Question with hardware in mind.....
RedMachine72
Posts: 8
Not sure if this is the place for this, but I did not find a section for this question in particular. Gathering components for a new PC build and was wondering what others had so I can get an Idea of what I should really be targeting in my hardware. I have the cases (yes I said cases), 2 Thermaltake Core X9 stacked for lots of room for water cooling and plenty of room for expansion. Some water cooling equipment like hoses and fittings and 2, 360mm radiators. I just want an idea of how much hardware to put in for not just gaming occasionally, but serious graphic arts, I am thinking about changing to art and web design in school and want the best set up that will last for years to come. If people could list what they are running in their PC's, I would be most appreciative.
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You really should go back through this forum and read what has already been discussed- it was covered thoroughly in two threads recently. A wealth of information.
Most here are hobbyists, so get a good CPU and the best graphics card you can with lots of memory and you are good. Unlike gaming, graphic art is less finicky on the hardware specs, but the more memory the better and if using IRAY, a great Intel card
I just built my own Iray monster, so here's the build/story:
Asus Rampage V Extreme Motherboard
i7-5930k
Corsair H100i CPU Cooler
64GB Corsair Vengence DDR4 2400
Corsair AX1500i Power Supply
4x EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC+ ACX2.0+ w/ BP
960GB SanDisk SSD
NZXT IU01 Internal USB Expansion
Cooler Master HAF-X Case
Extra fans: Cooler Master JetFlo 120, Cooler Master MegaFlow 200
Problems I ran into...
I'm not entirely happy with the motherboard. Seems fine off a complete power down, but I've had intermittent issues soft rebooting (1801 BIOS... and in checking this, I just now noticed they've released a 1902, so fingers crossed). Also the headers on the edge of the board bumped into the heatsink on the graphics card in slot 4 which prevented it from seating. To get around this, I put the card up on two stacked PCIe riser cards and used standoffs to anchor the card to the case. Actually did the same for slot 2 just to give the fans on all the graphics cards room to breathe (hi/low/hi/low). This required me to modify the HAF-X air duct, but net effect, it's blowing air down underneath the raised cards and towards the fans of the two that weren't raised. And yet...
The thermals are still making me uncomfortable on the top graphics card in slot 1 (89C with the fan pushing 90% under load). The other cards are more reasonable (75-83C with fans maxing out around 65%). Wish I'd at least done the evga hybrid model in the top slot and probably all of them. The system is quiet under normal conditions, but sounds like it's trying for lift off when rendering. It also makes the occasional delightful popping noise under load. Sounds like it's just case heat expansion, but that's really exactly what you want to hear coming out of a brand new pricey rig... Lesson learned: If you're going to pack graphics cards in adjacent (double) slots, water cooling your GPUs really is the way to go.
In retrospect, I'm also kind of wondering if I'd have been happier just going with a couple Titan X's instead of the four 980 ti's - basically, yes, half the cuda cores, but double the memory. Two cards would have saved me a lot of the troubles above with both mechanicals and thermals. Could I have lived with less/half horsepower? It'd still have been a very healthy upgrade compared to my last system and room left to expand, but with the 980 ti's a really busy scene can still bump it out of 6GB and then what have I actually bought myself? Depends on what scenes you're rendering, I guess. I don't know... I guess best advice is to plan so you can expand, but don't overbuy until you know you need it. My system finally just came together a couple weeks ago, so I'm still feeling my way with it. It's a beast - just not always a well behaved one as of yet.
While this isn't helpful now since you've built the system already, if you're going to put in 4gpus, the reference cooler would get you pretty good temps without watercooling since it exhausts the hot air out the back of the case. Tweaking the fan curve can get your temps into the 60s while rendering if you don't mind some noise on the reference cooler. With four ACX coolers, the heat is being exhausted out the sides of the cards and filling the case with hot air. If your case follows the typical setup of front intake and a rear exhaust toward the top of the back panel, then general airflow in your case is sending the hot air from the bottom three cards up and cooking the top card.
Is this your case:
http://www.coolermaster.com/case/full-tower/haf-x/ ?
If so, you can probably lower temps significantly if you set the side intake fan to exhaust. Right now, the gpus are blowing the hot air out the side, but then the side intake is blowing that hot air right back in. You might see up to 10C drop. I'd be curious to know what happens, if you don't mind updating the thread if you try it.
By the way, I think the 980tis were the right choice.
I recently made a thread about this very topic and put together 9 different builds at three price points on three chipsets.
Here's a link:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/68899/building-intel-rigs-for-iray/p1
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I probably landed on the worst cooling solution for this setup with the ACX and you can certainly see the cards getting hotter bottom to top. I really didn't put in enough thought/homework on GPU cooling, but at least it's not the most expensive part of the build or anything... ack. The things we learn.
That is my case and good suggestion on flipping the side fan, but it didn't seem to have much impact initially. I tried again with all the chassis fans on full bore and was able to get the top card down to 83C with the GPU fan running around 70%. After playing around a bit with the chassis fan profiles, it seems the rear and top exhaust fans actually make the bigger difference, so I've got a more aggressive profile setup there now and can acheive the same results without racing everything. It's still temperature throttling on that top card, but I feel like I've at least bought myself some needed wiggle room.
Argh, no! NVidia only — the Iray renderer is developed by NVidia, to take advantage of their CUDA technology, no-one else's graphics cards have CUDA cores, so none of them will allow GPU rendering.
Hmm...disappointed my advice re: side exhaust wasn't more helpful. Alas. Though I suppose 83 C @ 70% is better than 89 C @ 90%.
If you're confident installing it, you can get EVGA's hybrid cooler by itself for about a hundred bucks. While getting four right off the bat would get the best temps, I'd recommend starting with 2 and installing them on the two gpus in the middle. I was able to dremmel/cut a bit and fit it on a Titan Black, and it lowered temps by a huge amount. It doesn't go above 40 C while rendering. You could probably then turn down the case fans significantly to lower noise and still get good temps on the first and fourth cards. Even getting a single hybrid cooler and putting it on top would at least fix the throttling on that card, and maybe lower temps on the second card slightly.
If you're prepared to spend about another grand, you could build a custom loop for the gpus. I personally wouldn't go that route.
I was looking at that hybrid cooler kit, but it's designed for reference cards - not sure getting it on the ACX would go smoothly. The 89C/90% thing was not going to cut it, but I think I'll try living with this for a while and maybe spring for a hybrid card somewhere down the road. Thanks again.
I hear ya, could be more trouble than it's worth. The gpu waterblock/pump combo will fit on the PCB, but the shroud from the hybrid cooler attaches to half of the shroud from the reference cooler, which the ACX coolers don't have. I'd forgotten that bit. Your gpu would be cool but the VRM and memory would get really hot.
Last idea would be taking one out and leaving one PCIe slot between the three cards. That would lower temps considerably, but obviously reduce your render time by 25%.
It's still an awesome rig you have.
Thanks a lot on this. Gives me a lot of options with each build. I was going to go with 16gb of memory, but it looks more like I am going to hit the 32gb or maybe the 64gb mark so that I can have as much freedom as possible. I was going to go with a duel GPU setup from the gitgo, just which ones is still up in the air (NVidia though). I am going with an 1151 build as it seems to have the better set up for the money over a 2011-3 which is way more expensive the higher you go in the cpu (a 2011-3 3.5 cpu for $578 or a 1151 4.0 cpu for $414= $164 difference) only drawback that I can see is that I can only have 4 memory slots compared to most of the 2011-3 boards with 8 slots. I'll use what I save on the cpu and mobo for the gpu and extra memory.