Discussing PCIe bifurcation and optimizing a 3x GPU setup. Looking for expert tips on Mobo advice.
Discussing PCIe bifurcation and optimizing a 3x GPU setup. Looking for expert tips on Mobo advice.
It's about the costs involved. I'm facing the need to upgrade to older hardware at a price that feels high. It might be wiser to choose a more affordable board before Gen4 becomes outdated, then gradually upgrade later. I'm cautiously optimistic about this timeline, but I don't see much chance of it happening soon.
Well, that's why I'm asking—does the bandwidth count? If it doesn't, you just waste time tweaking settings on a board with plenty of x2 or x4 options; if bandwidth is important, Epyc is definitely the better choice. Speaking of tricks, I found a board with three slots—top slot for your gaming GPU, the other two for PCIe 4.0 x2. If you're okay with x2, go with the Epyc model here: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-X670E-TOMAHAWK-WIFI epyc. It packs a ton of features and looks impressive. As for ASRock, they managed to fit an SP3 socket, eight DIMM slots, and all seven PCIe 16x slots onto a regular ATX case.
This topic isn't something I'm very comfortable with, but I still question whether you can combine VRAM from different consumer GPUs that way. High-end workstations or professional GPUs that support VRAM pooling typically use nvlink to offer much more bandwidth than PCIe alone. From what I understand, you'd likely be launching up to 16GB instances. Just checking it out in case you end up wasting your money on something that doesn't function as expected.
No, I don't think the memory can't be pooled together. I was gonna say in the reply that 4060 cards are a bad idea not due to the 128 bit bus, but due to the low amount of vram. MSI and others are working with Phison these days to make a sort of nvme to ram solution, basically they're making a bunch of nvme drives work as ram, so the video card would be able to transparently swap big blocks of data to-from a bunch of nvme drives As others have told you bifurcation is about the manufacturer making it possible to split the lanes in a physical slot into 2 or more groups of pci-e lanes... basically, split a x16 slot into 4 groups of 4 lanes - see cards like Hyper from Asus that create 4 m.2 each with 4 lanes by bifurcating the x16 slot into 4 x4 slots. There were some motherboards that did this split on purpose, I remember a Gigabyte one on socket AM4 that had only two pci-e x16 slots but both had only 8 pci-e lanes (so they split the x16 into 2 x8) and they also split the second x8 into 2 m.2 x4 ... so the video card would always run at x8 no matter what, and the second x8 slot would be disabled if you used any of the 2 m.2 slots. The upside is you had 3 m.2 slots connected directly to cpu and with 4 lanes each, downside is video card has only 8 lanes. Epyc boards and cpus are a good compromise, they'll offer loads of ram slots (but you have to get Registered DDR4 which won't be compatible with desktop systems) and there's cheap (sort of) Epyc processors similar in performance to 7950x3d though it's debatable that you need such high end cpu, because most AI stuff will be done on the video cards. There's a seller on eBay that sells a lot of cpus and mobos, heard of him from servethehome forums, has a decent reputation there Here's the page : https://www.ebay.com/str/tugm4470/Comput...cat=175673 Same seller will also have coolers and ram and may give you an offer if you buy all from him as a package