GPU Question

mosawer · August 20, 2020

The gigabyte trx40 aorus xtreme motherboard comes with a pci express that can hold up to 4 nvme's, and I want to also have for example 3 gpu's, I would also vertically mount the pci express, would the pci express get in the way to the other gpu's?

BobVonBob · August 20, 2020

Using this for compute? Yes you can install 3 GPUs and the multi-NVMe card, but very few cases have room to vertically mount something while also having other PCIe cards installed. The TRX40 has 4 PCIe slots, why do you need to mount something vertically?

mosawer · August 20, 2020

well, i messed up, i meant to say 4 gpus, but then i realised that the motherboard has only 4 slots, lol, thanks anyways

BobVonBob · August 20, 2020

Just now, mosawer said:

well, i messed up, i meant to say 4 gpus, but then i realised that the motherboard has only 4 slots, lol, do u know any motherboards that have 5 gpu slots?

Not that I can find. Plenty of motherboards support 4 PCIe 16x slots, but nothing I can find has more than that. It might be out there in a server form factor, but it's not common. The board already has 4 M.2 drives, do you need 8?

Lord Nicoll · August 20, 2020

33 minutes ago, BobVonBob said:

Not that I can find. Plenty of motherboards support 4 PCIe 16x slots, but nothing I can find has more than that. It might be out there in a server form factor, but it's not common. The board already has 4 M.2 drives, do you need 8?

They are definitely boards with 7 full 16x slots but they only have as many lanes as the CPU has available, and since GPUs take up 2 slot spaces, you can not fit another card in in an ATX form factor. Usually SSI-CEB has the 7 slots but they're still ATX height sized. OP probably would need a W-ATX sized board or something, I don't think they make those anymore however, SSI MEB would likely be the size needed.

BobVonBob · August 20, 2020

3 hours ago, Lord Nicoll said:

They are definitely boards with 7 full 16x slots but they only have as many lanes as the CPU has available, and since GPUs take up 2 slot spaces, you can not fit another card in in an ATX form factor. Usually SSI-CEB has the 7 slots but they're still ATX height sized. OP probably would need a W-ATX sized board or something, I don't think they make those anymore however, SSI MEB would likely be the size needed.

Like I said, I know they exist, but in the time I spent looking I didn't find any on the TRX40 chipset. That would mean swapping out to an EPYC board, which would mean a rather significant price hike. Here's one in a standard ATX size with 7 slots for EPYC. Toss in some PCIe extenders and it would work fine, albeit being a bit on the janky side having a GPU and a storage device needing to be mounted elsewhere, but the price skyrockets and it doesn't have the same CPU performance as a 3rd gen threadripper.