Which NVIDIA GPU?

[Guest]

Hi all,

I would very much like to try out some GPU rendering and therefore I am looking for a Nvidia GPU.

I had found a Asus 1080 Ti Poseidon 2nd hand, but Now want to check in with you guys what you Think is the best solution?

any 1080 Ti models that are better than others? If so, which one would you recommend?

 

cheers :-)

[jonmoore]

I'm a Redshift user with 1080Ti's and would recommend Founders Edition models as they exhaust hot air out of the back of the case. You'll be able to run up to 4x 1080 Ti's in a case without extra cooling (PCIe lane, motherboard and power supply allowing). As much as Redshift allows up to 8 GPU's in a single node, the cost of building a system capable of hosting 8 GPU's rises significantly.

There are faster 1080 Ti models available with greater overclock capabilities but those gamer centric cards are not necessarily the best for GPU rendering. You should also consider something like a 1070 (or even an AMD workstation card - great performance for OpenC sims is a bonus here) to drive your GL viewport, otherwise you'll be losing a significant chunk of VRAM to system resources. With the way that GPU rendering works, if a single card has 3 GB allocated to system resources, all cards are limited to using the same amount of memory as the smallest available VRAM. Alternatively if you believe that most of your output requires no more than 7/8GB VRAM, stacking your system with 1080 Ti's alone is the best performance/price option.

A final consideration is operating system. If you take a look on the Redshift forums at the benchmark table, you'll see that Linux basewd builds using the same hardware have a significant performance boost and utilise far more of the available VRAM.

But don't take my word for it. Ask for advice over on the Redshift, Chaos Group and Octane forums.  

[Guest]

Jonmoore, thanks for the reply, I've had a FirePro W8100 but found it quite noisy, so blower style is definitely not for my current setup. Therefore I considered the Asus ROG Poseidon, that way I would be able to swap in some water cooling with ease, at some point if necessary.

 

1080Ti definitely seems like the way to go.

 

cheers

[Guest tar]

evga 1080ti works well and is quite, running at around 1.5Ghz IIRC. I too had a blower style AMD card once and was rubbishly noisy and eventually roasted itself on openCL calcs. The evga cards are super quiet. If heat is an issue just open the case as it radiates into the comp instead of out the back. no big deal.

[jonmoore]

I had EVGA 980 TI's (SC ACX 2.0) before upgrading to the 1080 Ti's but kept one for GL duties. If my renders don't require a lot of VRAM or when running smaller OpenCL simulations I add the 980 Ti' to the mix. The Founders Edition blower style of the 1080 Ti's are significantly quieter than the EVGA 980 Ti's (I'm very much an EVGA loyalist so a move to a vanilla nVidia design was a new route for me). I made the decision to go with a blower style design based on the advice of a few users on the Redshift forum that run GPU farms.

I wouldn't automatically judge all blower style cards with your AMD experience. At the end of the day, going with most 1080 Ti designs are a good value/performce choice, just avoid the hyper overclocked designs. They're more trouble than they're worth and the price premium isn't worth it (IMO).

[Guest tar]

sounds like bad advice then as the evga 1080ti is quieter under load than the reference one by 2 dBA, that's almost twice as loud! At idle it's 0dBA vs 27dBA.  It's also cheaper.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GTX_1080_Ti_SC2/30.html

 

[jonmoore]

All I can say Marty is what I'm experiencing. And the recommendation was based on more than noise.

As I said, I've pretty much purchased EVGA for the last 10 years but I'm very happy with my reference design. Maybe the EVGA 1080 Ti is significantly quieter than it's equivalent 980 Ti design. I have two 1080 Ti's in my Redshift workstation and I don't find the noise problematic. But I'm using a HP Z series workstation which is pretty decent in terms of damping the noise of internal components.

[Guest]

It Sounds like evga might be the way to go, however I have for a long time wanted to watercool my entire PC with a custom loop. 

Is that a bad idea? Any disadvantages?

then I could just find a water block for the GPU, rather than going straight for a hydbrid card?

[Guest tar]

@judnas I'm not aware of any significant advantages/disadvantages of watercooling - i.e. a Canadian super computer uses low pressure rear doors for fully passive cooling whilst other ones use liquid cooling.

[Guest]

Ok, Thank you!

the reason why I keep coming back to the Poseidon is because I found one at a decent price, however I'm most likely gonna get a new card. So your recommendation is to look at some EVGA model?

[Guest tar]

I would as a fall back but I'm brand agnostic and go with the engineering side of things and weighing the price side too i.e. is it an r&D machine or a production machine etc.

Liquid cooling sounds like fun and good experience too, so I always go with the fun option, with all things being equal.

[Guest]

It's mainly an R&D/Personal Projects machine, and yes watercooling sounds like fun, which is why I wanted to give it a go! :-)

 

thanks for all the help, I'll take a look around and see if I find any good offers! :-)

[Guest]

Just to give an Update, I ordered a Strix OC model, since it was on offer, later the plan is to watercool the entire system.

 

thanks for the help :-)

[Guest tar]

Cool stuff. Nice! Just a heads-up that Nvidia driver 384.59 on ubuntu 17.04 breaks OpenCL. 381.22 works fine.

EDIT: Sleeping Ubuntu whilst Houdini is open will break OpenCL on 381.22.  Error in H16.0.702 is:

Quote

No OpenCL platform has the specified device type (HOUDINI_OCL_DEVICETYPE): GPU.  Falling back to built-in CPU OpenCL driver.

Machine restart is required to fix.

Edited August 22, 2017 by tar