to upload to the GPUs on the mining-rig like rendermachine. Or am I wrong?

Even better would be a solution with daisy-chained 2 external GPUs on a Laptop / Macbook running WIndows 8. So your System for WiP Work
can easily carried to your client`s place oder you can take it with you and work from everywhere on the planet, just take your laptop and
2 cards (maybe i a DiY Case) and you`re done?!...

and again - my main concern is power consumption if a multi GPU System is turned on the whole day.

My machine draws 165W at idle and up to 300W while 3D work is being done (4x watercooled 780 6GB, titan). The power consumption comes to play when rendering final scenes on all gpus - 1000W. But for setting up a scene you need just one card turned on in Octane settings.

smicha, ok- i undestand.

i thougt all cards would consump much more power .
watercooling is not really an option for me so i had another idea in the meantime..

what about buying a 2 real cheap boards with processor oboard like this one

https://www.alternate.de/ASRock/Q1900M- ... ent=search

then have one 1000W PSU and powering both boards which have each 1 GTX 980 ti on it.

As these external PCIe PCBs like this one here
http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4C%20V3.0.html

already cost 70 Euros you can already buy 3/4 of a little computer ( if you spend some mony on some RAM Bricks and one tiny ssd on top)

Am i right, that Processors really aren`t too important when the machine is just for rendering? ( processor shoulf handle all 16 Lanes of course)

What Do you think of going that way of network rendering when time is up for finale rendering?

I think Glimpse will have more to say about external solutions.