Single or dual GPUs? Help

[jparker71]

My employer is buying a new computer for me, but I'm not that savvy when it comes to hardware.

The CPU will be Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4114 CPU @ 2.20GHz   2.19 GHz

RAM 128GB or 198GB

Windows 10

Two 4K monitors

I use 3Ds Max, Maya, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop and other Adobe products.

I was thinking of getting two NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000, but they are not SLI. I'm assuming they would need to be SLI, but I'm not sure.

Can any of the above software use SLI cards?

Could I have two cards that are not SLI?

What benefit would that be for me?

Could I be fine with one card?

[jaslion]

Seems like a very weak and totally wrong cpu for the desired applications. As for card a rtx 4000 is fine sli is not a thing for it it is nvlink. Of the software the autodesk ones can use multiple gpu's for rendering BUT you do NOT NEED NVLINK FOR THIS.

[Jurrunio]

2.2GHz Skylake 10 core, in other words half the speed of a 10900 which isnt even new now. Pretty underwhelming considering the bad the single core performance (due to low frequency).

 

Among Intel Xeons it's better to take Xeon Gold instead, say the 8 core 6334, (one generation older) 5315Y or the 12 core 5317. Xeon Sliver and Bronze are meant for servers that only care about parallel processing performance, unfortunately 

32 minutes ago, jparker71 said:

3Ds Max, Maya, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop and other Adobe products.

These, need more than that.

 

Btw two RTX 4000 is not necessarily better than a single say, RTX 5000.in every case. I know PR and PS dont really use 2 graphics cards, but 3DS Max probably can.

[jparker71]

27 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Seems like a very weak and totally wrong cpu for the desired applications. As for card a rtx 4000 is fine sli is not a thing for it it is nvlink. Of the software the autodesk ones can use multiple gpu's for rendering BUT you do NOT NEED NVLINK FOR THIS.

Thank you for the response.

If I understand what you wrote is that there is no need for linking the cards for what I'm doing?

What CPU would you recommend?

[jparker71]

9 minutes ago, 8tg said:

You don’t need SLI for multi gpu acceleration like that. Best way to describe that is SLI is mostly so two gpus can share a workload to make a frame, but you aren’t really making frames in gpu accelerated rendering, just doing a lot of math.

Nvlink is optional for getting all that working, the cards can share a workload independently of being directly connected.

Thank you,

This helps me understand things a lot better.

[jaslion]

5 minutes ago, jparker71 said:

Thank you for the response.

If I understand what you wrote is that there is no need for linking the cards for what I'm doing?

What CPU would you recommend?

Just a regular old desktop computer with like a 5900x. I mean at this point even a 140$ i5 11400 would be faster.

 

No need to link just tell maya or 3ds that they are an available pool. But you really normally won't need more than 1.

[jparker71]

7 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

2.2GHz Skylake 10 core, in other words half the speed of a 10900 which isnt even new now. Pretty underwhelming considering the bad the single core performance (due to low frequency).

 

Among Intel Xeons it's better to take Xeon Gold instead, say the 8 core 6334, (one generation older) 5315Y or the 12 core 5317. Xeon Sliver and Bronze are meant for servers that only care about parallel processing performance, unfortunately 

These, need more than that.

 

Btw two RTX 4000 is not necessarily better than a single say, RTX 5000.in every case. I know PR and PS dont really use 2 graphics cards, but 3DS Max probably can.

I will have them look into the gold.

[jaslion]

Just now, jparker71 said:

I will have them look into the gold.

They are usually still very low clocked. Just more cores which honestly means it's getting beaten by a bit more expensive consumer cpu's. Xeons were never really meant for this as a 3d and video workstation. It's what the old hedt platform from intel was for or the new threadripper from amd (but ryzen is usually enough).

[Jurrunio]

8 minutes ago, jaslion said:

They are usually still very low clocked. Just more cores which honestly means it's getting beaten by a bit more expensive consumer cpu's. Xeons were never really meant for this as a 3d and video workstation. It's what the old hedt platform from intel was for or the new threadripper from amd (but ryzen is usually enough).

Maybe they want to use server management tools on Xeon, I think there is such thing. For performance alone, Xeons are ripoffs.

[jparker71]

19 hours ago, jaslion said:

They are usually still very low clocked. Just more cores which honestly means it's getting beaten by a bit more expensive consumer cpu's. Xeons were never really meant for this as a 3d and video workstation. It's what the old hedt platform from intel was for or the new threadripper from amd (but ryzen is usually enough).

if I was building a system for me I would use Ryzen, but they have a deal with HP and going to get a HP Z8 G4 Workstation. That part is out of my hands, I have to make sure it meets software requirements. If was up to me we would look into Boxx computers.