quadro or geforce

[nubz]

Hi all,

I do a bit of 3d rendering as a hobby, mainly with poser/zbrush/octane, and im looking at putting a third video card in my machine. When using poser and other 3d applications, when you have a large amount of objects in your scene, the viewport becomes sluggish.

So my question is: to help improve sluggish viewport, would a quadro k2000 (2gb vram) be better than a geforce gaming card with 3gb vram or more?

 

[JackNaylorPE]

That's a question better suited for your application vendor. While most CAD applications run better on GeForce, rendering is kinda iffy and it's very application specific.

 

[k1114]

You say 3rd gpu, so what else do you have? What are your specs? Gpu performance will be different per software.

 

[nubz]

Thanks for the replies. My full specs are:

I7 4770k
Gigabyte g1 sniper 5
Two gtx780
32gig corsair platinum 1600
Samsung ssd
Corsair ax1200 psu
Windows 7 pro 64bit

I have actually had a thought regarding this...my mobo has 2 pci 3 x16 slots and 2 pci 3 x8 slots. The x8 slots share bandwidth with the x16 slots, so if i understand this correctly, if i add a third gpu to one of the x8 slots, i am bottlenecking the two 780s.

What kind of performance loss would i be looking at by doing this?

 

[JackNaylorPE]

If you are using two PCI-E slots for SLI inserting any card into a 3rd PCI-E slot will generally move you to x4 disable SLI. The exception here is a PLX chip and the Sniper is equipped with the PLX PEX8747 chip which allows you t use up to 4 slots w/o messing up anything SLI wise.

However, I must say though O have done build with more than 2 cards in SLI, I never did one with 2 cards in SLI and one doing sumthin else....so not sure how this figures into things.

 

[nubz]

Hmmm, thats interesting. Would love if someone could confirm having third gpu outside sli will still work as above scenario

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Well I do know it works with say a 3rd card as say dedicated PhysX card but I have no direct knowledge of how one uses a workstation card in a mix w/ two gaming cards .... something in the back of my head is saying that ya can do it if the workstation card goes to a separate monitor, but I'm old so I don't trust everything it says nowadays ....seems like it's a recollection from the days when if you had 2 MB of VRAM you were envied by all.

 

[nubz]

I wasnt set on a quadro just yet. I think for a quadro to be better than a decent geforce card for what i want to do, i would need to go for something better than a k2000, which is more than i want to spend. I have my old gtx680 4gb here that i am going to put back in first to see how it goes.

I also will be using only 2 monitors, with all video cards plugged into both. Let me explain a bit more: the idea is to use the hdmi/DP outputs in the 3rd card and run them to the hdmi channels on my monitors, and have my monitors on the hdmi channels when rendering (so the two 780s power the render engine (octane) with no effect to windows performance, so i can multitask). And when i want to play a game and make use of sli, switch to dvi channels on my monitors, using the dvi outputs on the 780

 

[JackNaylorPE]

The thought of doing that on a daily basis made my head hurt