Board with Lots (and lots) of PCI slots?

mothermachine

mothermachine

mothermachine

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Hi folks,

IRAY has just been announced as a free upgrade for Autodesk Subscription Customers, (http://area.autodesk.com/ibc/areatv-productdemos for more info) and it takes full advantage of CUDA GPUs, so I'm thinking that a nice box stuffed full of cards will be just dandy.

Potentially in the market for a mobo with lots of PCI Express slots to take many CUDA-based cards (460/470/480 etc.) for a small CUDA-farm.

Any mobo models out there worth looking at?

Which CUDA-based cards have the most CUDA cores? (no, not thinking of Quadros - ridiculously overpriced for the performance increase).

Cheers,
 
mothermachine said:
ok cool, cheers. this is looking very promising. i just want to see some benchmarks comparing a GPU farm to a CPU farm to see which is the best pound-for-pound.
Click to expand...

I can only offer experience of running 4 cards for distributed computing tasks, but I'd say the principles and requirements are similar.

Motherboards that support 4 cards, its not just the double slot spacing you need, you also will need boards with extra power connectors on the mobo.

Look at these, they all fit the bill.

Asus Rampage III Extreme Intel X58
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD9 Intel X58
EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI, Intel X58
Asus P6T7 WS SuperComputer, Intel X58 (Rev. 2.0)

And if you want to go really OTT:

EVGA Classified SR-2 Intel 5520 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard (270-WS-W555-ER)

Takes two CPU's and 4 GPU's

But you need Xeon chips and deep pockets :eek:
 
around here, 850W is reccomended for a rig with just two 480's. Off the top of my head they use 250w of power under full load per card (not sure of the value but it is significantly over 200W. Someone else please verify).

So yeah, a decent 1200W+ PSU (those new corsair professional gold series spring to mind) :p
 
thanks fellas. i won't be needing xeons, since the whole idea of this is to build a mini GPU farm rather than a CPU farm, if you see what I mean. so all the expense will go into the GPUs (and RAM, mobo etc obviously too).

But why will I need a mobo with extra power connectors? I would have thought that that's simply down to how many PCI-Express power connectors your PSU will have? (2 per card, so 8 in total).

Cheers,
 
well each pci-e slot is supposed to supply upto 75w of power to whatevers attached to it. (so a 480 will take 75w from the motherboard, 75w from the 6pin pcie and the remainder from the 8pin pcie, which can deliver upto 150w).

If you have four cards sucking a total of 300w from the motherboard, then this will put a lot of strain on it. For something like that it is much better to use the extra molex/6pin port on the motherboard to supply the extra power, and let the PSU handle the strain of what power goes where.
 
umm ... standard motherboard connections have a 24 pin for the board and either a 4pin or 8pin(sounds to me like you need to recount :P)

the high end boards have an extra 6 pin pcie connector just for the pcie slots. Some even have two nowadays. Just need to find a PSU with enough connectors :p

edit: i take that back. They seem to use extra 8pin cpu ones. Its the crazy evga dual socket one that has dedicated 6pin pcie ones
 
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thingemajib said:
umm ... standard motherboard connections have a 24 pin for the board and either a 4pin or 8pin(sounds to me like you need to recount :P)

the high end boards have an extra 6 pin pcie connector just for the pcie slots. Some even have two nowadays. Just need to find a PSU with enough connectors :p

edit: i take that back. They seem to use extra 8pin cpu ones. Its the crazy evga dual socket one that has dedicated 6pin pcie ones
Click to expand...

I'm with you! Time to do some digging... cheers :)
 
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