Cycles and Mining rigs ?

I was taking a look at the following Mobo

So it can support upto 13 GPUs from my understanding but has anyone tried installing windows or Linux running one of these mobos and if they were any good for Cycles and rendering ?

Even if it was purely for rendering would it work well ???

has anyone tested ? would love to try rendering with 12 GPUs!

Rendering won’t be as fast as it might look at first glance. Yes, there is a total of 13 PCIe slots, but only one of them is a full-length slot. That means only one GPU card. The other slots are meant for less demanding expansion cards (I can’t even hazard a guess as to what they’d be; they seem useless to me). Also, that single full-length slot is the only one running at 16x (full speed, in other words). The rest are 1x, 16 times slower and that means even if you could find 12 GPU cards to fit into those short 1x slots, the total speed of all twelve would be the same as the single full-speed GPU.

Another factor to consider is the size of power supply needed to run these 13 GPUs… if you could find 1x GPUs which is highly doubtful. Just off the top of my head (no calculations) I’d assume you’d need a PSU outputting somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2000 to 2500 watts. They do exist, but you’ll be laying out anywhere from $300 for a questionable one to almost $1000 for something more likely to be reliable.

For a rendering motherboard, you’d be better off looking for something with two or three full-length, 16x slots.

The PCIe speed related to how fast data is transferred to and from the GPU, not how fast the GPU renders.

In the case or GPU rendering, once the scene has been copied to the GPU very little bandwidth is needed.
FYI 1 PCIe 3 x1 lane can copy data at 1GB/s, so it wouldn’t take that long to fill even a 12GB card.

However 12 cards would often run into the issue of several GPUs being idle while tiles finish on the other GPU’s. Unless you ran Blender 4 times and used 3 GPU’s per instance. But you’d need the system ram to run that all as well, may as well get 4 systems with 3 GPU’s each, and normal sized power supplies.

yeah I noticed the PCIe slots and was amazed that it even boasted 12 cards considering many server mobos don’t come that close but the thing is with these mining rigs they use powered Risers to fully power the card, I imagine the bandwidth is less but with many cards it can be distributed

was just curious and wouldn’t just finding the correct balance of tile sized to the number of cards counter act the problem of the idle cards slightly. Also running these system as a single node for a farm help counter that too. ?

I am busy budgeting for a 2 card system as a single node and expand on it by buying another system as a node but thought this might be an interesting alternative build that offers more expansion on a single node.