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I already own a PNY Quadro 5000 but it is not fast enough to render, so i am thinking to buy a Gainward GTX 580 Phantom 3Gb in order to increase the number of CUDA cores since this card is cheaper than buying another Quadro 5000.

Will the system crash or it will be ok?

Thank you very much indeed.

Intel Core i7 2600K
Asus P8P67 Deluxe
16 Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR1600 RAM
PNY Quadro 5000
Windows 7 Professional 64bits

Yep. Just use the Quadro Card as a display only card and the 3GB - 580 as your render card.It should work fine.

Ok, i will do it so. I will tell you how it will work.

Thanks a lot.

I have a similar setup and we have been trying to get a Quadro FX1800 & a GTX580 to play nicely together without much luck.
Everything functions normally but all Windows interaction is extremely sluggish. Explorer windows take seconds to draw. We've tried different driver combinations, tweaking NVidia settings all with no lasting success.
Hope you have more success than we have,
Steve

Sounds like your computer is using the 580 for display as well as rendering even though it may be telling you otherwise, and bypassing the Quadro card altogether as this is what happens to my machine because I am just using one card for both Display and Rendering.

Absolutely no.

Theoretical the combination works but practical it doesn't work correctly!!! If you look now in nvidia control panel (assuming you didn't mount the GTX yet) you'll see some special optimization profiles for 2D\3D pro apps, the nview manager, etc Quadro stuff. If the Quadro drivers detects a second GTX card the special profiles and nview stuff automatically disappear and the standard games profiles pop up. That means your 1800$ Quadro 5000 becomes a 200$ underclocked GTX 465 with 2,5 GB of ram, also the 10 bit color precision will disappear is you have a 10 bit monitor. Nvidia made sure you won't buy a (cheap in most cases) Quadro and after that a high end GTX cards to encourage buying Tesla ones.

If you are working in 3d max you won't see to much difference in performance between a Quadro 5000 and a GTX (if the Quadro features are disabled), but if you are working in OpenGL apps or CAD apps, especially CAD were are tones of limitations on both image quality and performance on GTX cards, you'll see the big Quadro 5000 acting like a GTX 465, in one word useless. So the priced you paid for the Quadro will become pointless.

Yet there is a way to keep a Quadro and a GTX in the same system. The Quadro drivers mustn't detect the GTX card so while you are doing your modeling and animation you must disable the GTX from Device Manager. Is the only way to keep the GTX undetected by the Quadro drivers and only if you are in the final stage when you have to work with octane and you don't need the Quadro features anymore you can activate the GTX back. It is a little complicated but the only solution .

Thank you, Marius 3D.
I am thinking in another way to do it. I am going to build a computer for just rendering (basically with 2 GTX 580 3Gb). So with the Quadro 5000 computer i will model the object, the i will export it and render with the 2 GTX 580 3Gb new computer.

Is it a good idea?




Intel Core i7 2600K
Asus P8P67 Deluxe
16 Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR1600 RAM
PNY Quadro 5000
Windows 7 Professional 64bits

Thanks for the tips guys.
Tried the disabling in Device Manager tip but didn't fix our sluggish interface issue.
The weird thing is everything else is fine. I can have a render going in Octane using the GTX, switch to Softimage and model, light, render etc with no prob. However Property page windows in Soft are really slow, maximizing 3Dviews can cause the screen to go black then slowly one by one window elements draw.
Same with Windows explorer windows.
Even with the GTX disabled, had the same problem.
I had the workstation working perfectly for one afternoon, by tweaking settings in the NVidia Utilities. Set all openGL to use the Quadro and all GPU rendering to the GTX. Worked like a dream.
I shut the workstation down over the weekend and on Monday the issue was back and now won't go away regardless of what is set in NVidia Control panel.
it's a strange one.

Thank you Maryus for that info

For me the combination of a Quadro 2000 and a GTX470 worked fine when using the newest developer driver. This setup seemed to maintain the good vieport performance of the Quadro and use the GTX470 in Octane. Using only the Quadro Driver or the "normal" gtx driver led to the slow viewport described above. I am not a driver crack, so I may be wrong, but for me the 2 of them worked nicely togther. Just switched to 2x GTX470 yesterday.