Finding the right setup with mix of old CPUs & new GPUs

[antoniomilo]

Hi everyone, hope your well, love the site and have found it so useful, I'm looking at optimising my render farm for GPU rendering, which I've built over time, in a slight ad hoc way, as and when funds came in, but have reached a point where I'd like to balance the hardware better.

I have 5 nodes:

Newest node specs below, taking advice from your very site

RB-0
CPU: AMD Threadripper 1900X
RAM: 128GB
GPU: x1 Gigabyte RTX 3090 24GB TURBO, x1 Palit RTX 2080 Ti 11GB OC
Mboard: ASRock Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming
PSU: 1600w

The below are my older nodes, from my old CPU render farm, but have since transitioned to GPU rendering.

RB-05
CPU: Intel Core i7 5820k
RAM: 32GB
GPU: Palit 1080ti Super Jetstream OpenAir
Mboard: MSI X99S MPOWER
PSU: 850 Watt PSU

RB-06
CPU: Intel Core i7 5820k
RAM: 32GB
GPU: x1 ASUS GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb Blower & x1 GIGABYTE GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb Blower
Mboard: MSI X99S MPOWER
PSU: 1000 Watt PSU

RB-07
CPU: Intel Core i7 5820k
RAM: 32GB
GPU: x2 ASUS GTX 2080 Ti 11Gb Blower
Mboard: MSI X99S MPOWER
PSU: 1200 Watt PSU

RB-08
CPU: Intel Core i7 7700k
RAM: 32GB
GPU: x2 MSI GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb Blower
Mboard: MSI X99S MPOWER
PSU: 1000 Watt PSU

How would you recommend to reconfigure this setup? are the older 5820ks and 7700k holding their GPUs back? should I just replace these, or focus on building fresh new nodes going forward, I'm looking to add a couple more 3090 in rb-0, but these are proving hard to come by.

Thanks!
Antonio

 

[Alex Glawion]

Those CPUs are still pretty good for support in GPU Rendering. I wouldn't say they bottleneck anything from IPC/clock speed alone. Of course they have limited pcie lanes, but you don't have many gpus in those older nodes, so that shouldn't be a problem. You might see some bottlenecking when you add a 3090, as the newest rtx gen does saturate x16 pcie3.

 

[antoniomilo]

Thanks @Alex Glawion !