Over the years I’ve upgraded to my 10 years old workstation to its limit. It’s running fine before RTX 3080 ticame out…It makes my workstation (GTX 1080ti + GTX1070) feels like a turtle when rendering Cycles animation.
I remember reading about RTX 3000s also needs a high end modern CPU to take a full advantage of its rendering power. I wonder if I could just add a RTX 3070 Super or higher model to my old Xeon workstation for Cycles rendering?
My workstation specs:
x58 Mobo with 3 PCI Express 2.0 x 16, one slot left
48GB RAM
Xeon W3680 OC 4.3Ghz
GTX 1080 Ti (liquid cool) + GTX 1070
A high-end graphics card might not even be compatible with an old mobo!
Someone tried to install an RX 5700 GPU [YouTube link below]
and he couldn’t get the pc to boot.
So he had to use a lower-end RX 580 (a PCIe 3.0 x16 GPU with lower benchmarks than your GPUs)
Not to mention, I’m guessing a PCIe 4.0 x16 GPU wouldn’t even run at full speed in a slower PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, even if it does work. (2.0 x16 is like up to 25% the speed of 4.0 x16, right?)
So if you can’t find someone who got a high-end GPU to work,
then I wouldn’t risk buying it.
Or at least have some kind of backup plan or resell it if you already bought it and you can’t get it to work?
(Or use it in a new PC and sell your x58 as a budget gaming PC?)
Also, he said AVX apps don’t work on an x58 PC,
and i read something on wikipedia like Blender has AVX
(but I guess you got Blender to work anyways)
(it scared me cuz I just bought an x58 pc, but it was only $50 so not really a loss if something in blender doesn’t work).
Go to 5:43.
He also answers other questions about if an x58 is worth it today
(he says not for people buying a brand new pc).
I think you would be fine. But remember that the 3000 series is pcie gen 4.0 so there will be some limitations. The best thing about the new gpus are the high CUDA count and second gen rtx cores.
