Quadro and SLI?

HI Tek Syndicate - Am a huge fan of your videos. Can you please explain the advantage of purchasing multiple NVIDIA Quadro cards for a system? I am receiving conflicting info. NVIDIA really seems to advertise the advantage of multiple QUADRO GPU's and even has a chart on their website showing the advantage of using them (specifically with Autodesk 3DS Max and Iray). But I'm told to harness the power of them you need SLI? But they don't have SLI unles you purchase an OEM system directly from Lenovo, etc? I just bought 2 Quadro M4000's. How do I harness that dual combined power if I cant use SLI without one of those systems?
Thanks,
Dave

PS - Im a landscape architect/urban designer and do a lot of 3D modeling with RHINO, Lands Design and VRAY as well as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

multi GPUs is SLI, although are you sure on need CUDA? As AMD's firepro series are pretty affordable comparatively and use OpenCL

Yes I wanted to take advantage of CUDA as was under impression VRAY utilized that. I have used nXt Flamingo (with RHINO) and nXt Accurender (AutoCAD) but not sure if they take advantage of CUDA.

Seems like it has Open CL support, not sure on the specifics though

http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY3/GPU+Rendering

http://help.chaosgroup.com/vray/images/stuff/rt_gpu/

Some more stuff, that's open CL on like a 480 GPU, which is kinda funny since Nvidia's open CL support sucks, but it seems to run well in that test

Anyways here would be the firepro card, 8gbs of VRAM about $600
https://pcpartpicker.com/part/amd-video-card-100505724

It has both. There is an option to select to use OpenCL or CUDA in VRAYS RT Engine.

I just don't get what SLI is. Why do GeForce cards need an SLI bridge and with it you get multiple GPU's acting together as one, yet QUADRO is talked about in terms of SLI but to get it I have to buy on of those systems on NVIDIAS list? I cant hook up SLI on my own? Some of the software I read about will only recognize one GPU, so doesn't that mean I need an SLI connection to take advantage of 2 or more QUADRO cards? That's how the GeForce cards work, but QAUDRO SLI doesn't work that way? I don't get it.

It doesn't look like quadro has a bridge slot, so it probably just does all the multi-GPU stuff over the PCI-e bus, much like the newer AMD high end cards don't need a bridge

Or it might be that you can only SLI certain quadro cards, I don't see a bridge slot on the K1200

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133587&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC-_-pla-_-Workstation+Graphics+Cards-_-N82E16814133587&gclid=CKbnnq2F-8gCFQIKaQodXy8NJA&gclsrc=aw.ds

The K4200 has bridge slots, though only comes with 4gbs of VRAM if that matters at all, and runs about $800
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133558

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What's the budget for your rig anyways?

should work from the look of this

Thank you superguru. NVIDIAS online chat tech rep told me I cant get SLI with the QUADRO cards unless I purchase one of these systems. Here are two links. The first is showing the advantage of multiple GPU cards the second shows the chart the NVIDIAS tech rep told me to look and that I had to buy one of those systems for QUADRO's to utilize SLI and work together:

http://images.nvidia.com/content/quadro/industry-solution/pdf/autodesk-3dsmax-solution-overview.pdf

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_sli_compatible_systems.html

Around $5000-$6000 total

I found a video using the W8100 in VRAY

Really I'd just build your own system with fire pro cards, gimme a second, though I'm leaving room for a ton of 4k displays

If you're wondering about GPU usage and monitoring download GPU-Z, shows usage of all kinds, temps and so on.
If you're rendering you don't really need "SLI" since compute workloads are totally different than rendering images in a game.

If you want to run SLI (fancy term for saying each GPU renders its own frame, so they switch between rendering) you will need cards that support it and a motherboard that does too.

If you're only going to run none realtime rendering SLI isn't really needed, using .

VRAY supports both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.
If you're only doing compute stuff I'd suggest looking at consumer grade stuff first, the prices for quadro/tesla is really inflated compared in comparison.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/workstation/firepro-3d/8100#

"Multi-GPU support Combine up
to four AMD FirePro W8100 workstation graphics cards in a single
desktop system and leverage the combined processing power for personal
supercomputing or to work with multiple 4K video streams in real time,
layer in effects, make color corrections and edits on the fly."

Seems you can just do it with AMD cards
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So there's a build, it's missing any SSD storage, so just pick what you want there, you could also up the CPU for 2 more cores, though that gets pricey

**PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/48JcXL
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/48JcXL/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor ($379.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($28.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Asus SABERTOOTH X99 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($309.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Crucial 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($169.99 @ Adorama)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($51.88 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: AMD FirePro W8100 8GB Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) ($999.99 @ B&H)
Video Card: AMD FirePro W8100 8GB Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) ($999.99 @ B&H)
Case: Cooler Master HAF XB EVO ATX Desktop Case ($94.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: Rosewill 1050W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($139.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $3175.80
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-06 00:31 EST-0500**

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And then I'd totally buy like 3 of these to go with it for tons of work space

Yes. I am ONLY rendering in VRAY etc. I don't ever play games. I just don't want my system to crash. I had been running Windows on an iMac 2013 with Bootcamp. That was a disaster as soon as my files started to get huge with this new project I'm working on. I than started to build my own system and got a Titan X but it could not render my files with Vray and RHINO without freezing up and crashing. I had purchased an I7 6700 CPU 4.0 Ghz with 32 GB DDR3 Ram and AUSUS Z-170-P D3.

I have decided after seeing Tech Syndicate videos to get a workstation. I returned the Titan X and bought 2 QUADRO M4000's. So am also getting the following:

ASUS Z10PE-D16/4L S SI EEB Dual LGA 201 R3
4x Kin gston 16GB DDR$ SDRAM ECC (64GB Ram total)
2x Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 Haswell-EP 2.4 GHz LGA 2011-3 Processor
Dell 27" 5k monitor (I also do a lot of photography)

Sorry about typos. That's DDR4 Kingston RAM and Dual LGA 2011 R3 Motherboard

Well pretty sure those two Quadro cards are going to render together just fine even without enabling SLI, as long as your software supports multi GPU rendering.

Shoulda gone X99 with a budget like that man

Thank you streetguru! That system looks sweet and I like the price range on it better. I just got this new build and was told I can return items if its not working for me and its not but don't think I can return the M4000s.

Thank you thelonewanderer, that's what I was thinking. Though NVIDIA doesn't make that clear. I cant imagine why they would show advantage of multiple GPUs working together and not mention you HAVE TO BUY one of THOSE systems to do so and have to do it with SLI bridges.

So if I don't need SLI to run multiple Quadro GPUs what's the advantage of using SLI with QUADRO on one of those NVIDIA certified systems?

Thank you for helping clear this up some. I am not the only one confused about this as I have seen many threads out there of people purchasing multiple QUADRO cards and than wondering how to get them working together with SLI - as we all have thought you HAVE to HAVE SLI to take advantage of multiple QUADRO cards.

AND:

VRAY has real time on screen rendering. If one selects the RT button than the renders will be in real time. And that is what I want. I want to see something rendered as soon as possible. See this link: