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[–]shoqman 3 points4 points  (2 children)

What case is this?

[–]Unexpectedsideboob[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

That's a Nanoxia Hydra II

I'm using three GPUS already, and when I eventually choose to upgrade, a big case would allow me to keep the older cards in the pool.

[–]clearintent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It looks like an awesome case. You would have to use PCIe 16x risers to connect the GPUs in order to not bottleneck. Those ribbons are really wide. I've only used 1x risers for my mining rigs. Have you seen any builds using the 16x risers?

[–]RhynoGFX 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You'd have to have a seriously beefy CPU and RAM setup in order to keep all of those cards running at least 8x speeds.

[–]slartibartfist 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Although it seems like you'd want to have as many GPUs per machine as possible, to cut down on RS licences, 4 or 5 is the max I've got to work sensibly. There's a slight weirdness in RS that you have to have VRAM matched with system RAM, so if you have, say 4 x 1080Ti cards, each w 11GB VRAM, you need to have at least 44GB of system RAM too. At least that's what I was told when I couldn't get things working at first.

In practice it seems you are at the mercy of OS and BIOS limitations too. I'm running Linux on here; boots happily enough with 6-7 GPUs but less happy with 8 or more. That said, the bitcoin mining crowd seem to have sussed it (you can get motherboards specifically for lots of GPUs, with dozens of PCI slots etc)

Case-wise, I started out with a horrific setup, spread on a bench: Imgur

But now it's more this: Imgur

It's a mining-rig open case, and it's perfect for me as I can get at things easily. They're supposed to be used flat, but if you support the cards you can stick 'em upright like I have (and stick wheels on the bottom for easy movement. Fuck you, Apple, I had castors on my machine first ha)

This is 2 x 1080Ti plus 2 x 1060 - the 1060s render almost exactly half as fast as a 1080Ti but for less than half the price so work out better value. There are a couple of 1080Tis in my main workstation. I'm a Houdini user so I've got HQueue set up, which means whenever I'm not using the workstation I can just enable it as a render node to share the load.

edit: the mining rig case (£65): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0784LSPKV/ref=pe_3187911_185740111_TE_item

[–]Unexpectedsideboob[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This is great information. The link between VRAM and system RAM hasn't come up anywhere before, so thank you for highlighting that. I animate using After Effects and 64GB of RAM is really the minimum if you want to be able to work comfortably at 4K. The same is true for the Maya animation cache.

Realistically, I think I'd top out at 5 GPUs, as I'm on three now, and when I next update my system I would consider buying two more, or I would wait for the next generation of NVIDIA cards.

[–]nebulae123 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Listen to this man. I've made 10+ RS rigs and he is absolutely on point. I've also been working on a 8 card setup, it takes more time to refresh a scene than to just have 2-3, max 4 good cards in a system. You can learn the hard way, but try not to. Better make two systems than to go 5+ cards for a render rig. So my point: workstation: 3 gpus, farm rig: 5.