Dual GPU render slave

[bibi5000]

Hi!

I'm planning to build a render machine for Houdini/Redshift which will be used only for rendering, hence I want to keep my investments low and start to build a base for two old GPUs which I will replace later on if my budget allows it.

I have a 2070 TI an a 3070 TI which I want to use in this build - in the future I am planning to buy a 4090 to replace the 2070 TI.
To other parts I was thinking of:

CPU: Ryzen™ 9 5950X (I don't care if it's team blue or red, just picked that one...)
Mainboard: ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR (this board may be a bit out of date, can't find good information on Boards suited for dual GPU)
Cooling: be quiet! Pure Loop 360mm (not sure if water cooling is the way to go, would love to hear input on that)
RAM: 32 GB RAM G.Skill D432GB 3200-14 Trident Z
SSD: SAMSUNG 980 PRO 2 TB for system/apps
Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL (breathing space for two GPUs)
PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 1200W (aiming high for that 4090 that will maybe come later)

This would sum up to about 2000 Euro (2200 $) at the german online shop alternate.de which I would be happy with. Cheaper is always welcome, of course.

Apart from using a really old card in this build - what do you think? I do not have any experience with dual GPU builds, so any input is welcome!

 

[Alex Glawion]

If this machine is for rendering only (not for working on) I'd apply some cost-saving measures, like getting a lower end CPU & SSD. You don't need a 16-core CPU to do GPU rendering, a little 6-core 5600X will do just fine to drive the GPUs. A regular Sata SSD, too, will be fine for feeding the assets and saving the resulting renders to disk.

For multi-GPU rendering I'd stay clear of B-Series Motherboards, as you'll need a good amount of pcie-lanes later on when you add stronger GPUs. Get an x570 Board such as the MSI Unify or Asus WS Ace for best performance on those pcie4-slots.

Also beware that the 4090 is much thicker than your 2070ti or 3070ti, so you have to make sure the pcie slots are far enough apart tso more than one of them will fit later on.

 

[bibi5000]

Hi Alex, thank you for your input! Yes, it is for rendering only and will replace 6 older CPU (Xeon E3-1245 and Dual Xeon E5-2670) render slaves.

I thought about adding a beefy CPU in case I wanted to do some good ol' CPU rendering. It will be also used as a Nuke frame rendering machine - but Nuke is mostly single-threaded so more cores will make no big difference. Do you have a tip for a higher tier CPU?

I think I will go for the Asus WS Ace, it runs fine on my workstation altough the first BIOS versions where a nightmare, BSOD over and over. Space will be a concern and I have no idea how to figure out if the cards will fit before trying it out.

 

[PerterZ]

Hi, @Alex Glawion , I posted in another thread but it's 6 months old so not sure it'll be answered. Basically I'm also planning to mount two 3090 gpu on a lga1700 board with i7-13700K just bought, but the Asus Z790-P borad I ordered has a x4 support on the 2nd x16 PCIe according to their manual, which I suspect the same for the majority of lga1700 board. Would you recommend a lga1700 board that can do x8 and x8 on two PCIe x16 for intel cpu? I'm going through many manuals but not luck yet. Some said AM4 has a better chance to find it but since I've already bought the i7 I want to give it a chance. Appreciate any suggestion!

 

[Jerry James]

Hi, @Alex Glawion , I posted in another thread but it's 6 months old so not sure it'll be answered. Basically I'm also planning to mount two 3090 gpu on a lga1700 board with i7-13700K just bought, but the Asus Z790-P borad I ordered has a x4 support on the 2nd x16 PCIe according to their manual, which I suspect the same for the majority of lga1700 board. Would you recommend a lga1700 board that can do x8 and x8 on two PCIe x16 for intel cpu? I'm going through many manuals but not luck yet. Some said AM4 has a better chance to find it but since I've already bought the i7 I want to give it a chance. Appreciate any suggestion!

It shouldn't matter either way unless your scenes are way way larger than your 3090's VRAM capacity. If you want x8/x8, you can pick from our article here - https://www.cgdirector.com/best-z690-z790-motherboards/

 

[PerterZ]

It shouldn't matter either way unless your scenes are way way larger than your 3090's VRAM capacity. If you want x8/x8, you can pick from our article here - https://www.cgdirector.com/best-z690-z790-motherboards/

Thanks Jerry, I went with gigabyte z690 aero D. As you suggested, it comes with two x8 pcie slots and enough space in between for the ultra wide 3090 cards. All seemed well and I went on build the rig with a new evga 1600 G+ PSU ordered. The following is a disaster. I started with the minimum DRAM5, Q-flash plus the board as z690 needs to support the 13th gen intel core. All went well, then I added the DRAM and a SATA SSD (samsung 2T) along with an old evga 1000w psu took from an old pc. All went well, I installed win10 etc. Then I switched the psu to an used 1300GT psu that I bought from ebay, the motherboard shut off immediately after turned on. Switched back to the 1000w psu has no effect, so it's fried. After fried two motherboards, I ordered another and a new evga 1600G+ psu this time from amazon. Again, built with the good old 1000w psu as I know it works. After went into the bios and able to see everything I switched to the new 1600G+, it initially worked fine without the SATA SSD, but after connected the SSD the same problem happened, except this time I shut off the psu power swiftly and the motherboard isn't fried. I put on the 1000w old psu everything back to normal except the SSD is no long can be detected. At this point, the SATA SSD appears to be the culprit of the problem. Tried a different SSD and SATA cable, no help, might have fried another SSD in the process.

Do you know if there is any known tricks with the high walt PSU and SATA SSD? if this is a thing with the gigabyte aero board? I'm now starting to think about going with more expensive motherboard, as I searched around there is nobody mentioned a problem like this everybody seemed all blessing using high wastage psu as far as I've searched.

Thanks for any thoughts and suggestion.