So many gpus?

[Apollo190]

I just saw a post where some guy connected 78 RTX 3080s together in his mining rig. But how is that possible, I thought even SLI (dual gpus) is impossible with 3080, let alone 78.

Can someone explain this?

[porina]

Mining doesn't require or care at all for SLI. Each GPU operates by itself so it scales perfectly. Mining also doesn't really care about PCIe bandwidth. 1x lanes are enough to mine with. With a sufficient platform that might allow it to be put into a single machine, but it is also possible that they're running multiple host systems to operate portions of those GPUs.

[TehDwonz]

1 minute ago, Apollo190 said:

I just saw a post where some guy connected 78 RTX 3080s together in his mining rig. But how is that possible, I thought even SLI (dual gpus) is impossible with 3080, let alone 78.

Can someone explain this?

They aren't linked together. When mining crypto, you can just use them as individual GPUs. They can then be "combined" in the mining software to work in parallel.

[minibois]

They aren't using SLI. SLI is for gaming.

With certain applications - like mining, F@H, etc. - you can just have multiple videocards - sometimes even different versions like AMD and Nvidia mixed - in one system.

 

Also, who knows how many motherboards are underneath those videocard. Highly unlikely it's just one. They're probably using mining boards that can handle 4 - 10 videocards at once.

 

You might find this thread interesting: 

 

[TehDwonz]

6 minutes ago, minibois said:

They aren't using SLI. SLI is for gaming.

With certain applications - like mining, F@H, etc. - you can just have multiple videocards - sometimes even different versions like AMD and Nvidia mixed - in one system.

 

Also, who knows how many motherboards are underneath those videocard. Highly unlikely it's just one. They're probably using mining boards that can handle 4 - 10 videocards at once.

 

There is at least one ASUS board with 19 x1 PCIe slots, and those slots can each be port-multiplied into 3-5 more x1 slots. Some bizzaro Chinese boards have more still. If you had a board with 26 physical PCIe slots, you could multi each one 3x and have 78 in one system. As you say, the actual interface bandwidth is irrelevant to mining.
Not sure I have seen a 26 slot board though...