2 x 3060s?

[Matt Brown]

Hi Friends,
I'm sure everyone's sick of talking about graphics cards at the moment....BUT...

I use octane!
I'm currently using a 2060 super, bought it last September and boy was I lucky! I also have a system with a 1660 Ti
I'm looking to upgrade.

Do you think 2 x 3060s is a viable option in this day and age,
I can get 3060s for £600($844) each, their octane bench score for two of them is 571.
For reference a 3080 has an octanebench score (2020.1) of 549, though I'm not sure how much they're going for though, probably £1200/$1700,
Also there's a nice 12gb of VRAM available which is appealling as I love big scenes.

My only other option is a prebuilt HP Omen 30L which includes a 3080 for £2100 ($3000)
i7 10700k
16GB RAM
500mb NVME + 512gb SSD
RTX 3080
Coolermaster platinum+ 750w power supply

Do any of these stand out as clear winners or should I just sit tight and count myslef lucky?

Yours,
Matt

 

[Alex Glawion]

As sad as it is, but both those 3060s and the pre-built sound like a pretty good deal right now. If you're thinking of upgrading down the road, the omen should have enough room for a second gpu, though I am not sure about the pcie lane situation.

The 3060s are pretty neat with their 12gb of vram indeed, but you can only make use of that if you have fairly complex scenes.

 

[Matt Brown]

As sad as it is, but both those 3060s and the pre-built sound like a pretty good deal right now. If you're thinking of upgrading down the road, the omen should have enough room for a second gpu, though I am not sure about the pcie lane situation.

The 3060s are pretty neat with their 12gb of vram indeed, but you can only make use of that if you have fairly complex scenes.

Hi Alex,

Yeah it is a sad state of affairs. Though there's very little we can do to change the situation so I guess the best thing to is just work with what's available.

Yeah, 12gb vram's pretty appealing to be honest. I'm on 8gb at the moment and almost always go out of core with it. I often do quite complex nature scenes with lots of scatters, so I'd love that extra bit of buffer space. Especially as when using octane, windows takes a chunk fo vram for some reason. In that regard alone perhaps 2 x 3060s are best for me. Obviously the best option for me would probably be a 3080 ti with that little bit extra vram, but I'm not holding out any hope of getting my hands on one anytime soon.

Thanks Alex!

Matt

 

[Matt Brown]

Ahhhh, I think I see where I might run into some bottlenecks.
My main setup's working with an i7 10700k on a gigabyte vision D, I'm also running 2 x M.2 NVME drives.
Though from what I can tell on the block diagram all the M.2 sockets run through the chipset (despite one being labeled M2A_CPU).
The chipset's connected to the CPU via DMI 3.0, which as far as I can tell is the same thing as PCIe right? As far as I'm aware the RTX 2060 Super (which I'm using at the moment) only uses 8x PCIe despite being on a bus that would allow it to use x16.

So does that mean I'd end up bottlenecking everything by running out of PCIe lanes by having two graphics cards running at x8x8 on that motherboard?
I've read your guide to PCIe lanes on here and am still a little confused as to how the CPU & chipset lanes work with each other.

Thank you!

Matt

 

[Jerry James]

Ahhhh, I think I see where I might run into some bottlenecks.
My main setup's working with an i7 10700k on a gigabyte vision D, I'm also running 2 x M.2 NVME drives.
Though from what I can tell on the block diagram all the M.2 sockets run through the chipset (despite one being labeled M2A_CPU).
The chipset's connected to the CPU via DMI 3.0, which as far as I can tell is the same thing as PCIe right? As far as I'm aware the RTX 2060 Super (which I'm using at the moment) only uses 8x PCIe despite being on a bus that would allow it to use x16.

So does that mean I'd end up bottlenecking everything by running out of PCIe lanes by having two graphics cards running at x8x8 on that motherboard?
I've read your guide to PCIe lanes on here and am still a little confused as to how the CPU & chipset lanes work with each other.

Thank you!

Matt

Yep, the chipset is connected to the CPU using roughly the equivalent of 4 PCI-E 3.0 lanes (DMI 3.0). And on Z490, yep, all M.2 slots will go through the chipset because there are only a total of 16 lanes to the CPU.

Running multiple NVMe drives and multiple graphics cards does begin to reach the limits of what Z490 can do. However, you'll only run into a bottleneck scenario when you're running both GPUs full-tilt as well as using both storage devices and several USB devices at the same time. Not too likely to happen for most professionals.