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External PCIe chassis for GPU rendering with MacPro 5,1

B

balt

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 5, 2009
11
0
Hi all,

I'm still working happily with an over the years upgraded mid 2010 MacPro 5,1. It's got SSDs now, a GTX680 graphics card, and much external storage. On the CPU side, the relatively minor speed improvements over this dual hexacore machine don't really warrant upgrading, in particular now that most of my 3D render engines I use are CUDA based. I've so far always built PCs that are just used as render stations, but I'm really sick of getting slow render performance for previews out of my mac. So I've decided to upgrade now that the GTX Titan X has been released (or is just about to).

What I'd like to do is buy an external PCIe chassis and stick 4 Titan X's in there, so it'll need to be a full size tower with a 1200W or so PS.

Has anyone done this or something similar before? If so, what brand chassis have you had success with?

Cheers

- Balt
 
balt said:
What I'd like to do is buy an external PCIe chassis and stick 4 Titan X's in there, so it'll need to be a full size tower with a 1200W or so PS.

Has anyone done this or something similar before? If so, what brand chassis have you had success with?
Click to expand...

Never had call to use them, but these guys have been around doing this stuff for almost 30 years, and probably have a solution.

http://www.magma.com/catalog/pcie-expansion
 
Thanks guys, looks like you've found the same devices I've found... I just haven't seen anyone use these successfully for GPU rendering. I was hoping someone else did that with a MP 5,1 before I spend substantial funds flying blind...

Cheers

- Balt
 
At work we have a Magma PCIe expansion box that we originally used for a networked RAID storage server, but has since turned into a general use server. We have two Quadro 4000 Mac edition cards in there now and a few network and esata cards. Ours is attached through a 2009 Xserve, but I assume the Mac Pro would work similarly. I think in general it would work, but if you used a Magma box I think you'd run into power issues. The Quadro 4000's we have in ours are attached through molex to pcie power adapters. The power supply doesn't have the cabling for any pcie power. This box is an older model, so maybe the new ones are different?
 
I don't think I saw it mentioned yet, but there's also the cubix expander. I think barefeats has some benchmarks using it.
 
YMMV in later OS's.

Best to read up at Pro sites like lift gamma gain and Creative Cow.

Apple really didn't like having nMP made to look so foolish so I think 10.9 brought some pain to expansion chassis that hasn't been fixed yet.

But as I said, best to read up from Pros or ask the Cubix folks themselves.
 
Sedor said:
I have a Amfeltec GPU Cluster with three video cards in it running.
Click to expand...

I have tested a $200 (USD) Amfeltec Splitter (Supports up to 4 GPUs per splitter card - http://amfeltec.com/products/flexible-x4-pci-express-4-way-splitter-gpu-oriented/ ) on a MacPro2,1 (2007) with four GTX780 6G video cards (2 in MP and 2 externally connected by splitter - see 1st pic, below). The MacPro 2007 will support only 4 GPUs stably, even if externally connected (i.e., it makes no difference which external chassis you use and it makes no difference how you allocate the GPUs internally or externally at least with OS 10.9.2). That's because of the IO space limits of the 2007 MP. I'm not sure whether that limit applies to the 2009 and later MPs. You can put up to three double wide GPUs internally in a MP 2007 to MP 2012: See https://forums.macrumors.com/showth...ld+mac+pros+can+make+respectable#post18872245 and https://forums.macrumors.com/showth...ld+mac+pros+can+make+respectable#post18887464 . Extra PSU is required in all cases for three or more recent GTX GPUs with significant rendering ability. Second pic, below, shows rack module of 8X GTX 780 6G GPUs from which I ran test using 2 of them. The rack of 8x GTX 780 6G GPUs is for my Supermicro server.
 

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Last edited:
Thanks for all the links Tutor. This is just to confirm I've been following up with all of those and some other bits I found, and it clearly comes down to the amfeltec product being by far the least expensive and flexible option:

http://amfeltec.com/products/gpu-oriented-cluster/

Those go for about $500 plus shipping. A long shot from the $3500 and more for the enclosed chassis by cubix.

Cheers

- Balt
 
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