Question 3080 FE --> Cooling ok to mix into multi-gpu workstation?

[mook33]

Hi everyone,

My workstation has all "blower" style Nvidia GPU's, since all that heat in the case wouldn't be good if more than one was working away.
Presently the case has 2x 1080 FE cards, and 1x 2080 (Zotac blower-style). I've had up to 4 GPU's in there at a time in the past running without issue, aside from the middle-most card(s) getting slightly more toasty -- but not by much.

It seems only the 3090's are getting "blower" style cards from third party manufacturers this time around, which are too expensive.

My QUESTION is that, if I was to mix in a 3080 FE card (which is dual slot, correct?), would its "semi-blower" style cooler dump too much heat into the case and get adequate cooling itself? I'm thinking that since it'd be the only "non blower" card, then it wouldn't be too horribly bad -- assuming the 3080 itself has enough room to "breath" and get air onto the GPU. I haven't mix-and-matched cards like that before though, so I'm not sure.

For reference, the PSU I have is a Seasonic Prime 1300w Platinum. I might have to do some number crunching to ensure that I'll have enough wattage, but I "think" I will; the 1080 FE's in particular are quite power efficient. I am running a slightly-overclocked 6700k and 64GB of 3200 Mhz RAM in the system though. To round things off, the motherboard in this system is an Asus Z270-WS. Everything is just air-cooling, as I do semi-regularly swap components out to another workstation as needed.

Way back I had 2x 560 Ti's (non-blower style cards) that I was using in a single case, and when they were in adjacent slots, there was no room for one of the GPU's to breathe & it overheated/crashed...so I want to make an informed decision.

I'm in no rush to add the 3080, since they're impossible to find right now. If this setup sounds doable though, I may go ahead and sell off one or two of the 1080's in the workplace to try and cover / recover costs.

Thank you!

John

 

[Lutfij]

The 3000 series high end cards are all known to be hot headed, to the point that we pretty much dubbed it a requiem of the Fermi series, which, if you read through history and reviews tell that the card could've cooked eggs atop of it(if you gave it enough time).

I would advise on not cramming too many cards in your workstation, let alone another Nvidia card that is now known to be hotter than the previous two generations. Might I ask what sort of tasks you throw at your workstation?

 

[mook33]

Might I ask what sort of tasks you throw at your workstation?

Hi, and thank you so much for your response. I'll explain and answer your question below!

That's really good to know about the 3000 series cards. I've heard a lot of praise over the FE cooler, but it sounds like it definitely doesn't play well with others?

The mix / match of what the PC is used for varies. I use Davinci Resolve and Unreal Engine 4 regularly, and often have a deepfake (or two) running on the other cards for the YouTube channel we run (AsArt).

In this regard, having multiple (and separate) GPUs has worked really nicely: While one 3080 GPU would get things done "faster", it would be completely utilized by any single task.

Aside from UE4, the mix of cards I / we have now works just fine.

Working with and rendering out Sequences from UE4 has been the major hang-up lately. This is especially true with the card's VRAM usage. The 2080's 8GB leaves about 1/16th or less to spare. I think UE4 is trying to not use every bit, but bogging down as a result. The system can become unresponsive in short spurts before updating again.

To render a nice quality video from UE4 with the raytracing up, a 2,000 frame video can take up to 7 hours at 1080p. 4k would either crash the process or take well over 24 hours (which makes sense, if you multiply the amount of pixels it is processing). These are only "final" quality renders though, so other iterative versions will render out much more quickly with lowered settings.

The interest in a 3080 comes mostly with the idea that the more VRAM would "hopefully" not be as much of a ceiling (particularly in UE4). Combined with the new architecture & RT cores, the hope is that the 3080 would process things significantly more quickly, too.

If you have any further suggestions, they are very welcome!

Thank you again,

John