Is 8x8x2 any good for rendering with three video cards?

BigLouis1971

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Aug 23, 2013
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I have a i7-4790K CPU, Asus Z97A/USB 3.1 motherboard, 16GB of RAM, EVGA 750 watts Bronze PSU and a GTX 1070. I'm thinking to add two additional GTX 1070s. Do you think that my rig can handle the three cards and be able to get desirable performance?
 
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Daz uses iray which is good and octane is also another good one. Both of these are widely used. Poser uses its own superfly renderer. All of these scale nearly 100% and can use different model gpus, so you may want to look at a 1080ti for a better value.

Pretty much everything is cuda or ocl for gpu rendering. You don't find dx other than hardware which isn't for final renders. The only exception I know of is quicksilver. Gpgpu has been long gone although that does support multiple gpus. Video rendering is a complete different animal so I won't go into that.
Only two way SLI is supported, in addition SLI is a silly investment unless you have cash to blow on top end cards.
A 1080 TI is a much better investment. Even if you're only using them for CUDA, for more stable performance in gaming, you'll want the 1080 Ti, SLI is often not supported at all, and where it is scaling is poor.
16GB is fine though, not to worry there.
 
tripple gpus arent a great option anymore imo. nvidia doesn't officially support more than two. you also will have problems with some games and other things including programs that may not even support more than the first card. there are a lot of other downsides to multiple gpus. in terms of rendering it will be a good performance boost, but with three you are leaning on too much gpu and not enough cpu at that point. I also wouldnt recommend a 750 evga bronze series power supply for three gpus. Just doing a second gpu would be more up your alley. if it wasn't a money hole to upgrade the cpu, i'd say do that too with something that has more cores. and get a 1080 ti instead of a second 1070.
 

iamacow

Admirable
If you are talking about video rendering than SLI and all that doesn't matter. However most Z87/97 motherboards only supply 2 PCIE slots at 8X without the addition of a PLEX chip. So your are limited to 2 cards anyways. Yes you can use the last 4x PCIE (on some) boards through the chipset but it does not work so well for video cards.

So if you are using the 1070s for CUDA rendering you might want to invest in a single 1080Ti instead of 2 1070s. Technically you would be short 256 CUDA Cores but that is not bad for a single card.

For gaming Tri-Sli is no longer supported. However once again a single 1080Ti will be very close to 2x 1070s and preform better in a lot of games because there is no need for a SLI Profile.
 

ledhead11

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Oct 10, 2014
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I second everything Chugalug said but also, that PSU would be working really hard with 3 1070's.

I'm not sure how they work exactly but I have read on some forums how there are some rendering programs that can utilize multiple non-sli gpu's but, as I agree with Chugalug, not recommended. Plus with 3 cards you will definitely run into heat issues. I've done 3 cards on my x79 rig(SLI & PhysX) and it was fine but I also have a HAF 932 case with lots of fans.
 
I don't understand why gaming was mentioned almost exclusively like he asked about gaming. It is very important to know what type of media is being rendered. More info is needed, even what exact renderer would be very helpful as they can be very different in what they want. For the most part, sli is irrelevant. They scale nearly 100% for 3d. For video, it's useless as they scale horribly and even single gpu scaling is horrible. For 3d, multiple gpus has typically been recommended for value vs performance but the 1080ti does offer quite a bit of performance for the price vs a 1070. I wouldn't put 3x 1070 on a 750w psu anyways. Most gpu 3d renderer can even mix amd and nvidia as it's compartmentalized. That also means 1080ti + 1070.

We really need more info and a lot of the info in this thread is unrelated gaming info and/or possibly unrelated from not knowing what type of work is being done.
 

iamacow

Admirable
K114 thats why I said CUDA support. If the OP isn't utilizing CUDA or OpenCL in the application than a second card or third card will do NOTHING. Since I'm assume rendering means video than more CUDA cores the better for applications like Adobe products using the Mercury Playback Engine. However other factors come into play like system ram and simply data access. You can have 4 1070s and if you only have 8GB on system ram you won't be doing much UHD or SUHD work.
 

iamacow

Admirable


I couldn't find anything that says it can use more than 1 video card for acceleration. So would actually asked their forums if CUDA or OpenCL is supported or is it just DirectX which would be just a single card.

I think the "video acceleration" quote is just marketing because they don't say what cards are supported or not which makes me think that just any video card with DirectX works. Aka any video card.
 
Daz uses iray which is good and octane is also another good one. Both of these are widely used. Poser uses its own superfly renderer. All of these scale nearly 100% and can use different model gpus, so you may want to look at a 1080ti for a better value.

Pretty much everything is cuda or ocl for gpu rendering. You don't find dx other than hardware which isn't for final renders. The only exception I know of is quicksilver. Gpgpu has been long gone although that does support multiple gpus. Video rendering is a complete different animal so I won't go into that.
 
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