Support for 4 x GTX 1080 ti

[richard.b.mcintosh]

Will the following hardware support four GTX 1080 ti GPUs without bottlenecking?

MOBO: EVGA X99 Classified
CPU: Intel Core i7-6850K 
RAM: Corsair Vengeance® LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3000MHz C15 Memory ((CMK32GX4M2B3000C15R)

My purpose it to do GPU 3D rendering using blender. Further, is it beneficial (for render speed) to use a SSD vs a HDD?

 

[saint19]

Hi and welcome to Tom's forum.

What PSU do you have? Remember that 3-way or 4-way SLI is not officially supported in the 10xx generation cards.

 

[richard.b.mcintosh]

Hi and welcome to Tom's forum.

What PSU do you have? Remember that 3-way or 4-way SLI is not officially supported in the 10xx generation cards.

Corsair AX 760W Fully Modular 80+ Platinum Power Supply

I will need to upgrade PSU. I don't plan to buy all GPUs right now, but rather upgrade over time. I also don't plan to SLI, just use the GPUs for rendering.

 

[bjornl]

You aren't going to get 4 1080tis on that motherboard as several of the slots are too close together for that. The cards are 2 or 3 "slots" wide.

More cores CPU might help more than more video cards.

SSD vs HD makes little difference to render speeds. SSDs are faster. I would suggest an M.2 type drive for boot. A fast SSD for projects and several large disks in a mirror (or raid if you have a hardware raid controller) as backup.

If I were building a new render box, I would look at one of the newer i9's. 44 pcie lanes, lots of cores,

 

[doubletake]

What PSU do you have? Remember that 3-way or 4-way SLI is not officially supported in the 10xx generation cards.

OP didn't say anything about SLI though.

OP, if what you're referring to by bottlenecking is whether or not the CPU can accommodate all the GPUs, then yes it can as the 6850k is a 40-lane CPU, so each card can operate at PCI-E 8x speed. That's the best you'll be able to get as far as connectivity is concerned, as not even a Threadripper CPU has enough lanes to have every card operate at x16.

If you just meant whether or not the CPU will somehow hinder performance, then that shouldn't really be a factor if you're doing to be doing CUDA-accelerated rendering. As for the SSD v. HDD question, I don't really have any experience with what rendering with Blender does with your storage, but I would assume that an SSD would only be beneficial if the program is going to be actively using it for some kind of scratch storage while the render project is running.

 

[saint19]

Hi and welcome to Tom's forum.

What PSU do you have? Remember that 3-way or 4-way SLI is not officially supported in the 10xx generation cards.

Corsair AX 760W Fully Modular 80+ Platinum Power Supply

I will need to upgrade PSU. I don't plan to buy all GPUs right now, but rather upgrade over time. I also don't plan to SLI, just use the GPUs for rendering.

If you are planning use the rig for rendering I would suggest you go with Quadro GPUs instead of GTX line. Quadro are specially designed for that solutions and works much better.

If case that you prefer the GTX keep in mind that your rendering system only will use 2 GPU in SLI while the other 2 well...would be excellent for do the rest of task in your machine.

 

[doubletake]

You aren't going to get 4 1080tis on that motherboard as several of the slots are too close together for that. The cards are 2 or 3 "slots" wide.

That motherboard works just fine for 4 cards, but only if you have a 40-lane CPU (which the 6850k is). As long as you have such a CPU and not a 28-lane 5820k or 6800k, then you can use slots 1,2,4,6, which will give you standard 2-slot spacing between each card. You can check this here on the EVGA manual.

Also, obviously, big jumbo aftermarket cards are out of the question, and blower cooler or liquid cooling setups would be best to ensure all 4 cards fit.

If case that you prefer the GTX keep in mind that your rendering system only will use 2 GPU in SLI while the other 2 well...would be excellent for do the rest of task in your machine.

Again, this is wrong. Installing multiple GPUs from either vendor does not necessitate enabling SLI/CF. GPU-accelerated programs that use OpenCL or CUDA for things like rendering, video encoding, etc, usually allow you to assign tasks to individual GPUs, which has absolutely no reliance on the gaming-oriented SLI/CF feature.

 

[richard.b.mcintosh]

You aren't going to get 4 1080tis on that motherboard as several of the slots are too close together for that. The cards are 2 or 3 "slots" wide.

More cores CPU might help more than more video cards.

SSD vs HD makes little difference to render speeds. SSDs are faster. I would suggest an M.2 type drive for boot. A fast SSD for projects and several large disks in a mirror (or raid if you have a hardware raid controller) as backup.

If I were building a new render box, I would look at one of the newer i9's. 44 pcie lanes, lots of cores,

Can I fit GTX 1080s? Or what would be the best GPUs I could fit? I've seen many quad GPU setups online but know very little doing this

 

[richard.b.mcintosh]

Hi and welcome to Tom's forum.

What PSU do you have? Remember that 3-way or 4-way SLI is not officially supported in the 10xx generation cards.

Corsair AX 760W Fully Modular 80+ Platinum Power Supply

I will need to upgrade PSU. I don't plan to buy all GPUs right now, but rather upgrade over time. I also don't plan to SLI, just use the GPUs for rendering.

If you are planning use the rig for rendering I would suggest you go with Quadro GPUs instead of GTX line. Quadro are specially designed for that solutions and works much better.

If case that you prefer the GTX keep in mind that your rendering system only will use 2 GPU in SLI while the other 2 well...would be excellent for do the rest of task in your machine.

Can you recommend which Quadro GPUs to use? These can be quite expensive, right?

 

[bjornl]

Hi and welcome to Tom's forum.

What PSU do you have? Remember that 3-way or 4-way SLI is not officially supported in the 10xx generation cards.

Corsair AX 760W Fully Modular 80+ Platinum Power Supply

I will need to upgrade PSU. I don't plan to buy all GPUs right now, but rather upgrade over time. I also don't plan to SLI, just use the GPUs for rendering.

If you are planning use the rig for rendering I would suggest you go with Quadro GPUs instead of GTX line. Quadro are specially designed for that solutions and works much better.

If case that you prefer the GTX keep in mind that your rendering system only will use 2 GPU in SLI while the other 2 well...would be excellent for do the rest of task in your machine.

Can you recommend which Quadro GPUs to use? These can be quite expensive, right?

Quadro's are not required. Quadro's are very expensive. They accelerate OpenGL and so are very popular with people using autocad. Blender is a little different. It's been a while since I used it, but I don't recall that it would benefit from a OpenGL card such as the Quadro lineup. What little I've seen from Blender configs tells me that the cuda cores matter and so that should be your focus.

 

[bjornl]

You aren't going to get 4 1080tis on that motherboard as several of the slots are too close together for that. The cards are 2 or 3 "slots" wide.

More cores CPU might help more than more video cards.

SSD vs HD makes little difference to render speeds. SSDs are faster. I would suggest an M.2 type drive for boot. A fast SSD for projects and several large disks in a mirror (or raid if you have a hardware raid controller) as backup.

If I were building a new render box, I would look at one of the newer i9's. 44 pcie lanes, lots of cores,

Can I fit GTX 1080s? Or what would be the best GPUs I could fit? I've seen many quad GPU setups online but know very little doing this

Not stock 1080's. Look at the cards and look at the slots. The cards are almost all 2-3 slot solutions. Meaning that you might get 2-3 cards in most mother boards at most. You can increase this number by using very thin (and slightly complex to set up) water cooling.

If you are trying to duplicate a particular person's build, have you thought about asking them for their selection of parts and if they have any advice? Most people love to share their builds.

Are you a very experienced blender user? If not, I strongly suggest you start small. Blender is not like other 3d apps. It is more or less an acquired taste. Those who use Lightwave, Maya, Studio Max and Cinema 4d seem to be able to move from app to app. I don't know alot of guys using those tools who moved to Blender. Similarly I don't know a lot of former blender users using more main-stream apps.

Consider building your PC carefully for expansion.

Get a newer system based on the i9 series. For example the i9-7940x

Get a very nice motherboard such as the GIGABYTE X299 AORUS, with lots of expansions (includnig 5x pcie x16) and good build quality. The asrock fatal1ty x299 professional gaming is the only one I know that support 4 video cards (but the slot layout makes it hard to go over 3).

Get a very nice power supply (very efficient, reasonably high 80+ rating (gold or better) .
Also on power, get a nice UPS.

I would not bother with 3000mhz CL-15 ram. I'd suggest CL14 ram. Both Kingston and Corsair make nice modules with lower latency. Remember the ram won't run at 3000mhz unless it is set to. By default a 6850 will run its ram at 2133 or 2400 depending on the motherboard and selected ram. The i9 will only run it at 2666. A little room for overclocking is nice. But unless you are very geared towards that, I would focus more on latency than clock rate since you will always enjoy the lower latency and only enjoy the higher clock rate if you go there (OC).
I would also consider getting 64gb of ram, but 32gb should be plenty.
Also get 4 sticks of ram.,

Storage. Go BIG! 3d project files can explode in size. I would recommend the following:
a nice fast m.2 boot disk. A nice large SSD for loading your application and current project from. A pair of really large drives in a mirror to backup to. I would suggest NAS or enterprise rated drives. I particularly like HGST. The reason for this type of drive is that they are more robust. The disks are less likely to fail. The reason for the mirror set is because they still do fail and you don't want to lose your entire catalog due to a single point of failure. it is still a good idea to also backup to either the cloud (something like Adata) or a NAS device located in another part of your house.

I suggest you start with air cooled video cards and go with either just one or two.
I'd suggest the 1080TI because it has more cuda cores, and is generally much faster than the 1080 for your uses.

Get a nice wide case (I really like Fractal design's Define R5).. Wide cases have more air in them and so tend to be more thermally stable. Also this particular case is very quiet even with a lot of disks in it.

 

[rcald2000]

richard.b.mcintosh I recommend that you also post your question on the Blender Rendering forum, as you'll get responses from individuals who have a higher knowledge of that specific product. I read forum post over there all the time. FYI: The vast majority of professionals that I come across have GTX 1080 and Titan X's. I believe that most people did their GPU buying before the 1080 Ti's finally released, otherwise they would have probably bought it instead.

Blender.org - Rendering forum
https://www.blender.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10&sid

 

[doubletake]

Not stock 1080's. Look at the cards and look at the slots. The cards are almost all 2-3 slot solutions. Meaning that you might get 2-3 cards in most mother boards at most. You can increase this number by using very thin (and slightly complex to set up) water cooling.

I'm not trying to crap on your post here, but please don't misinform the OP.
If by "stock" you mean reference 1080s, then they most certainly do fit standard 2-slot spacing, as all recent reference Nvidia designs do. Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, that EVGA board does in fact support a 4-way setup. Check the manual page that I linked.

 

[bjornl]

Not stock 1080's. Look at the cards and look at the slots. The cards are almost all 2-3 slot solutions. Meaning that you might get 2-3 cards in most mother boards at most. You can increase this number by using very thin (and slightly complex to set up) water cooling.

I'm not trying to crap on your post here, but please don't misinform the OP.
If by "stock" you mean reference 1080s, then they most certainly do fit standard 2-slot spacing, as all recent reference Nvidia designs do. Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, that EVGA board does in fact support a 4-way setup. Check the manual page that I linked.

Ask yourself this question:
Why is there extra space between the primary video card slot and the next pcie x16 slot?
And
On higher end boards built with the thought of multiple video cards, why is the 2nd video card slot also positioned to have extra room?

Because if someone is foolish enough to jam the video cards in as tight as you propose then they get the prize they deserve. The only way to cool that many cards is to use water cooling. And even there you need to pay attention to size if you want the innards of your PC to look like a Jaguar.

 

[doubletake]

Ask yourself this question:
Why is there extra space between the primary video card slot and the next pcie x16 slot?
And
On higher end boards built with the thought of multiple video cards, why is the 2nd video card slot also positioned to have extra room?

Because most of those high-end board manufacturers (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA) are also GPU vendors, and it's in their best interest to provide additional spacing for their open-air cooler cards to breathe properly. I'm not disagreeing that it's not the best way to do things, but it's wrong for you to try to convince OP that it's somehow a terrible idea to try and run 4 reference cards packed together with standard 2-slot spacing. Pretty much every professional solution out there that uses GPUs for things like rendering (such as this Asus GPU server) are centered around the exhaust cooler & 250W TDP. That kind of stacked setup also works in a regular desktop case; you won't get particularly low noise and temps, but it will work. It'll certainly work well enough that the OP won't have to do a new build from the ground up just to cater to his GPU needs.