I’ve been trying to learn Blender on my 2016 MacBook Pro and as you would expect rendering on this thing is horrific, not to mention so very hot. I’m going to be selling an older laptop and my Nintendo Switch to be able to have a $1000USD budget. The system below is my starting point. A single GTX1060 with expectations to add two more later. This is a bit over the $1000 budget so I am open to suggestions.
Hardware I have that will go in the machine:
1x 256GB M.2 Card (Windows Drive)
1x 128GB M.2 Card (Linux Drive)
1x Samsung Evo 850 500GB 2.5 Drive.
1x WD Black 3TB 3.5 Drive (ExFAT Storage drive shared between OSes)
I’ve considered that, but it means if I’m rendering an animation the MBP has to stay and since it has to goto work with me each day a independent system is going to be better. It would probably be ok for a short time but my budget wont increase much if any over the next 6mo.
So I’m changing up my build because I gound a new job and have a bit more to play with, but I’m wondering what the difference in rendering would be running a single 1060 in a pcie 16x or two 1060 in pcie 8x? The board I have is an X470 and if you run two cards the primary port drops to 8x instead of 16x.
Also how much does it affect rednering if you are using the gfx card for display? I plan to put a smaller card for display only in the third slot that is 4x only but that is plenty for just a display card, I just wonder how much it’s affecting my render times currently.
Here is the current build and future plans. Right now I’m running some generic m.2 cards and two evo850 500GB.
Offline/non-realtime rendering isn’t really latency sensitive and the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x8 is more than sufficient not only for offline rendering but even for realtime rendering of say video games. Even x4 and x1 would work for offline rendering.