July - New PC build !

General Forums Off-topic Chat
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Hello ! I am looking to build a PC for work in Blender and some CAD programs.
I will not be overclocking.

I am set to buying a x79 board for quad channel support to go with the intel i7 3820. I will be using a 16 Gb quad channel kit. For CPU cooling I thought about using the Corsair h70 radiator liquid cooling as it offers no fans and I can choose to put two ( most likely Noctua NF-F12 PWM ). I know it might be overkill but I like the way it isolates the CPU heat from the rest of the case.

For storage I will be using a single 180 SSD. I will not be adding any HDDs so front intake will be greatly favored.

For Graphics cards I plan to have two in my system. The first one I will be adding is a Qutro fx3700 1GB ( found one at 100 E ). In October I will add two GTX 580 ( or something better ) for GPU rendering in cycles. One will replace the quadro.

I will be using a 1200 W Corsair AX1200 GOLD PSU so I will be set for future builds.

I have been looking at a number of different cases :

HAF series - 912 - XM - X. Kinda big for what I need no ?

ANTEC - SOLO 2 - So far my favorite. I love the way the PSU is mounted up.

So what do you guys think ? would 2 GTX 580 go well in this case with the configuration above ?

I was thinking it might work well in this case because the front intake is not obstructed by storage bays ( the SSD is mounted on the side panel vertically ). So two 120 mm Noctua NF-F12 PWM in the front will push air for the 2 gpus at maximum a number of 55CFM at 22.4 DB. I think that is sufficient.

I aim for my system to be as quiet as possible in idle because it will sit in the room I sleep in and I don’t want to be disturbed.

So what do you think ?

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Noctua fans are awesome, not only because they’re from Austria, they are really among the best. I’ve got several in use, but IMO the “be quiet! silent wing” are a tad better.

Using an SSD for storage is rather wasteful. You use a SSD for OS housing and get a HDD for storage. 180GB is nothing, especially working with CG. If you dualboot you need around 100gb for windows with tools, around 20gb for linux.
leaves you with 60gb storage - that’s around 5 minutes of raw video or 7 PC Games.

The Quadro FX3700 is crap (I got one for 60 Euro about a year back), if you work with Blender even a 9800GTX+ is faster and cheaper, as Blender does not benefit from Quadro features and all in all the FX3700 is old and low end.

I’d get the HAF-X. The Antec only has 7 card slots. the HAF-X has 10 card slots. With the right mainboard you can fit 3 tripleslot graphic cards. Often the second/third PCIe-x16 is at the bottom of the mainboard, meaning in the Antec you can only use a single slot card. with the HAF-X you can use a triple slot card in the bottom-most mainboard card slot.

If you have till october I’d rather wait for the GTX680 GPGPU driver development and integration, and I especially would keep an eye on VRAM packaging. I’d rather get 1xGTX680 4G or 6G than 4xGTX580 3G :wink:

hth

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arexma,
Thank you for jumping in so fast ! You are one of the few on these forums that can be trusted when it comes to hardware :slight_smile:

Noctua fans are awesome, not only because they’re from Austria, they are really among the best. I’ve got several in use, but IMO the “be quiet! silent wing” are a tad better.

Indeed ! I don’t like the color on the Noctua but they are the best from what I have access to. Silent wings may be better but I don’t have access to them. I have been looking at the Cooler Master Excalibur ( higher rpm more airflow/more noise/cheaper )

Using an SSD for storage is rather wasteful. You use a SSD for OS housing and get a HDD for storage. 180GB is nothing, especially working with CG. If you dualboot you need around 100gb for windows with tools, around 20gb for linux.
leaves you with 60gb storage - that’s around 5 minutes of raw video or 7 PC Games.

Agreed ! However for now 180 GB SSD will do for my needs ! Also I’m trying to keep the front intake as much unobstructed as possible.

The Quadro FX3700 is crap (I got one for 60 Euro about a year back), if you work with Blender even a 9800GTX+ is faster and cheaper, as Blender does not benefit from Quadro features and all in all the FX3700 is old and low end.

Correct ! However as I said in my first post I will be using CAD not only Blender.

I’d get the HAF-X. The Antec only has 7 card slots. the HAF-X has 10 card slots. With the right mainboard you can fit 3 tripleslot graphic cards. Often the second/third PCIe-x16 is at the bottom of the mainboard, meaning in the Antec you can only use a single slot card. with the HAF-X you can use a triple slot card in the bottom-most mainboard card slot.

Hmm yes but the HAF-X is also much larger than the ANTEC. My room is pretty small and I don’t think I could fit a full Tower case on my desk.
About triple slot graphic cards - they are monsters that people generally use for overclocking. As I have mentioned in my first post I WILL NOT BE OVERCLOCKING. So dual slot at best. I also don’t plan on keeping more than 2 GPUs in my case.

In the case that I put the double slot GTX 580 or 680 in the upper PCIe-x16 slot on the mainboard and the single slot quadro fx 3700 on the bottom slot will that work ?

Also how will the cards run in 8x each ? or 16x each ?

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I didn’t read properly then, my bad :stuck_out_tongue:
Still, the performance will be horrible in Blender. Your machine will be able to render scenes fast you can’t handle in the viewport :slight_smile:

Not really and there’s one slight problem. There are only 2.5 or 3 slot 580/680 for you.
The only 2 slot cards are with reference cooling and they sound like a leafblower - I can’t sleep next to one.
Custom cooling, either aftermarket or boardpartner, need at least 2.5 slots - and even if I’d use reference cooling I’d leave 1 slot free for the air intake of the stupid radial fan.

Also with 2 cards it’s sometimes a problem, you got to watch the board layout.
Some have the second PCIe16 at the bottom (the 6th or 7th slot) you’ll not be able to get the card in.
Some only have space for dual slot cards between the two PCIe16 at the top of the board.

Yeh, usually the top slot is the primary one but shouldnt make too much trouble.

That depends on the mainboard really.
The issue are not the slots, but the lanes.
You can make a board with 16*PCIe16 slots, but if there’s only one PCIe16 lane, they’ll run with x1 if you fill them all.

I’ll oversimplify a bit:
The lanes are like roads to the CPU, and the controller there can only handle so many lanes at once.
There are boards that have 4PCIe16 slots, and also 4PCIe16 lanes, thus it’s one where you usually find "4PCIe16 electrically" because they are “real” ones, each connected with x16 to the CPU.
Then there are boards that have e.g. 2PCIe16 (2*8 electrically)
This means if you use 1 card, it’ll run electrically x16. As soon as you add another card, they got to share the x16 and run with x8 each.

You can easily spot it though, boards with more than 1 electrical PCIe16 are usually noticable more expensive.

I’d also recommend to look at the Silverstone Raven RV01 case, it has the mainboard 90° turned, which is great for a slient system. There are a few other cases with 90° turned mainboards, but they are rare.

But keep a watchful eye for the mainboard layout, sometimes it’s essential, along with the room in the case at the bottom slots when using more than 1 graphics card. Done it long enough and had to learn it the hard way cutting holes in cases :stuck_out_tongue:

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That last one is really helpful arexma,

So if we drifted into a discussion about slots let’s go a step further :

The GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD5 LGA 2011 Intel X79 is what I was originally going to buy. What is nice about this is that it comes with bluetooth and wifi out of the box.

However I’ve been looking on the net and it seems there isn’t much performance loss while running dual GPU in 16x electrically ( so each card in 8x ). Also I’m not really sure how the quad channel will help with GPU rendering as my CPU is only quad core ( just stock clocked higher than the 2700k )

SO I’ve been meaning to ask if the ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 wouldn’t be better running a Intel Core i7-3770 Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz in dual channel only. This would allow me to save money on both the ram and PSU. Would this configuration bottlneck dual GTX 680s ? Again only interested in CUDA rendering performance.
Also not sure how I would fit a wifi card here.

What are your thoughts on this ?

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According to the specification the GA runs with 2x16(x16) and 1x16(x8), which the price already suggests:

  • 2 x PCI Express x16 slots, running at x16 (PCIEX16_1/PCIEX16_2)
  • For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16_1 slot; if you are installing two PCI Express graphics cards, it is recommended that you install them in the PCIEX16_1 and PCIEX16_2 slots.
  • 1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x8 (PCIEX8)
    (All PCI Express x16 slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard.)
  • 2 x PCI Express x1 slots
    (All PCI Express x1 slots conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)
  • 1 x PCI slot

Looking in the manual on page 7:

http://download.gigabyte.ru/manual/mb_manual_ga-x79-ud5_e.pdf

You see that the top and bottom slots are the PCIe16(16) and the middle one is the PCIe16(8)

You see a total of 6 slots, meaning if you insert 2*580 you have to put one in the top slot and got room for a 2.5 or 3 slot card.

If yo buy a case with 7 slots and the PSU at the lower back, you might run in trouble if the second 580 is 2.5 or 3 slots, because you only have 2 slots left and if you put it in the PCIe16(8) in the middle, you have 2 slots for the topcard, 4 slots for the bottom card and one card only running with x8.

That’s what I meant with keeping a watchful eye :slight_smile:
The board is great, you just have to pick a case that allows more than a dualslot card in the bottom slot.

At the speed issues, rendering with CUDA, let’s go full technical.
CUDA works with a host (the PC) device (the graphic card) relationship.
The connection between those two is the system bus.
On-device operations are lightning fast GPU<>VRAM.
Host-device operations are gammy in comparison.

So when you start to render in Blender, you got to get your data from your host memory to your device memory.
Meaning geometry and texture data goes from RAM to the VRAM which is slow.
The rest happens on the graphicscard itself, and the parallelization, the speed of the floating point operations on the GPU and the fact that memory operations are very, very fast on-device make GPGPU stuff that fast.
That’s also the reason why you only have let’s say 3GB memory for rendering although you have 2*GTX580 3G in your system. You have to send the same data to both cards and let the cards do their job, but on different portions of the data. If the cards where to send data to each other they had to use the system bus again and that’s very slow (compared to on-device)

So the only time when the x8 would slow down would be before rendering and after rendering. Or when playing games, when the textures have to be flushed and new ones have to be loaded for instance.

hth :smiley:

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What I’ve been reading is that in dual graphics configuration if not overclocking it is better to go with reference two slot cards ( that exaust air at the back of the case ) rather than 2.5 or 3 slot cards like the Gainward Phantom GTX 680 ( which exhaust hot air in the case ) that I had my eyes on.
The ideea is that I don’t want hot air from the bottom card to go rampaging my top card. What’s your take on this ?

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My first take on this:
GTX470 stock clocks, reference cooler: idle ~70°C load ~95°C, loud like crap.
GTX470 heacily OC’d, Gelid aftermarket cooler; idle ~44°C load ~68°C, not hearable.

I’ve had SLI and had up to 3 cards in my system and never used reference cooling.
Always was cooler and less noisy.

All I have are 2120 in the front, 1120 in the back (I work with overpressure to keep dust out, more air in than out) and i got sensors at the top and bottom of my case, in idle its 5°C dT and under load ~15°C dT… meaning like today with 30 degree the air in my case is ~35°C at the top… 31 at the bottom.

So my take on this… There’s no circumstance where the reference cooling is better. You need a good airflow in the case in any case.

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So my take on this… There’s no circumstance where the reference cooling is better. You need a good airflow in the case in any case.

Understood ! Well then I’ll newer doubt the aftermarket cooler again :slight_smile:

You still haven’t clarified my question from above. Is it better for my Cuda rendering performance in cycles if I stay with quad channel or should I go with the sabertooth z77 dual channel memory (1155 ivy ) ?

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As much as they have improved; I don’t think I would trust a single SSD alone.

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here ya go… :wink:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/silentmaxx_offers_silent_passively_cooled_sandy_bridge-e_gaming_pc_discrete_graphics

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arexma,
Are you still around ?

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Yeh, but sometimes I got to either work and sleep as well not only dwell in forums :slight_smile:

I thought I made it clear that CUDA needs no RAM during chrunching numbers. It soley works on-device in the VRAM.
It only needs RAM while it shovels the data host->device and I think that the data acelleration tree is build in the RAM as well, but don’t take my word for it.

Same goes for games, only during shovling textures and geometry to the device you need RAM and whenever the texture memory on the card is flushed and new ones streamed into it.

So basically there’d be no significant difference if you render a frame with CUDA with quad or dualchannel RAM. It’s either 30 mins to render, or 1810 seconds :slight_smile:
TBH I’ve no idea what Quadchannel does on a technical level. Dualchannel theoretically allows one read and one write operation simultaniously each clockcycle. Quadchannel?
I’d have to read up on it… but you can do this yourself as well. :wink:

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arexma,

Please forgive me for that last one ! I didn’t mean to jump you but I was in a bit of a hurry with placing my order.

At last I went ahead and ordered the GIGABYTE x79 ud5 board with quad channel 16 GB and the i7 3820. I figured I won’t be doing any more upgrades from October on and I might as well have the 2 x 16 slots and one x8 for dual GTX 580s and the Quadro Fx 3700. For the case I went with the Corsair c70 military green case. I figured if I spend all that money on components I might as well have a nice case that has 8 slots and native support for the h100 240 mm radiator. I will get my Noctua fans in October.

Also thanks again for jumping in so fast ! You’ve been a great help !

Cheers !